Select all the statements about Sergei Prokofiev. Multiple select question. He studied piano and composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He was banned from the Soviet Union after being denounced as a “formalist.” He left Russia following the 1917 Russian Revolution. Performances of some of his works were banned in the Soviet Union.
Select all the statements about Sergei Prokofiev. Multiple select question. He studied piano and composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He was banned from the Soviet Union after being denounced as a “formalist.” He left Russia following the 1917 Russian Revolution. Performances of some of his works were banned in the Soviet Union.
The Correct Answer and Explanation is:
Correct statements
- He studied piano and composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.
- He left Russia following the 1917 Russian Revolution.
- Performances of some of his works were banned in the Soviet Union.
Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) enrolled in the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1904, where he studied both piano and composition with luminaries such as Nikolai Tcherepnin, Anatoly Lyadov, and Rimsky-Korsakov. This rigorous training forged the dazzling keyboard technique and bold modernist language that would characterize his music for the rest of his life.
After the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, Petrograd’s concert life collapsed and basic necessities became scarce. Encouraged by the new Soviet People’s Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Prokofiev secured an official exit permit in May 1918, traveling across Siberia to Vladivostok, then by ship to the United States. He spent the next 18 years as an émigré, basing himself first in America and later in Paris, before deciding to resettle in the USSR in 1936 amid promises of ample commissions and performances.
Initially welcomed, Prokofiev soon encountered the tightening cultural controls of the Stalin era. The watershed moment came with the Zhdanov Decree of February 1948, which castigated leading Soviet composers for “formalism”—music deemed overly complex, modernist, or insufficiently “socialist-realist.” Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony, his Eighth Piano Sonata, the oratorio On Guard for Peace, and many other scores were summarily withdrawn from concert programs, recordings, and publication. Although his works were censored and some were effectively banned, Prokofiev himself was never expelled or “banned” from the Soviet Union; he continued to live in Moscow under official surveillance and dwindling health until his death on 5 March 1953 (the same day as Stalin).
Thus, the statement that he was personally “banned from the Soviet Union” is inaccurate, while the other three statements accurately reflect his education, emigration in the wake of the revolution, and the later suppression of portions of his repertoire.
