Sviatoslav Richter recalled the first time he set eyes on Sergei Prokofiev. "One sunny day," said the great pianist, "I was walking along Arbat Street [in Moscow\] and caught sight of an unusual man.  The Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev left some of a turbulent century's most enigmatic music, writes Michael Dervan

He had a defiant air about him and passed by me like an apparition. He was wearing bright yellow shoes and a checked suit with an orange-red tie. I could not help turning round to look at him - it was Prokofiev."

Prokofiev, whose symphonies are to be performed chronologically by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra from Friday, had done what for many people would have been unthinkable. After many years living in the US and Europe he had chosen in 1936 to return to the Soviet Union and settle once again in his native Moscow. He needed, he said, to see the "real winter" again and hear the sound of Russian in his ears.

The more conservative listeners of the early 20th century hadn't much liked his music. His mission, suggested a critic in 1918, "would seem to be to make two dissonances grow where only one grew before". At the 1921 premiere of the commedia dell'arte opera The Love For Three Oranges, the critic of the Chicago Tribune ironically reported "the beginnings of two tunes" but otherwise thought the 30-year-old composer "might well have loaded up a shotgun with several thousand notes of varying lengths and discharged them against the side of a blank wall".

The verdict of the third edition of Grove's Dictionary Of Music and Musicians, published in 1927, effectively put an official seal on the view of Prokofiev as a chilly machinist. "As a composer, Prokofiev does not court popular appreciation. By its deliberate avoidance of all romantic and emotional factors, his music is calculated never to appeal to the hearer's feelings; it is designed to please solely as a kind of decorative pattern and to avoid conveying extra-musical ideas of any kind . . . . Prokofiev might well be described as a cubist in music."

This chilling verdict was issued a full 10 years after the premiere of his tuneful First Symphony, the Classical, and 10 years further away again from the premiere of the piano piece we now know as Suggestion Diabolique. The 17-year-old composer played the piece in his debut at the Evenings Of Contemporary Music in St Petersburg in December 1908, when the dominant response to his "extravagant combinations of sound" was one of enthusiastic excitement.

In his autobiography the composer divides his early work into a number of "lines". He inherited the "classical", he says, from hearing his mother playing Beethoven sonatas. The "modern" stems from a quest for his own harmonic language and his search for a means of expressing powerful emotions. The "toccata or 'motor' line" he traces to the impression that Schumann's Toccata made on him. And there's also the "lyrical", which, with regret, he saw as the least remarked on of his musical gifts.

He also objected to the word grotesque being used about his music. "I would prefer," he wrote, "my music to be described as 'scherzo-ish' in quality, or else by three words describing various degrees of the scherzo - whimsicality, laughter, mockery."

The sophisticated neoclassicism of Prokofiev's First Symphony could hardly be further removed from the violent, primitive angularity of his Second, premiered in Paris in June 1925. The change, he said, "was the effect of the Parisian atmosphere, where complex patterns and dissonances were the accepted thing, and which fostered my predilection for complex thinking".

His own verdict on the work was actually negative, however. "It was too densely woven in texture," he concluded, "too heavily laden with contrapuntal lines changing to figuration to be successful, and although one critic did comment admiringly on the septuple counterpoint, my friends preserved an embarrassed silence."

The Third Symphony of 1928 was in the composer's view "one of my best compositions". The work's reputation has been dogged by the fact that much of its material was borrowed from the opera The Fiery Angel, which Prokofiev had, unusually, begun without a commission and completed in anticipation of performances in Berlin under Bruno Walter.

But the Berlin production never materialised, and the opera, with its highly charged tale of a woman obsessed with - and lusting after - her protective angel, wasn't seen on stage until after the composer's death.

The opera contains some of Prokofiev's finest ideas, and it's easy to see why he wanted to find an alternative public outlet for them when the promised staging failed to materialise.

The Fourth Symphony, written for the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1930, again took its material from music originally intended for the theatre, this time from The Prodigal Son, which had been premiered by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in 1929.

Prokofiev was heavily criticised for relying for the second time on so much borrowed material. The work, he admitted candidly, "was not a success", but he always retained a special affection "for its restrained tone and the wealth of material it contains". And, although he complained about the reception accorded this symphony - "Apparently, the public likes to be slapped in the face; when a composer probes more deeply, then they lose sight of where he is going" - he revised the work in 1947 and had plans also to revise the Second Symphony, although he didn't live to carry out this project.

It was to be a full 14 years before Prokofiev would approach the challenge of writing a symphony again. His style in the 1930s underwent a radical transformation. He simplified his style and penned some of his most tuneful pieces: the music for the film Lieutenant Kije, Romeo And Juliet (a work that spawned two orchestral suites and one for piano before making it onto the stage) and Peter And The Wolf.

The composer couldn't have had many illusions about the country he chose to live in from 1936. He had kept a detailed diary during a visit in 1927 and knew enough to make sure these personal observations never made their way back to the Soviet Union during his lifetime. The diary was discovered among his wife's papers after her death, in 1989, and subsequently published as Soviet Diary 1927.

And then there was the fact that, early in 1936, Shostakovich found himself in public disgrace through the official condemnation of his opera Lady Macbeth Of Mtsensk, a clear indication of the interest the Soviet authorities took in matters of artistic expression. One commentator, Dorothea Redepenning, has gone so far as to suggest that Shostakovich's discomfiture may have been part of the attraction for Prokofiev, if you view it as clearing the way for him to lead the field among Soviet composers.

Musically, Prokofiev did prosper after his return. He wrote much of his greatest music - the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies and the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Piano Sonatas - in the shadow of the second World War.

The Fifth Symphony, which he called "a symphony on the greatness of the human soul", was delayed at its premiere by the sound of artillery celebrating the crossing of the Vistula by the Red Army on its march into Nazi Germany. The work has an epic quality that has played no small part in its popularity; it has little of the austerity of the Sixth, completed in 1947 and about which the composer said: "Now we are rejoicing in our great victory, but each of us has wounds which cannot be healed. One has lost those dear to him, another has lost his health. This must not be forgotten."

The symphony was initially received with enthusiasm, but disaster was to follow. Prokofiev found himself among the composers censured for "formalistic distortions and anti-democratic tendencies" in 1948 and, along with Shostakovich and other colleagues, he faced proscription, with humiliating self-abasement as the only apparent way forward.

Prokofiev was at this time separated from his family. In 1939 he had started an affair with a younger woman, Mira Mendelson, for whom in 1941 he left his Spanish-born wife, Lina, and their children. In 1948 Lina was arrested, accused of espionage and sentenced to 20 years' hard labour. The composer's health was also failing, and on doctor's orders he was restricted to composing for no more than an hour a day.

But compose he did, completing one final symphony in 1952, a commission from the children's division of Russian state radio for "a simple symphony for young listeners". The spareness and placid nature of most of the writing has baffled many listeners - and conductors, too. The great lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky offered one of the most favourable assessments of the work as "stylistically summarising the entire course of his musical aesthetics, declaratively lucid, ironically optimistic, tonally firm despite constant modulatory translocations, animated by irresistible rhythms and humanised by pervasive lyric sentiment".

Prokofiev had ended his symphonic career as he started, with a work of deceptive simplicity.

His death passed almost unnoticed. In one of the strangest of coincidences he died an hour before Stalin on March 5th, 1953. His funeral was a very small affair. There were friends who simply didn't know he had died, others who did but who couldn't attend because they were caught up in the official mourning for Stalin. David Oistrakh played two movements from the composer's F minor Violin Sonata, one of his darkest and most other-worldly creations. It was an appropriately un-Soviet choice of music for the most cosmopolitan of Soviet composers.

• The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra's subsequent performances are on October 10th and 31st, November 14th and January 9th, 16th and 30th