7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7civil war in the Ukraine (1939). The basis of the opéra bouffe
Betrothal in a Monastery (composed in 1940, produced in
1946) was the play The Duenna, by the 18th-century British
dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Testing his powers
in other genres, he composed the monumental Cantata for
the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution (1937), on texts
by Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, and Joseph Stalin, and the cantata
The Toast (1939), composed for Stalin’s 60th birthday.
On his last trip abroad, in 1938, Prokofiev visited
Hollywood, where he studied the technical problems of
the sound film; he applied what he learned to the music
for Sergey Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky, depicting
the 13th-century heroic Russian struggle against the
Teutonic Knights. The cantata Alexander Nevsky was based
on the music of the film.
On the eve of World War II, he left his wife and sons
for poet Mira Mendelssohn, who became his second
(common-law) wife. Regardless of the difficulties of the
war years, he composed with remarkable assiduity, even
when the evacuation of Moscow in 1941 prevented him
from returning to the city until 1944. From the first days
of the war, his attention was centred on a very large-scale
operatic project: an opera based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel
War and Peace. He was fascinated by the parallels between
1812, when Russia crushed Napoleon’s invasion, and the
then-current situation. Those who heard the work were
struck both by its immensity of scale (13 scenes, more than
60 characters) and by its unique blend of epic narrative
with lyrical scenes depicting the personal destinies of the
major characters. His increasing predilection for national-
epical imagery is manifested in the heroic majesty of the
Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major (1944) and in the music
(composed 1942–45) for Eisenstein’s two-part film Ivan the
Terrible (Part I, 1944; Part II, 1948). Living in the Caucasus,
in Central Asia, and in the Urals, the composer was