After the death of his father in 1910, Prokofiev lived under more straitened material conditions, though his mother provided for his continuing studies. On the eve of World War I, he visited London and Paris to acquaint himself with the newest in art. The tense pre-storm atmosphere that pervaded Russia sharpened in him a feeling of skepticism, of disbelief in romantic ideals, but did not shake his essentially healthy outlook on life. Exempt from war mobilization as the only son of a widow, Prokofiev continued to perfect his musicianship on the organ and appeared in concerts in the capital and elsewhere. The pre-Revolutionary period of Prokofiev's work was marked by intense exploration. The harmonic thought and design of his work grew more and more complicated. Prokofiev wrote the ballet Ala and Lolli (1914), on themes of ancient Slav mythology, for Diaghilev, who rejected it. Thereupon, Prokofiev reworked the music into the Scythian Suite for orchestra. Its premiere, in 1916, caused a scandal but was the culmination of his career in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). The ballet The Tale of the Buffoon Who Outjested Seven Buffoons (1915; reworked as The Buffoon, 1915–20), also commissioned by Diaghilev, was based on a folktale; it served as a stimulus for Prokofiev's searching experiments in the renewal of Russian music. Despite Diaghilev's assertion of the priority of ballet over opera, which he considered a dying genre, Prokofiev was active in the field of opera. Following the immature Maddalena, which he wrote in 1911–13, he composed in 1915–16 The Gambler, a brilliant and dynamic adaptation of the novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor). Continuing the operatic tradition of Modest Mussorgsky (Mussorgsky, Modest), Prokofiev skillfully combined subtle lyricism, satiric malice, narrative precision, and dramatic impact. During this period, Prokofiev achieved great recognition for his first two piano concerti—the first the one-movement Concerto in D-flat Major (1911) and the second the dramatic four-movement Concerto in G Minor (1913).
The year 1917—the year of two Russian revolutions—was astonishingly productive for Prokofiev. When Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown in February 1917, Prokofiev was in the streets of Petrograd, expressing the joy of victory. As if inspired by feelings of social and national renewal, he wrote within one year an immense quantity of new music: he composed two sonatas, the Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, the Classical Symphony, and the choral work Seven, They Are Seven; he began the magnificent Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major; and he planned a new opera, The Love for Three Oranges, after a comedy tale by the 18th-century Italian dramatist Carlo Gozzi (Gozzi, Carlo, Conte), as translated and adapted by Meyerhold. In the summer of 1917 Prokofiev was included in the Council of Workers in the Arts, which led Russia's left wing of artistic activity; but for almost nine months he was stranded in the Caucasus, cut off from Petrograd by the civil war. Only in the spring of 1918 did he succeed in returning there. In the difficult circumstances of these years, however, he concluded that music had no place in the council's activities, and he decided to leave Russia temporarily to undertake a concert tour abroad. With official sanction, Prokofiev traveled over the difficult route through Siberia, where civil strife was raging.
Foreign period
The next decade and a half are commonly called the “foreign period” of Prokofiev's work. For a number of reasons, chiefly the continued blockade of the Soviet Union, he could not return at once to his homeland. Nevertheless, he did not lose touch with Russia. The first five years of Prokofiev's life abroad are usually characterized as the “years of wandering.” On the way from Vladivostok to San Francisco, in the summer of 1918, he gave several concerts in Tokyo and Yokohama. In New York City the sensational piano recitals of the “Bolshevik Pianist” evoked both delight and denunciation. The composer had entrée to the Chicago Opera Association, where he was given a commission for a comic opera. The conductor and the producer of the opera, both Italian, gladly backed the idea of an opera on the Gozzi plot. Accordingly, The Love for Three Oranges was completed in 1919, though it was not produced until 1921. Within a few years the opera was also produced with immense success on the stages of the Soviet Union as well as in western Europe.
In America, Prokofiev met a young singer of Spanish extraction, Lina Llubera, who eventually became his wife and the mother of two of his sons, Svyatoslav and Oleg. Not finding continuing support in the United States, the composer set out in the spring of 1920 for Paris for meetings with Diaghilev and the conductor Serge Koussevitzky (Koussevitzky, Serge). They soon secured for him wide recognition in the most important western European musical centres. The production of The Buffoon by Diaghilev's ballet troupe in Paris and London in 1921 and the Paris premiere of the Scythian Suite in 1921 and that of Seven, They Are Seven in 1924 evoked enormous interest, consolidating his reputation as a brilliant innovator. The successful performance of his Piano Concerto No. 3 (1921), completed in France, also marked one of the peaks of Prokofiev's dynamic national style.
During 1922–23 Prokofiev spent more than a year and a half in southern Germany, in the Bavarian town of Ettal. Resting after fatiguing premieres and reviewing the course of his creative path, he prepared many of his compositions for the printer. He also continued work on the opera The Flaming Angel, after a story by the contemporary Russian author Valery Bryusov (Bryusov, Valery Yakovlevich). The opera, which required many years of work (1919–27), did not find a producer within Prokofiev's lifetime.
Meanwhile, Prokofiev, uninterested in the musical activity in Germany, settled in Paris in the autumn of 1923. There he was in close touch with progressive French musical figures, such as the composers Francis Poulenc (Poulenc, Francis) and Arthur Honegger (Honegger, Arthur), while continuing his own intensive creative activity. Vexed by criticisms of his melodically lucid Violin Concerto No. 1, which had its premiere in Paris in 1923, he addressed himself to a search for a more avant-garde style. These tendencies appeared in several compositions of the early 1920s, including the epic Symphony No. 2 in D Minor, commissioned by Koussevitzky. Its intense dramatic quality and its striking sense of proportion are also found in the Symphony No. 3 in C Minor (1928), based on thematic material from the opera The Flaming Angel. In close collaboration with Diaghilev, Prokofiev created new one-act ballets, Le Pas d'acier (performed in 1927) and The Prodigal Son (performed in 1929). Le Pas d'acier had a sensational success in Paris and London, thanks to its original staging and bold evocation of images of Soviet Russia at the beginning of the 1920s—with its economic dislocation and the beginnings of industrialization. The Prodigal Son had a lofty biblical theme and music that was exquisitely lyrical. It reflects an emotional relaxation and a clarification of style that are also seen in the String Quartet No. 1 in B Minor (1930), in the Sonata for Two Violins in C Major (1932), and in the ballet On the Dnieper (1932).
In 1927 Prokofiev toured the Soviet Union and was rapturously received by the Soviet public as a world-renowned Russian musician-revolutionary. While there, he strengthened his old associations with the innovative theatrical producer Meyerhold (Meyerhold, Vsevolod Yemilyevich), who helped him in a basic revision of the opera The Gambler, produced in 1929 in Brussels.
During the 1920s and early '30s, Prokofiev toured with immense success as a pianist in the great musical centres of western Europe and the United States. His U.S. tours in 1925, 1930, and 1933 were attended with tumultuous success and brought him new commissions, such as the Symphony No. 4 in C Major (1930; incorporating musical material of The Prodigal Son), for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony, and the String Quartet No. 1, commissioned by the Library of Congress. His new piano concerti—No. 4 (1931), for the left hand, and No. 5 in G Major (1932)—demonstrated anew his bent for impulsiveness and virtuoso brilliance.