Isabella Colbran: The Tragic Story of Rossini’s Composer Wife

by Emily E. Hogstad, Interlude

Although she and her talents were central to the work of her husband and creative partner Giacomo Rossini, there is no English language biography of Isabella Colbran.

We want to change that. So consider this a basic overview of her story while we wait for a specialized biographer to tell the full story of Isabella Colbran’s extraordinary life!

Early Childhood

Isabella Colbran

Isabella Colbran was born on February 2, 1785, in Madrid, Spain. Her father was Giovanni Colbran, the head musician in Charles III’s court.

She must have shown musical talent at a very early age because when she was only six years old, she began studying music (specifically, voice and composition) with several of the best-known musicians in Spain, including castrati Carlo Martinelli and Girolamo Crescentini. By the time she was fourteen, she had published a book of songs. 

In 1801, when she was sixteen, she moved to Paris with her father and began working in Napoleon’s court. Later, father and daughter traveled throughout Europe, eventually choosing to settle in Italy.

Throughout her twenties, she was one of the most celebrated singers in the world, a favorite of royalty, the aristocracy, and other powerful people alike.

Life in Italy

In 1807, when Colbran was twenty-two, she made her debut at La Scala in Milan. Italy, she found, agreed with her.

That same year, she gave a concert that scholars believe fifteen-year-old Gioachino Rossini likely attended. He was studying music in Bologna at the time, and he almost certainly wouldn’t have passed up the chance to see her.

French writer Stendhal described her as “a beauty of the most imposing sort; with large features that are superb on the stage, magnificent stature, blazing eyes, à la crircassienne, a forest of the most beautiful jet-black hair, and, finally, an instinct for tragedy. As soon as she appeared [on stage] wearing a diadem on her head, she commanded involuntary respect even from people who had just left her in the foyer.”

Life in Naples

Rossini – Elisabetta regina d’Inghilterra – Isabella Colbran as Elisabetta

At the height of her creative power, she made a couple of fateful decisions.

First, she signed a seven-year contract with the Theatro di San Carlo in Naples.

She also embarked on a relationship with the powerful Domenico Barbaia, one of the savviest impresarios in Italy. This helped to guarantee her fame…and crush the local competition, which was never going to compete with Barbaia’s mistress.

In 1815, Barbaia, always on the lookout for new talent, hired Rossini to write an opera about Queen Elizabeth I. The decision would have both personal and professional repercussions. Twenty-three-year-old Gioachino Rossini was just beginning his career as an opera composer, and this was an extraordinary opportunity to write for one of the great voices of her generation. Between 1815 and 1823, he wrote eighteen operas for Colbran: an average of one every six months.

Not surprisingly, given how closely they were working together, sparks flew. Colbran broke things off with Barbaia and committed to Rossini instead. His relationship with her would prove life-changing.

Life With Rossini

In 1820, Colbran and Rossini collaborated on his most daring work yet: an opera called Maometto II, about a real-life Ottoman Sultan from the fifteenth century. 

He made some bold artistic and structural choices. One of them was that toward the end of the opera, Colbran sang for over half an hour, never leaving the stage during that time.

The year was a fraught one, both personally and politically.

First, Colbran’s father died. One sign of how close Rossini and Colbran were at this time was that Rossini bought a cemetery plot for her father. This suggests that he thought of Colbran not as a temporary mistress but as a long-term partner, even if they hadn’t legally wed yet. In his will, Colbran’s father left his daughter a villa outside of Bologna. (This would become important later.)

That same year, there was also an attempted coup against the monarchy in Naples. Political instability in Naples, combined with the failure of his 1819 opera Ermione (a production that, of course, Colbran had starred in), convinced the couple it was time to leave.

Marrying Rossini

In November 1821, Rossini wrote to his father that he and Colbran were engaged.

After the first run of his opera Zelmira in February 1822, Rossini and Colbran traveled to Bologna, where, on 16 March 1822, the two were married in a church outside of town. She was thirty-seven, and he was thirty.

From this point on, Rossini began controlling pretty much every major aspect of Colbran’s life: from the money she had earned during her career to the property she had inherited. This legal and financial powerlessness of married women was common, but it must have been stressful for Colbran to feel her agency dwindling.

That season, Domenico Barbaia decided he wanted to bring the Naples opera company to Vienna. So the newlyweds traveled to Vienna together, and they were a great success. Prince Metternich, a powerful conservative statesman, was a big fan of Rossini’s operas, and six were mounted over the course of three months.

The End of Colbran’s Career

Girolamo Crescentini

However, storm clouds were brewing. Rossini wrote in his letters that Colbran was experiencing stage fright because she felt as if the quality of her voice was deteriorating.

While his wife worried for her career, Rossini threw himself into the Viennese music scene. He heard Beethoven’s Eroica symphony and met with the composer, who implored him to write more comedy…a genre he had largely ignored because Colbran’s strengths lay in drama.

Within months after their marriage, Rossini got to work on another opera for his wife called Semiramide, which premiered in Venice in February 1823. 

Unfortunately, Colbran got bad reviews. As she feared, her voice was indeed deteriorating, and critics and audiences were noticing that she was having more and more trouble staying in tune.

In 1824, her lost voice forced her to retire from the stage for good.

Colbran’s Final Years

In 1830, Rossini’s widowed father moved into the villa that Colbran had inherited. Neither daughter-in-law nor father-in-law was particularly thrilled about this arrangement, but both grit their teeth and bore it.

Meanwhile, Rossini was gone most of the time in Paris, working and dealing with financial issues. He was unfaithful, cheating on his wife multiple times. Eventually he began seeing Parisian courtesan Olympe Pélissier, who evolved into a long-term partner.

He ended up suffering from a bout of gonorrhea, and at some point, Colbran became sick with it, too. Worse, she developed complications. During her illness, with no career to pursue, she sought distraction in gambling, a habit that quickly turned disastrous.

Needing an artistic outlet, she also returned to composing during this time. By the end of her life, she had composed four books of songs, dedicating them to Maria Luisa of Parma, Louise of Baden, Queen of Naples Julie Clary, and her castrato teacher Girolamo Crescentini.

She and Rossini broke up sometime in the 1830s and made their separation official in 1837. That same year, Colbran met Pélissier for the first time. Rossini scholar Denise Gallo writes that Rossini’s wife and mistress developed “a polite relationship.”

However, for what it’s worth, Rossini didn’t entirely abandon Colbran. He paid her money, and even though he was completely emotionally and physically absent, he apparently ensured she had high-quality medical care.

Meanwhile, according to legend, Colbran never fell out of love with her husband.

Colbran’s Death

In August 1845, Rossini heard that his former wife’s health was dangerously bad. In September, he went to the villa with Pélissier to see her for the final time. He emerged from Colbran’s chambers crying. Nobody knows what they said to each other.

After Colbran died on 7 October 1845, he sold her villa, unwilling to ever return. Although he composed intermittently and privately later on, Isabella Colbran’s death coincided with the ceasing of his heretofore productive creative life.

Composers Like Chopin: Ten Composers to Check Out

By Emily E.Hogstad, Interlude

Delicacy. Poignancy. Romance. These are just a few of the words often associated with Frédéric Chopin‘s timeless compositions for piano.

Frédéric Chopin © ClassicFM

That said, Chopin’s music doesn’t have a monopoly on those adjectives.

Today, we’re looking at ten works by ten composers who, just like Chopin, understood the piano’s expressive power…while forging their own creative identities, too.

If you’re looking for music like Chopin’s, here are ten suggestions for your playlist:

John Field (1782-1837)

Pianist and composer John Field was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1782.

He studied with Muzio Clementi in London and toured Europe with him, finally settling in St. Petersburg in 1802.

John Field, 1820

In his late twenties, he began experimenting musically. He started writing short pieces for solo piano featuring an arpeggiated accompaniment in the left hand and a highly chromatic melody in the right hand. These pieces would usually be poetic and melancholy in nature. He called them “Nocturnes.” And so a new genre of piano music was born, that Chopin would later perfect.

You can hear Field’s influence in Chopin’s nocturnes.

Maria Szymanowska (1789-1831) 

Maria Szymanowska was born Marianna Agata Wołowska in Warsaw in 1789.

Maria Szymanowska

In 1810, she married a man named Józef Szymanowski, a wealthy landowner, and she also made her public debut as a pianist.

Many women musicians of this era gave up their careers once they got married, but not Szymanowska. Ultimately, she split from her husband and began touring Europe, spending a great deal of time in St. Petersburg. (And in case you’re wondering, yes, she did cross paths with Field!) She died there in 1831 during a cholera epidemic.

Musicologist Sławomir Dobrzański writes, “Szymanowska’s musical style is parallel to the compositional starting point of Frédéric Chopin; many of her compositions had an obvious impact on Chopin’s mature musical language.”

Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857)

Glinka was born in Russia in 1804. He attended a school in St. Petersburg for children of the nobility and took three lessons from John Field while there.

Portrait of Mikhail Glinka, 1840

When he became an adult, he joined the Foreign Office, but by night, he kept pursuing music. He ultimately developed a great passion for expressing Russian nationalism in music, and encouraging a specifically Russian school of music.

Most of his best-known music dates from after that revelation. However, the music from his young dilettante days – like this Nocturne from 1828 – feels similar in some ways to Chopin’s and certainly reveals Field’s influence.

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) 

Liszt and Chopin met at the latter’s first Parisian concert in 1832. They moved in the same aristocratic Parisian circles and their lives shared important themes, chief among them their devotion to their respective homelands (Hungary and Poland).

Franz Liszt, 1847

They respected each other a great deal, and Liszt was deeply saddened by Chopin’s early death in 1849. Liszt went so far as to write a biography in memory of his friend.

It is believed that Liszt’s third Consolation in D-flat major is modeled after Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 27, No. 2. This piece by Liszt was published in 1850, the year after Chopin’s death.  

Clara Schumann (1819-1896) 

Clara Wieck, who became known as Clara Schumann after her marriage to composer Robert Schumann, began championing the works of Chopin when she was a child prodigy touring across Europe.

Robert and Clara Schumann

In 1832, the same year that Liszt and Chopin met, a young Clara Wieck heard Chopin in concert. She never forgot the experience.

Clara Wieck Schumann was always excited to play any new music that Chopin would write. She continued playing Chopin for decades after his death at important and prestigious venues, helping to ensure that he would stay in the repertoire. She ultimately emerged as one of the greatest pianists of her generation, and she brought Chopin’s music with her on that journey.

When Chopin came to visit her in 1836, she played this Chopinesque nocturne for him, as well as a variety of other pieces. He was delighted.

Thomas Tellefsen (1823-1874) 

Pianist and composer Thomas Tellefsen was born in Trondheim, Norway, in 1823.

As a young man, it became his dream to study with Chopin, and so he left his native Norway for Paris.

Thomas Tellefsen

Unfortunately for Tellefsen, however, not just anyone could study with Chopin; he was in high demand as a teacher.

Luckily, in 1844, Chopin’s partner, authoress George Sand, put in a good word for Tellefsen, and Chopin accepted him as a student. Chopin was impressed by his talent, and eventually, the two men became friends and traveling companions.

Chopin viewed Tellefsen as a major pedagogical heir, tasking him with writing a pianoforte method based on what he’d learned. However, if Tellefsen did complete it, no record of it exists.

What does exist are his compositions in a style a la Chopin.

Carl Filtsch (1830-1845) 

Carl Filtsch was born in present-day Romania in 1830. He was a child prodigy, and his family relocated to Paris when he was eleven so he could take lessons from Chopin.

Chopin didn’t teach children, but he made an exception for Filtsch. Indeed, he started teaching him three lessons a week.

Carl Filtsch

Filtsch eventually began touring Europe to acclaim, but he died of tuberculosis in Venice when he was only fifteen years old.

One of Chopin’s friends wrote in 1843 that, “My God! What a child! Nobody has ever understood me as this child has…It is not imitation, it is the same sentiment, an instinct that makes him play without thinking as if it could not have been any other way.”

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) Play

Chopin died when Fauré was only a few years old, but something about Chopin’s brand of poignancy and elegance spoke to the Frenchman. When Fauré began writing his own nocturnes in the mid-1870s, he reached back to an earlier generation for inspiration.

John Singer Sargent: Gabriel Fauré, 1896

Fauré, like Chopin, was obsessed with writing for piano. “In piano music, there’s no room for padding – one has to pay cash and make it consistently interesting. It’s perhaps the most difficult genre of all,” he wrote.

His first nocturne, dating from ca. 1875, features an opening theme that immediately recalls to mind Chopin’s Prelude in E-minor.

Even when the nocturne wanders into more experimental harmonies or rhythms, a Chopinesque character still remains.

Juliusz Zarębski (1854-1885) 

Juliusz Zarębski was born in 1854 in present-day Ukraine, a country that in the past had been under Polish rule. His hometown Zhytomyr is between Kyiv (two hours away by car) and Warsaw (nine hours).

Juliusz Zarębski

Zarębski studied in Rome and St. Petersburg as a young man, taking lessons from Liszt and setting to music work by poet Adam Mickiewicz (who, interestingly, was Maria Szymanowska’s son-in-law). He spent formative time in places that were deeply influenced by Chopin’s own influences, and it shows.

Tragically, his life path followed Chopin’s in a grim way: he became ill with tuberculosis and died at the age of 31. He left behind a catalog of lovely music, perfect for a Chopin listener looking for something fresh.

Rosemary Brown (1916-2001)

Rosemary Brown was a psychic medium from twentieth century Britain who claimed to channel the works of the great composers.

Rosemary Brown

The story of Rosemary Brown’s musical career is odd and fascinating. To make a long story short, Brown said that she could communicate with dead composers. (For what it’s worth, she claimed that Chopin was horrified by television.)

During their interactions, the composers dictated pieces to her in a variety of ways. She said that Chopin wrote this one.

Is this piece really Chopin composing from the afterlife? Well, frankly, deciding that is a bit beyond our pay grade, but you’re free to believe whatever you want! If nothing else, it’s a great story.

Conclusion

Regardless of what you think about the work of Rosemary Brown, here’s the truth: Chopin didn’t need a psychic medium to speak through the music of those who came after him.

Many composers shared his artistic priorities and delicate touch and wrote incredibly poignant, romantic pieces of Chopinesque music that we can still enjoy today. We hope you enjoy our picks!

Five Conductors Who Died on the Podium

by Emily E. Hogstad, Interlude

The best conductors are often workaholics intensely devoted to their craft and career.

So it’s no surprise that over the course of music history, quite a few conductors have died or suffered fatal injuries while on the podium.

Today, we’re looking at the stories of five conductors who did what they loved until the very end of their lives – and what music they were conducting when they passed away.

Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687)

Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Lully by Paul Mignard

Lully was born in Tuscany in 1632. Historians don’t know a lot about his childhood, but it appears that he studied both music and dancing.

When he was in his early teens, he was plucked off the street by a chevalier who was searching for an Italian conversation partner for his niece, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier, who was heiress to one of the greatest fortunes in Europe.

This was his introduction to the French aristocracy. In 1653, he made a big impression while dancing with Louis XIV, the future Sun King. Within weeks, he was named royal composer for instrumental music.

In 1661, Lully was named superintendent of the royal music and music master of the royal family.  

He fell into disfavor in the 1680s as rumors swirled surrounding his same-sex relationships. In 1685, he was accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a pageboy, and his home was raided by police. Although he never faced any legal consequences, the social and professional costs were steep, and Louis XIV distanced himself.

In 1687, Louis XIV underwent dental surgery. Things went sideways during the procedure, but somehow he survived. To celebrate the monarch’s unlikely recovery, Lully wrote a Te Deum.

During the performance, he used a staff to keep time and accidentally hit his foot with it. Gangrene set in, and Lully refused an amputation because didn’t want to give up his ability to dance. He died on 22 March 1687.

Narcisse Girard (1797-1860)

Narcisse Girard

Narcisse Girard was born in Nantes, France, and studied at the Paris Conservatoire with violinist Pierre Baillot and Beethoven‘s friend Anton Reicha.

As a young man, he scored prestigious positions at the Opéra Italien, Opéra Comique, and Paris Opéra in Paris. 

He gave a series of important premieres, including Hector Berlioz’s work for viola and orchestra Harold en Italie in 1834; Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Le prophète in 1849; and Charles Gounod’s opera Sapho in 1851.

One of his career highlights was conducting a performance of the Mozart Requiem at Chopin’s memorial service.

In 1860, he fell ill and conducted a concert at the Conservatoire while sick. Next he took on a performance of Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots, which clocks in at close to four hours. After the third act, Girard collapsed and later died.

Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896-1960)

Dimitri Mitropoulos

Dimitri Mitropoulos was born in Athens in 1896. He studied at the Athens Conservatory before becoming an assistant conductor at the Berlin State Opera.

One memorable performance in Berlin in 1930 saw him play and conduct Prokofiev’s third piano concerto from the keyboard after the scheduled soloist had fallen ill.

He emigrated to the United States in 1936 and conducted orchestras in Boston and Minneapolis before becoming the music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1951. 

His young, dynamic student Leonard Bernstein succeeded him in 1957. Mitropoulos’s gentle persona, inability to enforce strict discipline with his players, bad press, and rumored homosexuality all combined to end his music directorship at the Philharmonic.

He spent the rest of his career specializing in opera. He gave many performances at the Metropolitan Opera.

In November 1960, Mitropoulos was rehearsing Mahler’s massive third symphony at La Scala Opera House in Milan. According to press reports, he stopped, mumbled that he was feeling sick, and collapsed. The musicians immediately stopped playing and tried to assist him, but it was no use; he had suffered a massive cerebral haemorrhage. He died on his way to a Milanese hospital.

Eduard van Beinum (1900-1959)

Eduard van Beinum

Eduard van Beinum was born in 1900 in the city of Arnhem in the Netherlands. He studied violin, viola, and piano as a child, and when he was eighteen, joined the Arnhem Orchestra. Later he attended the Amsterdam Conservatory.

In 1929, he conducted the Concertgebouw Orchestra for the first time. Two years later, he was named second conductor, under the esteemed – and autocratic – Willem Mengelberg.

During the Nazi invasion, the two men found themselves caught up in politics.

Mengelberg flirted with Nazism, being photographed with Nazi officials and once telling an interviewer he drank champagne when the Netherlands surrendered to Nazi forces. His words and actions eventually forced him into postwar exile in Switzerland.

Meanwhile, the genial van Beinum refused to conduct a Nazi benefit concert in 1943 and threatened to resign from his position if he was compelled to play the event.

Eduard van Beinum Conducts Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 Op.55

After Mengelberg was pushed out in 1945, van Beinum stepped up to become the ensemble’s music director. He also served at various times as music director of the London Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

On 13 April 1959, van Beinum was at the Concertgebouw rehearsing Brahms’s first symphony when he had a heart attack and died.

Fritz Lehmann (1904-1956)

Fritz Lehmann

Fritz Lehmann was born into a musical family in Mannheim, Germany, in 1904. As a teenager, he studied at the Hochschule für Musik in Mannheim, eventually transferring to universities in Heidelberg and Göttingen.

He made a career conducting various German orchestras, and in 1934, he was hired as the conductor of the Göttingen International Handel Festival. Ten years later, he resigned when, like van Beinum, he came in conflict with Nazi officials.

One of his specialties was Johann Sebastian Bach. On Good Friday in 1956, he conducted a particularly fateful performance of the St. Matthew Passion in Munich.

During the performance, he had a heart attack and collapsed. A replacement conductor came out to finish the work. After the Passion was finished, it was announced that Lehmann had not survived.

Prokofiev for Beginners: 10 Pieces to Make You Love Prokofiev

by Emily E. Hogstad  

Sergei Prokofiev was born on 23 April 1891 in Sontsivka, present-day Ukraine. He became one of the famous rebellious enfant terribles of twentieth-century Russian music.

Sergei Prokofiev

Here are a few facts about his life and career:

• Prokofiev’s music blended steely modernism and traditional Russian character. He often combined dissonance and complex rhythms with more melodic and folk-inspired ideas.
• Prokofiev was a child prodigy who began composing at an early age. When he was accepted into the Moscow Conservatory, he was several years younger than his fellow students. (He would irritate his older peers by keeping track of their mistakes.) He cultivated a reputation as a misfit and a rebel.
• Prokofiev had a complicated relationship with Russia and the Soviet Union. He left his homeland in 1918 after the Russian Revolution but, homesick, returned in 1936. He ran into trouble with Soviet bureaucracy, and his ex-wife was even sent to a gulag after attempting to defect.
• In his later years, his health was poor. Prokofiev died on the same day as Joseph Stalin, so his death received relatively little attention.

Intrigued? Hope so! Here are ten works by Sergei Prokofiev to immerse yourself in his word.

Prokofiev began his first piano concerto as a cocky twenty-year-old.

In 1914 he played this concerto at a piano competition. He figured he probably wouldn’t win if he performed a canonical piano concerto, but he might stand a chance if he entered with an impressive performance of his own little-known work. (And yes, he did in fact win.)

This work is fifteen minutes long and in one movement. It’s dramatic, powerful, spiky, and spicy. 

In this work, Prokofiev takes a form that was invented in the late sixteenth century – the toccata – and brings it squarely into the mechanized twentieth.

Toccatas have always been fleet and virtuosic, but in his Toccata, Prokofiev brings those adjectives to another level, never allowing the performer (or the audience) a single moment to breathe. It’s a cold-blooded and deeply satisfying work.

Symphony No. 1 in D Classical, Op. 25 (1916–17) 

Many composers are terrified to write their first symphony, given the storied history of the genre and the weight of expectations. Brahms, for example, took over twenty years to write and perfect his.

Young Prokofiev, however, turned those expectations on their head when he breezily wrote his brief but enchanting first symphony, nicknamed the “Classical.”

As the name suggests, this symphony is in a neoclassical style that pays tribute to the works of Haydn and Mozart, while putting a modern spin on the genre.

Sergei Prokofiev in 1900

On April 18, 1918, he wrote a typically confident entry in his diary about the premiere: “Rehearsal of the Classical Symphony with the State Orchestra, I conducted it myself, completely improvising, having forgotten the score and never indeed having studied it from a conducting perspective.”

Despite its composer’s devil-may-care attitude, the premiere was a success.

Violin Concerto No. 1 in D, Op. 19 (1916–17) 

Prokofiev’s first violin concerto is like the soundtrack to a twisted fairytale, with long lush lines interplaying with repetitive, machine-like virtuosity.

It was composed against the backdrop of the oncoming Revolution. Despite the turmoil in the streets, 1917 turned into the most creatively productive year of Prokofiev’s life.

In 1918, he departed Russia for America, crossing via the Pacific and arriving in California. He made his way across North America, eventually finding himself in Paris, where his violin concerto was belatedly premiered in 1923.

Unfortunately, Parisian audiences in that particular time and place were hoping for something with a little more avant-garde bite, and the fairytale-like first violin concerto wasn’t their cup of tea. But time has been kind to it, and the concerto remains in the repertoire to this day.

Suite from “Lieutenant Kijé”, Op. 60 (1934) 

In 1936, Prokofiev returned permanently to his homeland. However, before the move, he embarked on a series of long visits.

During one of these, he wrote the soundtrack to a film called Lieutenant Kijé, a satire set in 1800 tracing the misadventures of a fictional lieutenant who is created when a clerk mis-writes a name in a ledger.

This was Prokofiev’s first time writing for film, and, typically, he had very specific ideas about how he wanted to go about composing for this new genre. “I somehow had no doubts whatever about the musical language for the film,” he wrote.

The Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra asked Prokofiev to adapt his soundtrack into a full orchestral suite, which he did. The suite remains popular in concert halls today.

Romeo and Juliet Suite No. 2, Op. 64ter (1936) 

Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet had a rocky beginning.

One of its choreographers resigned from the Kirov Ballet; the project was then moved to the Bolshoi; government bureaucrats were unconvinced about the ballet’s retooled happy ending; and everyone was generally jumpy after a 1936 Stalinist denunciation of renowned composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

Due to these delays, the music was heard before the actual ballet was produced.

That music is, like so much of Prokofiev’s output, both mesmerizing and terrifying. The lumbering bass of the Montagues and Capulets is especially legendary (at 2:45 in the recording above).

Peter and the Wolf, Op. 67 (1936) 

One might not have expected this from the infamous enfant terrible of Soviet music, but in 1936, Prokofiev wrote one of the most famous educational works in music history, Peter and the Wolf.

It was commissioned by the director of the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow. She wanted Prokofiev to write a special symphony for children.

The protagonist Peter plays in a meadow, listening to a whole menagerie of animals symbolized by various instruments.

Peter’s grandfather warns him of a gray wolf who might come to attack him. On cue, the wolf makes an appearance, but with the help of his animal friends, Peter is able to catch it.

Hunters come out of the forest, ready to kill the wolf, but Peter convinces them to put the wolf in a cage and bring it to a zoo instead. They do so, in triumphant, animal-parade formation.

The work has proven to be one of the most popular in the entire repertoire and is often used even today as an introduction to the orchestra and orchestral instruments.

War and Peace, Op. 91 (1941–52) 

After the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Prokofiev teamed up with his new wife, poet/translator Mira Mendelson, to write a massive opera based on Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

He submitted a score to the Soviet Union’s Committee of the Arts in 1942. They wanted more patriotism, but Prokofiev was loath to substantially revise the opera, so he sprinkled in some patriotic marches instead.

Despite the changes, full-throated Party support of the opera was never forthcoming, and the massive project gradually lost steam.

Prokofiev would never actually get to see the entire thing fully staged. But it’s still a fascinating glimpse into how he treated large-scale projects and how politics affected art.

Symphony No. 5 in B♭, Op. 100 (1944) 

Prokofiev wrote his fifth symphony in 1944, the summer of the Normandy landings. The long war was reaching a turning point, and this was reflected in his fifth symphony.

Publicly, at least, Prokofiev described the work as “a hymn to free and happy Man, to his mighty powers, his pure and noble spirit.”

He also wrote, “I cannot say that I deliberately chose this theme. It was born in me and clamoured for expression. The music matured within me. It filled my soul.”

At its January 1945 premiere, celebratory artillery was heard in the distance. Prokofiev didn’t begin the performance until the gunfire was over.

Later, the musicians and audience learned that the explosions had been a celebratory signal: Soviet troops had crossed into Germany, signaling a successful invasion. The war ended in Europe a few months later.

Even though this was a work written in a very particular time and place, its themes of overcoming struggle and battered optimism still resonate on a more universal level.

Symphony No. 7, Op. 131 (1951-52) 

By the 1950s, Prokofiev’s health was declining. Nevertheless, he still managed one last symphony, his seventh. Somewhat ironically, his final symphonic testament was commissioned by the Soviet Children’s Radio Division.

One can hear a wistful melancholy and a world-weary resignation in this music, even in its more flamboyant passages. The bold aggression of the teenaged Prokofiev has mellowed considerably.

Prokofiev was pushed into altering his work. Originally the ending was quiet and sad. However, a conductor friend told Prokofiev that he should tack on a brief happy ending, which would make him more likely to please bureaucrats and win the Stalin Prize and its 100,000 ruble payout.

Prokofiev reluctantly agreed, but he told the friend, “Slava, you will live much longer than I, and you must take care that this new ending never exists after me.”

Prokofiev’s seventh never won the Stalin Prize, and he died before he could try again with his eighth.

Conclusion

Grave of Sergei Prokofiev

Sergei Prokofiev died on 5 March 1953, about an hour before Joseph Stalin. So many mourners were busy paying tribute to Stalin that his death went largely unnoticed for a long time.

There were no musicians available to play at his funeral, so his family played a recording of his own Romeo and Juliet suite instead. He was sixty-one years old.