The enfant terrible who wrote for children
Sergei Prokofiev managed to be two composers at once: the scandalous modernist whose piano playing critics compared to a football match, and the storyteller behind Peter and the Wolf, the piece that has introduced more children to the orchestra than any other. Between those extremes lie some of the twentieth century's most irresistible scores — the ballet Romeo and Juliet with its thunderous Dance of the Knights, the witty Classical Symphony, and film music that made cinema history.
From enfant terrible to Soviet classic
A prodigy from the Ukrainian steppe, Prokofiev wrote his first opera at nine and entered the St Petersburg Conservatory at thirteen, the youngest student in its history. He graduated in typical style: competing for the piano prize, he played his own First Piano Concerto — reasoning that the judges would have nothing to compare it with — and won. After the revolution he left Russia and conquered America and Paris as a touring virtuoso and composer, but homesickness won in the end: in 1936 he settled in Stalin's Moscow, where official praise and official condemnation took turns for the rest of his life. That same spring, almost as a favour for a children's theatre, he dashed off Peter and the Wolf — and gave the world his most beloved work.
Prokofiev and Prague
Czechoslovakia holds a remarkable place in Prokofiev's story: when Soviet theatres rejected Romeo and Juliet as "undanceable", it was the National Theatre in Brno that gave the ballet its world premiere in December 1938 — Czech audiences saw Prokofiev's greatest stage work before anyone in Russia did. The connection lives on: the Dance of the Knights storms through Prague's gala programmes, Peter and the Wolf keeps enchanting new generations of Czech children, and whenever his music returns to the city's halls, it returns to the country that believed in it first.