On March 5, 1953, a small group carried a coffin through the back alleys of Moscow because the main roads were closed for Joseph Stalin’s funeral. Sergei Prokofiev had died the same day, and only about 30 people attended his service. This episode traces the life that led to that moment: a boy composing at five in the Lydian mode because he refused to touch the black keys, a chess fanatic by seven, an opera composer by nine, and a St. Petersburg Conservatory student who kept charts of his older classmates’ mistakes. His dissonant Second Piano Concerto drew complaints that it sounded like screeching cats.

After the 1917 revolution, Prokofiev secured permission from Anatoly Lunacharsky to leave, arguing they were both revolutionaries. We follow his years of financial struggle in America and Paris, his marriage to the singer Lina, his adoption of Christian Science, Diaghilev’s demands that his ballets sound more Russian, and a near fistfight with Stravinsky. The Depression and homesickness drove him back to the Soviet Union in 1936, where he wrote Peter and the Wolf, Romeo and Juliet, and Alexander Nevsky, then ran into censorship, the 1948 Zhdanov decree against formalism, and the arrest of Lina for sending money to her mother in Spain.

• Why the state rejected his original happy ending for Romeo and Juliet
• The Schumann song hidden inside the prize-winning Seventh Piano Sonata
• How the courts voided his first marriage just before Lina’s 20-year sentence
• The Symphony-Concerto written for a young Mstislav Rostropovich in his final years
• A 115-page tribute to Stalin and a brief mention of Prokofiev on page 116