His works include such widely heard pieces as the March from The Love for Three Oranges, the suite Lieutenant Kijé, the ballet Romeo and Juliet—from which "Dance of the Knights" is taken—and Peter and the Wolf.

A graduate of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, Prokofiev initially made his name as an iconoclastic composer-pianist, achieving notoriety with a series of ferociously dissonant and virtuosic works for his instrument, including his first two piano concertos.

After the Revolution of 1917, Prokofiev left Russia with the approval of Soviet People's Commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky, and resided in the United States, then Germany, then Paris, making his living as a composer, pianist and conductor.

Prokofiev, who regarded himself as a composer foremost, resented the time taken by touring as a pianist, and increasingly turned to the Soviet Union for commissions of new music; in 1936, he finally returned to his homeland with his family.

His greatest Soviet successes included Lieutenant Kijé, Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, Alexander Nevsky, the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, On Guard for Peace, and the Piano Sonatas Nos.

The Nazi invasion of the USSR spurred Prokofiev to compose his most ambitious work, an operatic version of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace; he co-wrote the libretto with Mira Mendelson, his longtime companion and later second wife.

Nevertheless, he enjoyed personal and artistic support from a new generation of Russian performers, notably Sviatoslav Richter and Mstislav Rostropovich: he wrote his Ninth Piano Sonata for the former and his Symphony-Concerto for the latter.

Prokofiev was born in 1891 in a rural estate in Sontsovka, Bakhmut uezd, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire (now known as Sontsivka, Pokrovsk Raion, Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine).

[18] By the time of Prokofiev's birth, Maria—having previously lost two daughters—had devoted her life to music; during her son's early childhood, she spent two months a year in Moscow or St Petersburg taking piano lessons.

[30] Despite his growing talent, Prokofiev's parents hesitated over starting their son on a musical career at such an early age, and considered the possibility of his attending a good high school in Moscow.

His performance of it impressed the organisers of the Evenings sufficiently for them to invite Prokofiev to give the Russian premiere of Arnold Schoenberg's Drei Klavierstücke, Op.

[54] The ballet's premiere in Paris on 17 May 1921 was a huge success and was greeted with great admiration by an audience that included Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel.

"[61] Arriving in San Francisco after having been released from questioning by immigration officials on Angel Island on 11 August 1918,[62] Prokofiev was soon compared to other famous Russian exiles, such as Sergei Rachmaninoff.

[68] Diaghilev became sufficiently interested in the opera to request Prokofiev play the vocal score to him in June 1922, while they were both in Paris for a revival of Chout, so he could consider it for a possible production.

"[69] In March 1922, Prokofiev moved with his mother to the town of Ettal in the Bavarian Alps, where for over a year he concentrated on an opera project, The Fiery Angel, based on the novel by Valery Bryusov.

[73] Still, the Symphony appeared to prompt Diaghilev to commission Le pas d'acier (The Steel Step), a "modernist" ballet score intended to portray the industrialisation of the Soviet Union.

[75] He began to practice its teachings, which he believed to be beneficial to his health and to his fiery temperament[76] and to which he remained faithful for the rest of his life, according to biographer Simon Morrison.

[81] Over more than two months, he spent time in Moscow and Leningrad (as St Petersburg had been renamed), where he enjoyed a very successful staging of The Love for Three Oranges in the Mariinsky Theatre.

57, which Prokofiev's friend Myaskovsky—thinking of its potential audience in the Soviet Union—told him "isn't quite for us… it lacks that which we mean by monumentalism—a familiar simplicity and broad contours, of which you are extremely capable, but temporarily are carefully avoiding.

Biographer Daniel Jaffé argued that Prokofiev, "having forced himself to compose a cheerful evocation of the nirvana Stalin wanted everyone to believe he had created" (i.e. in Zdravitsa) then subsequently, in the three sonatas, "expressed his true feelings".

[120] Prokofiev had been considering making an opera out of Leo Tolstoy's epic novel War and Peace, when news of the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 made the subject seem all the more timely.

In 1943, Prokofiev joined Eisenstein in Alma-Ata, the largest city in Kazakhstan, to compose more film music (Ivan the Terrible), and the ballet Cinderella (Op.

Early that year, he also played excerpts from War and Peace to members of the Bolshoi Theatre collective,[123] but the Soviet government had opinions about the opera that resulted in many revisions.

He conducted its first performance on 13 January 1945, just a fortnight after the triumphant premieres on 30 December 1944 of his Eighth Piano Sonata and, on the same day, the first part of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible.

This possibly apocryphal story was corroborated by the head of the composers' union, Tikhon Khrennikov, who said that the person Prokofiev snubbed was the Stalinist official Matvei Shkiryatov.

[140] Prokofiev's latest opera projects, among them his desperate attempt to appease the cultural authorities, The Story of a Real Man, were quickly cancelled by the Kirov Theatre.

[141] The snub, in combination with his declining health, caused Prokofiev to progressively withdraw from public life and from various activities, even chess, and increasingly devote himself to his own work.

He had lived near Red Square, and for three days throngs gathered to mourn Stalin, making it impossible to hold Prokofiev's funeral service at the headquarters of the Soviet Composers' Union.

Because the hearse was not allowed near Prokofiev's house, his coffin had to be moved by hand through back streets in the opposite direction of the masses of people going to visit Stalin's body.

[162] Yet for some time Prokofiev's reputation in the West suffered as a result of Cold War antipathies,[163] and his music has never won from Western academics and critics the same esteem as Igor Stravinsky's and Arnold Schoenberg's, which had greater influence on younger musicians.