Sergei Prokofiev
During the war Prokofiev composed a lot of his best music.  He wrote his last piano sonatas as well as working on his operas Betrothal in a Monestary after Sherican, and War and Peace (based on the novel by Tolstoy) and writing his film music for both Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible and composing his Fifth Symphony.  The first performance of this symphony, given on 13 January 1945, was the last time he conducted in public.  He spent the rest of his life in a house in the country to the west of Moscow, although during his last winters he lived in Moscow close to his doctors.  Even in these last years he was not to find peace.  Stalin’s rule of terror had serious effects on all Soviet artists.  In 1948 a committee of the Communist Party spoke out against several Soviet composers including Prokofiev.  They said that his music was “formalist” and “alien” to the Soviet people.  His opera “War and Peace” was not allowed to be performed because it was neither lyrical nor patriotic enough.  The works he wrote in his last years were mostly ones which the politicians officially approved.  His last great work of this period is the Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra which used a lot of music from the unsuccessful Cello Sonata, and greatly revised with the help of the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich.