Sergei Prokofiev

Prokofiev graduated from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and made his early name as an iconoclast, writing ferociously dissonant piano works that scandalized audiences. After the 1917 Revolution he left Russia with official approval and spent nearly two decades in the United States, Germany, and Paris, married Spanish singer Lina Codina, and worked for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The Great Depression dried up Western commissions; in 1936 he returned to the Soviet Union, where he composed Lieutenant Kijé, Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella, Alexander Nevsky, and his late piano sonatas. The Nazi invasion drove him to adapt Tolstoy's War and Peace into an opera with Mira Mendelson, who became his second wife. In 1948 he was denounced for "anti-democratic formalism," yet kept writing - his final works championed by Richter and Rostropovich - until his death in 1953.