page_title: Sergei Prokofiev
section_title: Postwar
hierarchical_section_title: Sergei Prokofiev / Biography / Postwar
caption_attribution_description: English: From left to right: Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian.
context_page_description: Sergei Sergeyevich Prokofiev was a Russian Soviet composer, pianist and conductor. As the creator of acknowledged masterpieces across numerous music genres, he is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century. 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. Of the established forms and genres in which he worked, he created – excluding juvenilia – seven completed operas, seven symphonies, eight ballets, five piano concertos, two violin concertos, a cello concerto, a symphony-concerto for cello and orchestra, and nine completed piano sonatas.
  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.
context_section_description: Prokofiev had time to write his postwar Sixth Symphony and his Ninth Piano Sonata (for Sviatoslav Richter) before the so-called "Zhdanov Decree". In early 1948, following a meeting of Soviet composers convened by Andrei Zhdanov, the Politburo issued a resolution denouncing Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Myaskovsky, and Khachaturian of the crime of "formalism", described as a "renunciation of the basic principles of classical music" in favour of "muddled, nerve-racking" sounds that "turned music into cacophony". Eight of Prokofiev's works were banned from performance: The Year 1941, Ode to the End of the War, Festive Poem, Cantata for the Thirtieth Anniversary of October, Ballad of an Unknown Boy, the 1934 piano cycle Thoughts, and Piano Sonatas Nos. 6 and 8. Such was the perceived threat behind the banning of the works that even works that had avoided censure were no longer programmed: by August 1948, Prokofiev was in severe financial straits, his personal debt amounting to 180,000 rubles.
  Meanwhile, on 20 February 1948, Prokofiev's estranged wife Lina was arrested for 'espionage', as she had tried to send money to her mother in Spain. After nine months of interrogation, she was sentenced by a three-member Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR to 20 years of hard labour. She was eventually released after Stalin's death in 1953 and in 1974 left the Soviet Union.
  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. The snub, in combination with his declining health, caused Prokofiev to progressively withdraw from public life and from various activities, even his beloved chess, and increasingly devote himself to his own work. After a serious relapse in 1949, his doctors ordered him to limit his composing to an hour a day.
  In spring 1949, he wrote his Cello Sonata in C, Op. 119, for the 22-year-old Mstislav Rostropovich, who gave the first performance in 1950, with Sviatoslav Richter. For Rostropovich, Prokofiev also extensively recomposed his Cello Concerto, transforming it into a Symphony-Concerto, a landmark in the cello and orchestra repertory today. The last public performance he attended, on 11 October 1952, was the première of the Seventh Symphony, his final masterpiece and last completed work. The symphony was written for the Children's Radio Division.
caption: Prokofiev with composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian, 1940.
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