In Volume One of Anthony Phillips's masterly translation of Prokofiev's diaries, published in 2006, we met the “Prodigious Youth” who dazzled and appalled pre-revolutionary St Petersburg, travelling to Paris and London in 1914, and winning a commission from the influential Serge Diaghilev. (A third volume will take us to 1933, the year of Prokofiev's final return to the Soviet Union.)

When we encounter him in this second doorstopper, the composer is still a young man, approaching his 24th birthday and on the threshold of international celebrity. The onset of the first world war put paid to the Diaghilev ballet, Ala and Lolly, but Prokofiev resourcefully salvaged a symphonic work from it, the Scythian Suite, which was to confirm his reputation, at home and abroad, as one of the most progressive modernists of contemporary “classical” music, second only to Stravinsky as a provocateur of musical scandal.

The years covered by this second volume witnessed momentous events in Europe and particularly in Russia, but even during wartime, Prokofiev - evidently bitten by the travel bug after the success of his visits to the French and British capitals - is still undertaking hazardous journeys by land and sea, first to Italy, via the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Macedonia and Greece, and later to New York, by way of the Trans-Siberian express to Vladivostok, and from there by ship to Japan (where he is forced to spend two months after missing a passenger liner to Valparaiso), Honolulu and San Francisco.

In Italy he meets up again with Diaghilev, who commissions a new ballet, Chout (The Clown), and introduces him to Stravinsky in Milan. The two composers are at first wary, but then warm to each other, Stravinsky enthusing over Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto, Toccata and Second Piano Sonata, while the latter expresses himself enthralled by Stravinsky's recent Pribaoutki (Catchphrases or Riddles for male voice and eight instruments).

“Then,” Prokofiev writes in his diary entry for March 20-22, 1915, “in the presence of the Futurists , we played the piano-duet version of The Rite of Spring. At this point I had heard the work only once...and had a less than clear understanding of it...I was extremely nervous as I knew that it was incredibly difficult. Stravinsky, small and bloodless as he was, became engorged with blood while playing, sweated, sang or rather croaked, and laid down such a strong, good rhythm that we played Le Sacre to stunning effect. To my unexpected amazement I saw that Le Sacre is a magnificent work”.

Prokofiev's eyewitness accounts of encounters with his great musical contemporaries - and the accessible, conversational style captured in Phillips's translation - make these diaries compelling reading, and not only for musical historians. Prokofiev had personal contact with Debussy (in Volume One), Richard Strauss and, of course, Rachmaninov, the greatest pianist of his day, whose standoffish attitude to the younger Klaviertiger did not preclude a grudging admiration of his talent as a composer (although Prokofiev, poles apart from Rachmaninov as a composer, was never sure how sincere the older man was).

In a fascinating appendix, Phillips publishes an interview from 1918 with Motoo Otaguro, the Japanese music critic, in which Prokofiev says he listened to The Rite of Spring in the piano four-hands version, but admits that Stravinsky is, with reservations, one of his favourite contemporary Russian composers (alongside Scriabin and Myaskovsky). About Rachmaninov, he remains circumspect: “As for his compositions, some people like them, some do not, but everyone agrees about his supremacy as a pianist.” Both composers, fleeing the upheaval and chaos of the Bolshevik revolution in their native country, were destined for America: “My route is through Siberia and Japan, Rachmaninov's through Sweden and the northern countries. It will be interesting when we meet there and can shake one another by the hand.”

This is an example of Prokofiev's laconic sense of humour (one of the most notable features of his music), and he also makes one laugh out loud when he describes a programme played by Rachmaninov in New York that, he says, would have provoked a Russian audience to throw a dead cat at him. No less funny is his meeting with Stravinsky in Paris in November 1922, when the composers fell out spectacularly over the artistic path that young Prokofiev should take. “A noisy altercation ensued, accompanied by much bad-tempered shrieking...I screamed at him: ‘How can you possibly presume to show me the way when I am nine years younger than you, and therefore nine years ahead of you! My path forward is the true path and yours is of the past generation!'...we almost came to blows and were separated with difficulty.”

The pages of Prokofiev's diaries are filled with such dramatic confrontations, but they are also a travelogue, a confessional (in Tokyo he admits to having a dalliance with a prostitute, “but caution rather inhibited pleasure”) and a chronicle of events (the murder of Rasputin, the killings on the streets of Petrograd during the October revolution, the “disgusting” shooting of the tsar's children) that bring an era of historical and artistic importance vividly to life.

Sergey Prokofiev: Diaries 1915-1923 Behind the Mask, trans and annotated by Anthony Phillips
Faber £30 pp799

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