Sergei Prokofiev was born on 23 April (o.s. 11 April), 1891 in Sontsovka Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russia (now Krasne in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine). He already displayed musical abilities at the age of five. His early compositions were written down by his mother; those were ditties, rondos, waltzes, “Indian Gallop”. By the age of seven he had also learned to play chess and it remained a passion throughout his life. Two years later, he composed his first opera “The Giant”. During the two consecutive summers of 1902 and ‘03 Prokofiev took private lessons on piano, music theory and composition under the pianist Reinhold Glière. Prokofiev’s mother thought that the isolation in Sontsovka was restricting her son’s further musical development. In 1904 he enrolled at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. By that time Prokofiev had composed two more operas: “Desert Islands” and “The Feast during the Plague”.
In 1910, Prokofiev’s father died. He had already started making a name for himself as a composer, though his progressive works often irritated the public. The “Sarcasms” for piano, for example, made extensive use of polytonality, the “Etudes” (Op. 2) and “Four Pieces” (Op. 4) were highly chromatic and dissonant. His first two piano concertos composed around this time caused a scandal, only the modernists were in raptures. In 1911 help arrived from renowned Russian musicologist and critic Alexander Ossovsky, who wrote a supportive letter to the music publisher Boris P. Jurgenson and thus secured the latter’s consent to publish Prokofiev’s works.
In 1918 Prokofiev made a lot of concert tours in the USA, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, England, Japan and Cuba. He became a worldwide celebrity. His operas “The Love for Three Oranges” (1919), “The Fiery Angel” (1927), the ballets ”The Steel Step” (1925), “The Prodigal Son” (1928), “On the Dnieper” (1930) and numerous instrumental pieces were composed during this period. In 1927 and 1929 Prokofiev toured Russia and in 1932 he decided to return back home. By that time his creative potential had reached its peak. Within the last sixteen years Prokofiev composed such masterpieces as his ballet “Romeo and Juliet”, the cantatas “Alexander Nevsky” and “Zdravitsa”, a symphonic piece for children “Peter and the Wolf”. During World War II he wrote his epic opera “War and Peace”, the Piano Sonata No. 7, and the Fifth Symphony. Despite a serious illness his creativity did not slacken during the post-war period. In 1948 the Soviet leadership accused Prokofiev of formalism. He decided to retire to his dacha in the small village of Nikolino near Moscow, where he spent his last days. Here he wrote his opera “The Story of a Real Man”, the ballet “The Tale of the Stone Flower”, the Piano Sonata No. 9, the oratorio “On Guard for Peace” among others. His last work was the Symphony No. 7, written in 1952.
Sergei Prokofiev died of a cerebral hemorrhage on 5 March 1953, the day Stalin’s death was proclaimed. Due to this fact his friends and relatives had a hard time organizing his funeral.