Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf

Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf has been a source of inspiration for countless souls. Born in Sontsovka (now the village of Krasnoe), Ukraine,Sergei Sergeievich Prokofiev (1891-1953) was the only child of Sergei Alekseievich Prokofiev and Mariya Zitkova who lived past infancy. Sergei Alekseievich was an agricultural engineer and his Mariya, though born a serf, was a well-educated woman with a broad knowledge of the arts, who was a talented pianist.

Sergei Sergeievich was a child prodigy who was composing for piano at age five and writing an opera at nine. Mariya, his mother, was his first teacher. He attended the St. Petersburg Conservatory from 1904 to 1914, winning the Anton Rubinstein prize for best student pianist when he graduated. He traveled widely, spending many years in London and Paris, and toured the United States five times.

The February Revolution of 1918 took him by surprise. He was enthusiastic about the general idea of revolution, especially in terms of seeking a radical break with tradition in the arts. However, it seems clear that he later he became disappointed with revolution’s socialist approach towards art , specifically concerning the gradual tightening of stylistic control that the Soviet regime subsequently imposed on the creation of art. Ultimately, the political and social upheaval of that year led Prokofiev to migrate to the United States.

However, in 1936, Prokofiev returned to settle permanently in the Soviet Union. This may have been due his homesickness, nationalistic pride, or career advancement. Unfortunately by the late 1920s the communist party had begun to view modernism as decadent. A special bureau, the Composers’ Union, kept track of artists and their works, making sure that artists would adhere the doctrine of “socialist realism,” which relied heavily on the imagery of art depicting and glorifying the proletariat's struggle toward socialist progress.

One of Prokofiev's first compositions after his return was Peter and the Wolf, written in just two weeks in April of 1936 for a children's theater in Moscow. Prokofiev invented the story and wrote the narration himself, drawing on memories of his own childhood. He constructed the music as a child's introduction to the orchestra, with each character in the story represented by a different instrument or group of instruments: Peter by the strings, the bird by the flute, the duck by the oboe, the cat by the clarinet, the wolf by the horn section, and so on.




Here are some of the cover jacket's designs for Peter and the Wolf.