Sergei Prokofiev left Russia in 1918, six months after the Bolshevik Revolution. He was twenty-seven, already established as one of the most brilliant young composers in the world, and he wanted to see what the West had to offer. He did not intend to stay away permanently. He told friends he would return when things had settled. Things never settled. Prokofiev spent eighteen years abroad, in the United States and France, before returning to the Soviet Union in 1936. Those years were among the most productive of his career, and they were also among the most conflicted.
Prokofiev’s exile was not political in the way that Rachmaninov’s exile was political. He had no particular objection to the revolution itself. What troubled him was the cultural isolation of Soviet Russia, the difficulty of hearing new Western music, the absence of the audiences and musicians he had come to depend on. He left not as a dissident but as a cosmopolitan, convinced that his art required the wider world. The West delivered on that conviction. It also exacted a price.
The American Years – 1918 to 1920
Prokofiev arrived in New York in September 1918, having travelled via Japan and San Francisco. America received him as a curiosity: a young Russian revolutionary who happened to be a prodigiously talented composer. His first American recital, at Aeolian Hall in November 1918, was a success: a programme of his own piano music, including etudes and his Second Piano Sonata, played alongside pieces by Rachmaninov and Scriabin. The New York press was enthusiastic, recognising in Prokofiev a technical command and an emotional directness that set him apart from the more austere modernists.
America in 1918 was a strange environment for a Russian composer. The country had just entered the final months of the First World War, and the cultural scene was still dominated by European models. Prokofiev’s music, with its aggressive rhythms, its harmonic pungency and its theatrical energy, offered something different. It was received as avant-garde, which in the context of American musical life of the period meant exciting but slightly alarming.
Prokofiev struggled with American practicalities. He spoke limited English, and the business side of concert life baffled him. He relied on agents and managers whose interests did not always align with his own. He found American audiences enthusiastic but insufficiently attentive, too willing to applaud virtuosity without engaging with the music’s deeper structures. The American years were productive, even so. Prokofiev’s first major Western commission came from the Chicago Opera: the opera The Love for Three Oranges, composed in 1919 and premiered in Chicago in December 1921. His Third Piano Concerto, completed in France in 1921, would become one of the most frequently performed concertos of the twentieth century.
Paris: The Centre of the Emigre World
In 1920, Prokofiev left the United States for Europe, and over the following years he made Paris his home, joining the substantial community of Russian emigre musicians, writers and artists who had gathered in the French capital. Paris was the centre of the Western musical world, and home to Igor Stravinsky, his senior by nine years and the compatriot he regarded as his principal rival. The two had not been fellow students; their rivalry took shape later, in the competitive musical world of 1920s Paris, but their proximity there created a creative tension, at once competitive and respectful, that influenced both.
Paris offered Prokofiev something that America could not: a musical community in which new work was taken seriously, discussed critically and placed in context. The concert life was richer and more varied than New York’s, with opportunities to hear everything from Debussy’s late works to Stravinsky’s neoclassical experiments. Prokofiev absorbed these influences, and his music changed accordingly. The angular, percussive style of his Russian years gave way to a more lyrical, more classically shaped approach.
The opera The Gambler, after years of revision, received its premiere in 1929 not in Paris but in Brussels, at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie, in a French translation. It was a considerable success and held its place in the repertoire there for two seasons. Even so, Prokofiev’s perfectionism and his impatience with institutional compromise were a recurring source of friction throughout his career, on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Diaries – Prokofiev’s Own Account
Prokofiev kept a detailed diary from 1907 until 1933, and the published edition provides an invaluable record of his thoughts and experiences during the Western years. The diaries, translated and annotated in three volumes by Anthony Phillips, with a foreword by the composer’s son Sviatoslav Prokofiev, and published in English by Faber and Faber, reveal a composer who was simultaneously confident in his abilities and anxious about his position in the musical world. He recorded his opinions of other composers with candid brutality, his reactions to performances with a mixture of satisfaction and irritation, and his reflections on his own work with a self-critical honesty that is sometimes painful to read.
The diaries also reveal the practical pressures that shaped Prokofiev’s creative decisions. He was constantly managing his finances, negotiating with publishers and concert promoters, and planning his compositional output to meet deadlines. This commercial awareness was unusual among major composers of the period and has led some critics to question whether Prokofiev sometimes subordinated artistic ambition to financial necessity. The diaries suggest a more complex picture: a composer who understood that his art depended on a practical infrastructure and who was willing to make compromises to maintain it.
The Pull of Home – Why Prokofiev Returned
The decision to return to the Soviet Union in 1936 was the defining act of Prokofiev’s life, and it was driven by a combination of nostalgia, practical calculation and artistic ambition. By the mid-1930s, the Soviet cultural establishment was actively encouraging emigre artists to return, offering commissions, performances and the promise of audiences that could not be matched in the West. Prokofiev was approached by Soviet cultural officials who made clear that his return would be welcomed and rewarded.
Prokofiev agonised over the decision for several years. He was aware of the risks. The Soviet cultural climate had tightened considerably since his departure, and political repression was intensifying. But he was also aware that his music was more popular in Russia than in the West, that Russian audiences responded to his work with an emotional intensity that Western audiences could not match. The promise of that response, combined with the practical advantages of Soviet support, tipped the balance.
Prokofiev also felt a personal pull toward Russia that he could not entirely articulate. He missed the landscape, the language, the particular quality of light that he associated with his childhood. His homesickness was not political but emotional, a longing for a place that existed more vividly in memory than in reality. The Russia Prokofiev returned to in 1936 was not the Russia he had left in 1918, and the disjunction between memory and reality would prove devastating.
The Return – What Was Lost
Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union in 1936 and never left again. He died in 1953, on the same day as Stalin, a coincidence that ensured his funeral was poorly attended. The years between his return and his death were among the most difficult of his career. The Soviet cultural authorities subjected his work to increasing scrutiny, and several of his compositions were denounced as formalist, a charge that could lead to public disgrace and professional ruin.
The opera War and Peace was revised repeatedly to meet the demands of Soviet cultural officials, who wanted a more straightforwardly patriotic work than Prokofiev had originally conceived. The Seventh Symphony, his last, was written for a Soviet children’s radio programme and cast in a deliberately simple, lyrical idiom far removed from the astringency of his Western works. The Western years had given Prokofiev a range of experiences and a command of musical techniques that his Soviet colleagues lacked. But the return to Russia subjected those experiences to a new set of constraints. The freedom to compose what he wanted, when he wanted, which Prokofiev had enjoyed in Paris and New York, was replaced by the constant pressure to meet official expectations.
The Legacy of the Exile Years
Prokofiev’s Western years produced work that remains central to the orchestral and operatic repertoire: the Third Piano Concerto, the opera The Love for Three Oranges, and the ballets he wrote for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. It was during these years that his international reputation was made, ensuring that his music would be heard worldwide rather than confined to the Soviet Union. His two best-loved scores, the ballet Romeo and Juliet and Peter and the Wolf, in fact came later, around and after his return to Russia.
The legacy is complicated by the circumstances of Prokofiev’s return. The contrast between the freedom of the Western years and the constraints of the Soviet period has shaped critical reception of his later work, sometimes unfairly. The later compositions are frequently judged against the Western works, and found wanting, when they should be understood on their own terms, as products of a different and more difficult set of conditions.
For British audiences, Prokofiev’s Western years are significant because they brought his music to London and other British cities. The London premiere of the Third Piano Concerto, with Prokofiev as soloist, was an important event in the city’s musical life. The British reception of Prokofiev during the exile period established a connection that has endured, with British orchestras and opera companies continuing to programme his works prominently. The exile years made Prokofiev a British concert-hall regular, and that is a legacy worth remembering.
Image: The composer Sergei Prokofiev, photographed in Paris in 1925 during his years in the West. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
