Music: Composer, Soviet-Style

(See Cover) In the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, the intermission had just ended. It was exactly 9:30 p.m. A woman announcer in a black dress stepped...

Music: Prokofiev's Last

Sergei Prokofiev was one of seven Soviet composers (among the others: Khachaturian and Shostakovich) denounced in 1948 "for formalistic and anti-democratic...

Music: Prokofiev's Farewell

At 60, tired, ailing and scarred by writing to please his Soviet masters, Sergei Prokofiev, Russia's finest modern composer, sat down to write his Seventh...

Music: Prokofiev & Tolstoy

Prokofiev & Tolstoy The U.S. witnessed a major musical event this week: the American premiere of the late Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace. Although...

Music: Prokofiev Hailed

Applause such as is rarely heard burst out in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall last week. The occasion was a Boston Symphony concert. The heroes: Russian Conductor...

Music: Battle for the Fatherland

When Hitler's armies marched into the Soviet Union in 1941, the Russian people's fight for survival inspired Sergei Prokofiev to write an opera that would...

Music: End of a Revolutionary

Sergei Prokofiev was an established musical revolutionary of 26 when the Bolsheviks spread flame and famine across Russia in 1917. He had outjangled...

Music: Raising the Devil

Russian Composer Sergei Prokofiev, manhandled by the Manhattan critics, was in a black mood. It was 1919 and he was wandering forlornly through Central Park...

Music: Brilliant Angel

When he was conducting his Third Symphony in Rome in 1934, Composer Sergei Prokofiev made a rare admission to a visiting musicologist. "This," said he, "is my...

Music: Some Angel

Sergei Prokofiev loved to write operas, but the world did not seem to care for them. His first mature one, Magdalene, was never produced; his second, The...