Peter and the Wolf

Peter and the Wolf, children’s theatre composition for orchestra and narrator by Sergey Prokofiev. The work, which tells a Russian folk tale, premiered May 2, 1936, in Moscow. Since that time it has introduced many young listeners to classical music and helped train them to recognize the distinct sounds produced by various instruments of the orchestra.

Prokofiev was commissioned by the Moscow Children’s Theatre to compose a piece for children’s theatre. He chose as his subject the story of a boy and his animal friends capturing a wolf. In the story’s telling Prokofiev assigned each character a musical instrument or class of instruments. The bird was identified with a flute, the cat with a clarinet, the duck with an oboe, Peter’s grandfather with a bassoon, the wolf with horns, and the hunters with percussion. Peter himself was given the entire string section and a jaunty lighthearted melody. So as not to distract from the music, Prokofiev jettisoned the original set of rhyming verses and wrote a simple prose narrative for the story. The work’s popularity grew quickly, especially after it was released as a sound recording, adapted for ballet, and made into an animated film (Peter and the Wolf, 1946) by Walt Disney.