This famous Russian composer was born in Ukraine (same country as me!:-) in Sontsovka, on April 27, 1891. At the age of six he was a good pianist, at nine he was working on an opera. He entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory when he was 13 - like Shostakovich. He brought to the Conservatory four operas, a symphony, and several piano pieces. Prokofiev disturbed his teachers. "He had to say exactly what he thought, and even as a student was alienating his superiors by his sharp judgments on their music or their teaching methods." Even when he praised Rachmaninoff he managed to make an enemy of him.

Prokofiev was an anti-romantic in his music. He disliked the music of Chopin and Liszt, and said, "They say you can't give a recital without Chopin? I'll prove that we can do very well without Chopin." At his piano examination he convinced his professors to let him play his own concerto instead of the assigned Classical one.

In 1917 after the revolution Prokofiev left Russia for the United States via Japan. Despite the turmoil, he wrote some of his greatest works that year - Violin Concerto in D and Classical Symphony. Prokofiev described the symphony as something Haydn would write if he lived in the twentieth century. It was his first work composed away from the piano, because Prokofiev want Prokofiev was not well-liked in the United States, and he did not have much love for the country after his opera The Love for Three Oranges, flopped. He wrote, "I wandered through the enormous park in the middle of New York and, looking up at the skyscrapers bordering it, I thought with fury of the wonderful American orchestras who cared nothing for my music; of the critics who were repeating for the hundredth time, "Beethoven is a great composer," while balking violently at new works; of the managers who arranged long tours for artists playing the same hackneyed programs fifty times over."

He left America and settled in Paris in 1921. He wrote a lot of music and gave many concerts, becoming the most discussed composer. He was described as the composer of the age of steel - too modern for his contemporaries. Today his music is considered far less revolutionary than it once was. He did write using established nineteenth-century forms; "his music, despite the many pile-ups of dissonance, was tonal. It is music of a powerful personality, celerity, dash, confidence and powerful athleticism. He could invent fine melodies if he wanted to. Melody, however, is not what Prokofiev's music is about. What Prokofiev represented was a sharp, eager, slashing attack on the Romantic musical conventions." (Harold Schonberg)

In 1927 Prokofiev toured Russia and received an incredibly warm reception. In 1932 he settled in Russia for good. Stravinsky writes that this was because Prokofiev's fate was uncertain in France and he was naïve enough to ignore the repressions that were going on in Russia at the time. Until 1937 he was basically free, allowed to leave the country on tours when he pleased. He composed such favorites as Peter and the Wolf (1936) and Romeo and Juliet (1935). But after the crackdown on Shostakovich in 1937, all composers in the Soviet Union had to write "realistic" music, i.e. without harsh dissonances and using Russian folk tunes. "Shostakovich, Kabalevsky, Khachaturian, and even Prokofiev himself wrote watered-down Prokofiev." (Schonberg) But some of the works he wrote during that period are now classics: the score for the film Alexander Nevsky, for instance, finished in 1939. More masterpieces came during the war, including the opera War and Peace and ballet Cinderella. Yet even Prokofiev was under attack in 1948 when the Party condemned "the formalistic movement in Soviet music as anti-national and leading to the liquidation of music." The only thing this kind of music would have led to would have been the "liquidation" of the composers who wrote it!

Prokofiev, like the rest of his colleagues, had to apologize for his music. He wrote: "The Resolution [against formalist music] has separated decayed tissue in the composers' creative production from the healthy part... The Resolution is particularly important because it demonstrates that the formalist movement is alien to the Soviet people." For the rest of his life Prokofiev wrote uncontroversial music. He died on the same day as Stalin, March 5th, 1953.

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