"muddled, nerve-racking" sounds that "turned music into cacophony". Eight of Prokofiev's works were banned from performance: The Year 1941, Ode to the End of the War, Festive Poem, Cantata for the Thirtieth Anniversary of October, Ballad of an Unknown Boy, the 1934 piano cycle Thoughts, and Piano Sonatas Nos. 6 and 8. Such was the perceived threat behind the banning of the works that even works that had avoided censure were no longer programmed. By August 1948, Prokofiev was in severe financial straits, his personal debt amounting to 180,000 rubles. On 22 November 1947, Prokofiev filed a petition in court to begin divorce proceedings against his estranged wife. Five days later the court ruled that the marriage had no legal basis since it had taken place in Germany, and had not been registered with Soviet officials, thus making it null and void. After a second judge upheld the verdict, he and his partner Mira wed on 13 January 1948. On 20 February 1948, Prokofiev's first wife Lina was arrested and charged with espionage for trying to send money to her mother in Spain. After nine months of interrogation, she was sentenced by a three-member Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR to 20 years of hard labor. She was released eight years later on 30 June 1956 and in 1974 left the Soviet Union. Prokofiev's latest opera projects, among them his desperate attempt to appease the cultural authorities, The Story of a Real Man, were quickly cancelled by the Kirov Theatre. The snub, in combination with his declining health, caused Prokofiev to progressively withdraw from public life and from various activities, even chess, and increasingly devote himself to his own work. After he had a stroke on July 7, 1949, his doctors ordered him to limit his composing to an hour a day. In spring 1949, Prokofiev wrote his Cello Sonata in C, Op. 119, for the 22-year-old Mstislav Rostropovich, who gave the first performance in 1950, with Sviatoslav Richter. For Rostropovich, Prokofiev also extensively recomposed his Cello Concerto, transforming it into a Symphony-Concerto, a landmark in the cello and orchestra repertory today. The last public performance he attended, on 11 October 1952, was the première of the Seventh Symphony, his last completed work. The symphony was written for the Children's Radio Division. Death Prokofiev died at age 61 on 5 March 1953, the same day as Joseph