Sergei Prokofiev was born on 23 April 1891 in Sontsovka, now located in Ukraine but then a remote rural estate of the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire. His father Sergey Alekseyevich Prokofiev was an agronomist and managed the estate

In 1914, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, having entered there ten years earlier at age 14 as the youngest-ever student to enter the Conservatoire. His teachers were the finest in Russia: Glazunov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Lyadov. He

You know that Prokofiev wrote some of the greatest music ever. You know that his ballet scores have become some of the most performed dance music ever; on and off stage. You know that he was a child prodigy. You

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) started experimenting with a number of short piano works in 1915, completed them in 1917, and gave them their first public performance on 15 April 1918 in Petrograd/St. Petersburg. At a private performance some months before, the

In 1952, one year before his death, Sergei Prokofiev was financially broke. The Soviet government had condemned his Symphony No. 6 a couple of years earlier, and the composer was stripped of his reputation and of his state pension. Trying

Sergei Prokofiev was still a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory when he took the stage on 7 August 1912 to premier his 1st Piano Concerto. Since it was his first appearance with an orchestra, and expecting a rather large

Sergei Prokofiev, one of the greatest composers of Russia, would never forget that day after the Revolution. He left Russia with the official blessing and warning of the Soviet Minister Anatoly Lunacharsky: “You are running away from events, and these

Dictatorial societies are notorious for fostering environments of suspicion and fear. It is always chilling to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume narrative The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn relied on eyewitness testimony and primary research as well as his own experiences as a