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Probably the least typical of all present-day Soviet composers, most of whom have never been outside the Russian wall, Prokofiev has spent a good deal of his career in France, England and the U.S., as a refugee from the Government he now helps to glorify. His father managed a big estate in the southern Russian village of Sontzovka. His mother, a pianist, brought him up on Beethoven and Chopin. Says precocious Prokofiev: "At six I wrote down myself a valse . . . and I composed a march for four hands when I was seven." By the time he was eight he was writing an opera in three acts and six tableaux. His parents, startled and impressed, packed him off to Moscow to study composition with a famous pedagogue and minor composer named Alexander Taneyev. At the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Prokofiev's dynamic and dissonant compositions got him the name of the "wild boy wonder." Pedagogue Taneyev, hearing some of the wild boy's music, murmured, "Good Lord! Am I responsible for this?"
When critics scorned his discordant Scythian Suite (1914), Prokofiev turned out the Classical Symphony, just to show them that he was also a master of the past. The Classical Symphony has remained one of his half-dozen most popular works.
Prokofiev, 23 when World War I broke out, was not caught in the Tsar's draft because he was a widow's only son. He and his mother fled Russia in 1918, after the Communist revolution. The officer who gave him his passport told Prokofiev: "You are revolutionary in art as we are in politics. You ought not to leave us now."
For Russian music, the Bolshevik revolution marked an esthetic as well as a political turning point. The late great Sergei Rachmaninoff left Russia, never to return. Igor (Le Sacre du Printemps) Stravinsky, who was already out of the country, has since lived in France and the U.S. A few older conservatives like Rhein-old Glier and Nicolai Myaskovsky stayed on in the U.S.S.R., and came to satisfactory terms with the new Soviet regime. The post-revolutionary generation in which Dmitri Shostakovich grew up was not yet out of music school.
In Paris, Prokofiev and Koussevitsky, who had also fled Russia, strolled the boulevards, drank red wine and ate frogs' legs. Prokofiev's smart, barbaric ballet scores, written for Sergei Diaghilev's émigré Ballet Russe, were a Left Bank rage. Koussevitsky conducted Prokofiev music in what were called the "Concerts Koussevitsky."
In the late '20s, Prokofiev got homesick—or) as he put it, "I became convinced that the artist should not stray away from his native sources." To win Russia's sympathy, he wrote an Age of Steel ballet, using whirring strings and bleating trumpets to glorify life in a Soviet village. Raucous passages called The Factory and The Hammers so pleased the Communists that Prokofiev was warmly welcomed when he visited Russia on concert tours. In 1938, after 20¢ years of exile, he settled in Moscow again.
Sergei Prokofiev, a man of practical habits, had been a success under the Tsar; he was a success in exile; he is now a success in Soviet Russia.