Peter Makes His Debut

On today's date in 1936, Prokofiev's delightful music fable for children, "Peter and the Wolf," was given its first performance in Moscow.

The woman who had approached composer Sergei Prokofiev with the idea for "Peter and the Wolf" was Natalia Saz, then the Director of the Moscow Children's Theater. Prokofiev had only recently returned to the Soviet Union after decades of living abroad. The idea was to interest children in the sound of the orchestra through a musical fable for narrator and orchestra, in which the winds would depict different animals, with the strings representing a little boy named Peter, who rescues almost all his animal friends from the jaws of a nasty wolf.

We are learning about this story in our Young Child 2 class.