‘The tradition of our pianism has been created first and foremost by the greatest Russian composer-performers.

It suffices to recall such names as Balakirev, Liadov, Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Medtner, Prokofiev, Shostakovich - and we see clearly that the main stylistic accomplishments pass from generation to generation,

from one great composer-pianist to another.’

~ Samuil Feinberg ~1

1890-1962

‘5 March 1953. Sergei Prokofiev, Russian composer whose music, capable of a great variety of expression – mercurial, martial, jovial, saturnine – has brought new vigour to 20th century composition, whose musical language is marked by elastic tonality, plastic rhythmology, tensile polyphony and ductile harmony, within the ambience of euphonious dissonance, without losing its profound Russian quality, dies of a cerebral haemorrhage at 9 o'clock in the evening, in his home in Moscow, at the age of sixty-one, [fifty minutes] before Stalin, whose reactionary views on music contributed to Prokofiev's harassment.’ Nicolas Slonimsky, master of the precision epitaph.2

Born in 1891 (15/27 April), a precocious child, ‘disagreeable’ as an infant, Prokofiev had lessons from Glière before going to the St Petersburg Conservatoire in 1904, aged thirteen, to study composition and other subjects with Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov and Nikolai Tcherepnin (dedicatee of the First Piano Concerto); and piano with Anna Esipova (among Leschetizky's most brilliant students, later the second of his four wives) - who thought him ‘talented, but rather crude’. Graduating ten years later, he visited London where he met Diaghilev; left revolutionary Russia for America in May 1918 (via Japan); and made Paris his base in 1922, becoming a focal point of the city's cultural ferment. Following four years of toing and froing – assuming ‘Prokofiev's used to travelling, so let him live out of his suitcase while he's here’ wasn't good enough he reminded Bulganin, Chairman of the Moscow Soviet (11 November 1935) - lured by Soviet deceipt and promises, nostalgic for his homeland, he re-allocated to Moscow in the spring of 1936, at a time when Stalin's ‘social realism’ reforms were actively opposing, censoring, and obliterating the very values with which he had been so long identified. ‘My father,’ maintained his eldest son Sviatoslav Prokofiev, was ‘a little naive when he decided to return, above all because he didn't understand what was happening’ (London Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2003).3 Compromising his style and vocabularly, moderating his manner, and producing such recognised masterworks of ‘new clarity’ as the cantata Alexander Nevsky, the opera War and Peace, the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the wartime Fifth Symphony, was insufficient to save him in Zhdanov’s 1948 cultural purges from being accused (along with Shostakovich, Khachaturian, Shebalin, Miaskovsky, Feinberg and others) of bourgeois capitalist ‘formalism’ - what the Soviets called the ‘total negation of musical art’, that ‘cult of atonality, dissonance, and disharmony … [of] confused neo-pathological combinations which transform music into a cacophony, into a chaotic conglomeration of sounds’. Prokofiev's last years were a quiet coda of apologia and ill health. Not until the cultural honeymoon of the Khruschev era, in a resolution from the Central Committee of the Party (28 May 1958), was he officially rehabilitated.

The rigours of symphony and sonata – holistically, atomistically - attracted Prokofiev from childhood, many of his early sketches being usefully mined for later works. Preceded by at least seven piano or duo sonatas (1903-09), the nine making up the piano canon proper date from between 1907 and 1947. Nos 1, 3 and 4, the latter two subtitled From Old Notebooks, incoporate or revise earlier juvenilia. Nos 6-8 comprise the so-called War trilogy – World War II from a Western perspective (1939-45), the Great Patriotic War from a Soviet/Eastern one (1941-45): the sobriquet is not used in Russia. ‘Difficult, dissonant, and graphic [music], a modernist updating of Ludwig van Beethoven’s piano sonatas. They neither borrow from folklore nor articulate the dialectical principles that might have allowed them to be interpreted as examples of Socialist Realism.’4 A 44-bar E minor fragment of a Tenth survives (1952/53, Op 137, Allegro moderato), but nothing for a projected Eleventh (1953, Op 138). Both were to have been re-workings of the Sonatinas Op 54 (1931-32).

Dinara Klinton:5 ‘Writing sonatas and symphonies was a part of the culture, the expectation, in Russian life – and especially for someone like Prokofiev, a large-scale thinker. It's difficult to compose one, but it's very easy to express oneself in these forms. They offer a lot of choice and possibilities.’

Like the symphony and string quartet, the piano sonata, historically, was a late flowering in Russian musical life, more 20th century based than 19th. Not until Scriabin (ten, 1892-1913) did it become a recurrent genre – to be take up subsequently by Medtner (fourteen, 1901-37), Myaskovsky (nine, 1907-49, contemporaneous with Prokofiev's), Anatoly Aleksandrov (fourteen, 1914-71), Roslavets (six, largely lost or incomplete, 1914-18), and Feinberg (twelve, 1915-62). Even so, broadly referenced, examples on either side of the fin de siècle watershed were still never to be that multiplicious. Balakirev and Tchaikovsky published just one each, Glazunov, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich only two.

For Prokofiev's generation, Aleksandr Alexeev has suggested (1974), the piano sonata as a concept ‘possessed vast potential possibilities for the musical embodiment of subjects that were exciting composers’ imagination, particularly the disparity of life and characteristic tensions of the time”. ‘In the field of instrumental or symphonic music,’ Prokofiev told Olin Downes of the New York Times, 2 February 1930, ‘I want nothing better, nothing more flexible or complete than the sonata form, which contains everything necessary for my structural purpose’. Between these two statements one gets something of the flavour and dynamism of the sonatas – music driven predominantly by abstract notions and chess-like moves yet with a programmatic underlay should we wish to imply, find, or imagine one. As to the latter, Prokoviev left no obvious clues but was clearly not averse to episodes or movements of balletic/operatic/pictorial/expressive allusion. Ghosts and realities of fairy tale and folk song are never far away.

DK: ‘When a composer focuses extensively on a particular genre– sonata, symphony, quartet – what they write can often become like a chronicle of their life. What’s special for me about Prokofiev’s piano sonatas is that they not only reflect the spectrum of his compositional skill and imagination, they also encapsulate the breadth of his thought, style and development across a time span of forty years. They mirror, very well, the era in which they were written. It's interesting how in the later examples, albeit on a different scale and with different means, he can so freely use ideas, notions, from earlier stages in his life. To say he was a man held by his ideas is not to claim he didn't develop as a composer or advance his style. On the contrary. But the bottom line was that he was always a rebel, a little boy with a lot of sarcasm and self-deprecation, disciplined, with a bright, quick mind. He knew from the outset exactly what he wanted to be and how to express himself. This is not to devalue his last years but to admire his first.’

These works – ‘stripped clear of artifical device, bleak and powerful, unpadded’ (Harold C Schonberg) - scale the heights of 20th century pianistic philosophy. Uncompromisingly, they come from nowhere, springing, like Athena, fully armed from the head of their progenitor, ready to do battle. Chronologically, Scriabin's may have preceded them but, as Heinrich Neuhaus reminds us bluntly, drawing a parallel with Shostakovich, ‘Prokofiev [does not] like (to put it mildly) Scriabin’. Within their pages we meet with facets as much to do with the character as the biography of the man. He was, recollected Sviatoslav Richter, dedicatee of the Ninth, ‘an interesting person, but … dangerous. He was capable [literally] of hurling you against a wall … He was violent … he intimidated me … he was always summed up by his music: encounters with his works are encounters with Prokofiev himself … As long as Prokofiev was alive, you could always expect a miracle, as if in the presence of a conjurer who, with a wave of his magic wand, could produce the most fabulous riches’.6 In the salty estimation of the Stavenhagen-trained Melbourne pianist/Juilliard pedagogue, Ernest Hutcheson (1948), Prokofiev could write a Toccata in 1912 - correspondingly the finale of the Seventh Sonata thirty years later - ‘meant for athletic performers who enjoy endurance tests using bicep resources’; but he equally possessed the ability to temper his style ‘with many moments of true beauty and tenderness’. From the volcanic to the vulnerable, the pulverisingly percussive to the poetic.

DK: ‘Prokofiev's music is extremely visual. It's physically communicative. Sometimes, playing it, I feel like a ballet dancer sensing the music through motion and vibration. In later life Prokofiev took this still further. Not only can we visualise objects, we can also feel the material that they’re made of, the structure, the consistency of the fabric. His distinctively “orchestrated” writing for the instrument creates a particular challenge for a performer, different weightings, voicings and colours demanding different soundscapes.’

‘Without being presumptious, I may say that I never follow anyone else’s ideas.

In everything I write, I follow two major principles: clarity and brevity,

avoiding everything superfluous in the expression of my ideas.’

~ Prokofiev ~

Sonata No 1 in F minor Op 1

in one movement

Allegro

1907 rev 1909. Premiered by the composer, 21 February/6 March 1910, Moscow. Dedicated to Vassily Morolyov, a local veterinary surgeon (and Scriabin admirer) from Sontsovka, Prokofiev's birthplace (Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine). Reworking the opening allegro of an earlier student Grande Sonata (summer 1906), its single-movement design (exposition-development-reprise), in much the same spirit as the first sonatas of Scriabin and Medtner but at a much concentrated level, juggles happily with recurrent themes and familiar classico-romantic key relationships. Prokoviev came to think of it as ‘a naïve and simple little piece, [marking] the end of my early period’. While revising it, working simultaneously on Scriabin's (similarly single-movement) Fifth Sonata, he played it for Esipova (November 1909), who, he noted in his diary, added ‘heavy’ pedalling, omitted subsequently from Jurgenson's edition two years later. (Pedal indications in the sonatas are generally rare.)

DK: ‘Over-pedalling doesn't flatter Prokofiev's style of writing. His “orchestrated” pianism, linearity and layered polyphony require other means of realisation. The First Sonata shows influences – Scriabin, Rachmaninov, some Brahms. But in manner and rhythms, its variegated articulations, you can hear a young rebel at work. He experiments, he's trying to find the right tools to express his intentions.’

Sonata No 2 in D minor Op 14

I Allegro, ma non troppo-Più mosso-Tempo primo-Più mosso-Tempo primo

II Scherzo: Allegro marcato

III Andante-Adagio

IV Vivace-Moderato-Vivace

1912. Premiered by the composer, 23 January/5 February 1914, Small Hall, Moscow Conservatoire. Dedicated to Maximilian Schmidthof,7 a pianist and Prokofiev's best friend, responsible for having introduced him to Schonpenhauer (favourite of the Russian intelligentsia), who'd committed suicide in a Finnish forest in April 1913, shortly after Prokofiev's birthday. ‘I have shot myself. Don't grieve overmuch. Just take it in your stride: it doesn't merit anything more than that … The reasons were not important.’ Crude thought the critics, a ‘true picture of the modern “football” generation.’ Worse was to come in New York (Aeolian Hall, 20 November 1918). ‘Russian chaos in music,’ Richard Aldrich's ‘herd of mammoths charging across an Asiatic plateau’ - much to the irritation of the composer who dismissed it all as ‘nonsense’. The young Richter took the work up in 1939 – playing it through to the nineties, ninety-five performances in all – albeit facing the learning process ‘with no particular pleasure. [It] ceased to be one of my favourite works’. On a significantly larger scale than the First, the Second is divided into four movements, with a motoric ABA staccato/marcato scherzo (A minor) placed second; the third (in distant G-sharp minor, tritonally removed) in the style of a fancifully ‘scored’ skazka or fairy tale, a shadowy multitude of voices in ritual communion; and a whirling finale that's a brilliant forum of high velocity articulation, full-throated thrust and coquettish glance. ‘Immersed in the dregs of Prokofiev's trans-modernism … there are many vital elements. He has imagination, an astounding rhythmic sense … a certain melodic gift’ (Musical America, 30 November 1918).

DK: ‘The idea of fairy tale was important to Prokofiev - in his sonatas and songs, his many children's pieces. But it wasn't his alone. It's very Russian. Think of Medtner. Go back to Mussorgsky, who can be very dark even when he is being childish … a source of Prokofiev's own darkness. [Recollecting his Conservatoire days, Prokofiev wrote that one opinion considered his efforts to be 'a compound of Reger, Mussorgsky and Grieg', 'the antithesis of Scriabin'; he programmed Pictures at an Exhibition in Chicago in 1922.] Then there's the cultural phenomenon of doting grandparents loving their grandchildren more than their own. Tales of an Old Grandmother [1918] - stories from a book, stories invented on the spur of the moment, stories not always good or comforting but scary. You get legends in northern countries, but fairy tales in Russia, they're part of the folklore, inspiring operas, ballets, poetry. Fairy tales open up endless opportunities and fanciful plots, they conjure images in the mind, triggering responses and associations in the listener, to be taken as far as a person will allow.’

Sonata No 3 in A minor Op 28 ~ From Old Notebooks

in one movement

Allegro tempestoso [12/8 triplet motion]-Moderato [4/4 duplet]-Allegro tempestoso-Moderato-

Più lento-Più animato-Allegro I-Poco più mosso

1907/1917. Premiered by the composer during a week-long fest of his works, 15 April 1918,8 Petrograd. A re-working of earlier sonata ideas and sketches, dedicated to the dilettante poet Boris Verin (Bashkirov), a friend from the early St Petersburg days with whom Prokofiev would share Schopenhauer readings, this is the shortest of Prokofiev's piano sonatas, following the single-movement format of the First, subdivided into eight variously inter-related main sections. We get pianistically dazzling pages that on paper are characteristically chiselled and lean, extremes of dynamic monochromatically contrasted, savagely so at times, the argument spread before us with pristine clarity, every articulation, each sonority, the placement of the hands calculated and exacting. Yet there's also a web of descriptions in the score addressing less definable parameters. Not, agreed, on the scale of a Scriabin, but present all the same, fused into a demandingly intricate subtext of expression, attitude and nuance. Tempestuous, dry, tranquil, simple, sweet, ferocious, precipitous, agitated, with effect, rising, elevated, like trumpets … Generalising loosely, Prokofiev, in his American-French-Soviet phases, had to contend with the Rachmaninov-Stravinsky-Shostakovich triarchy. Yet, Karl Fiorini reminds us,9 it was to be he destined, in the opening of the Third Sonata (published in Moscow in 1918), to provide a model of sorts for the uncaged opening of Shostakovich's First a few years later (1926).

‘By the time I composed [the original 'dryer … more impetuous' 1907] “Sonata No 3” I had mastered the form, and I even thought up some digressions to give it variety. In the recapitulation I employ for the first time a device I always used later when writing in sonata form: the restatement is set forth somewhat differently from the first statement and is shorter’.10 À la Schumann, the subsidiary theme of the Moderato is based on the surname of a Conservatoire girl, Sofia Eshe, whom Prokofiev used to ‘watch’ – according to his Diary11 one of the many comprising his ‘menagerie’. In German transliteration Esche [‘ash tree’]; in French Eche. In German nomenclature the notes E-E♭-C-B-E: Piece on the Theme of ‘Esche’ in C minor (1907 lost, revised spring 1910). In French a four-note cryptogram, E-C-B-E: followed in the sonata.12

Sonata No 4 in C minor Op 29 ~ From Old Notebooks

I Allegro molto sostenuto

II Andante assai

III Allegro con brio, ma non leggiere

1908/1917. Premiered by the composer, 17 April 1918, Petrograd. ‘Prokofiev's bark is vastly worse than his bite and his futurism is of the nursery variety … he clings almost constantly to Schumann's coat-tails. [This sonata] might have been written by the composer of … Carnival during his soujourn in the asylum at Bonn” (Musical America, 22 February 1919). Contemporaneously with the Third, the Fourth recycles apprenticeship material - either orchestral (Prokofiev's Diary) or from a piano sonata (Autobiography). Like the Second [qv] – also the 1923 reconstruction of the G minor Piano Concerto - it was inscribed to the memory of Maximilian Schmidthof. Whether or not Schmidthof's death cast a veil over the work is arguable. Common opinion finds it to be the most introverted of the Prokofiev canon, and, certainly, many commentators like to suppose, if not find, sepulchral associations. Baroque reference and neo-classical pastiche (the Classical Symphony was first performed in Petrograd only four days later), rondo and mischief, the carved and the clamorous, may direction the music but ‘dark’ sources ground it – sources already bleak and hollow-eyed (to a remarkable degree in one so young) five years before Schmidthof's suicide. The central A minor Andante was intended originally for a planned Symphony in E minor (1908). An arrangement for piano trio, by Myaskovsky's former student Vladimir Kryukov, appeared in Moscow in 1930, followed four years later by an orchestration from Prokofiev himself – unheard until the young Rozhdestvensky introduced it posthumously in Leningrad, 13 February 1958.

DK: ‘The Third Sonata takes small ideas and sketches and develops them, skilfully. The Fourth does so similarly but in a more mature way. You only have to look at the second movement … A dark work … the first movement is like a deep forest, a bird of prey waiting to tear at the flesh. Prokofiev didn't need to have to have a picture, a programme in mind, just a fairy tale ...’

Sonata No 5 in C major Opp 38/135

1st version Op 38

I Allegro tranquillo-Più mosso

II Andantino

III Un poco allegretto-Poco meno mosso-Più mosso

2nd version Op 135

I Allegro tranquillo-Più mosso

II Andantino

III Un poco allegretto-Poco meno mosso-Più mosso-Meno mosso

1923/1952-53. Composed in Ettal near Oberammergau. Premiered by the composer, 9 March 1924, Paris. The only one of the canon to be written outside Russia. Never especially in vogue (Maria Grinberg played it, Richter didn't), the ‘Bavarian’ 1st version, Op 38, carried a dedication to Pyotr Suvchinsky (Pierre Souvtchinsky), a wealthy emigré writer, publisher and patron based in Paris whose friendships and passions ranged from Myaskovsky and Stravinsky (he ghosted the latter’s La poétique musicale, 1942) to Messiaen and Boulez. Prokofiev believed it ‘successful, the finale unquestionably so’, later noting, by way of explaining the work's low-gear demeanour, his ‘poor state of health’ at the time of its writing. The ‘Muscovite’ 2nd version, Op 135 – premiered posthumously by Aleksander Vedernikov in Alma-Ata (Almaty, Kazakhstan), 2 February 1954, edited by Levon Atovmyan the following year - principally revised the outer movements, with changes to the second subject and coda of the first, and to the development and coda of the finale (tightened and expanded respectively). The finale's ‘extensive’ modifications, Boris Berman maintains,14 add up to a ‘significantly clearer and less dissonant’ outcome, highlighting the music's neoclassicism. Not that the Fifth is entirely classically occupied. There are Gallic/Stravinskyian coruscations in the tranquillo first movement (Années folles, Les Six in the air). Fairy tales, fugitive visions and fog-shrouded dancers in the central Andantino. Leanness and linearity, the full-blooded and the disembodied, design and pulse as an audible, physical experience, precision touch, the piano turned into a company of many colours and articulations, hallmark events in a quietly Prokovian way.

DK: ‘The Fifth is like a classical symphony at the start, a sonata facile even. But then it evolves into something picturesque and transparent – fairy tales, contrasts ... a chamber sonata with a lot of colours, a piece for string quartet more than orchestra.’

‘Restless and stormlike ... tender and dreamlike’

~ Prokofiev ~

Nurtured by Myaskovsky (with whom he'd play duet arrangements of the symphonies), Prokofiev was a zealous admirer of Beethoven. A ‘permanent” presence in his life - musically, spiritually, biographically. According to his much younger Jewish partner, Mira Mendelson-Prokofieva, he spent the summer of 1939 reading and absorbing the 1903 French original of Romain Rolland's Beethoven the Creator, focusing especially on ‘the union of unrestrained passion and rigid logic’ underlying the Appassionata. He was looking to Beethoven for inspiration, she claimed, and Rolland's book provided the catalyst. Recognised but indifferently explored, Beethoven's influence on the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Sonatas has been examined by Gary O'Shea.15 Relevantly, he particularises how the so-called ‘Fate’ motif of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (either straight or in triplet guise, both manifestations of long classical precedent) is ‘a recurring motif throughout all three sonatas,’ portraying ‘fate and melancholy’ - most notably in the Seventh. Not surprisingly the Appassionata has a place at the table.

Sonata No 6 in A major Op 82

I Allegro moderato -Andante-Allegro moderato, come prima

II Allegretto-Meno mosso-Tempo I

III Tempo di valzer lentissimo-Poco più animato-Tempo I

IV Vivace-Andante-Vivace-Più tranquillo-[Tempo primo]

1931/35[1939]-40. Premiered by the composer, 8 April 1940, Union of Composers, Moscow Radio broadcast; Sviatoslav Richter, 26 November 1940, Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatoire, preceded by a run-through, 14 October, in a recital organised by Heinrich Neuhaus. Work on the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Sonatas, Mira says, commenced in 1939. Surviving sketchbooks however (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow) point earlier, to the mid-1930s for all three.16 The immediate genesis of the Sixth was bound up in darkness, death and dance. The theatre actor and director Vsevolod Meyerhold, a close friend and collaborator, was arrested on 20 June 1939, followed within a month by the stabbing of his outspoken actress wife Zinaida Reich, a murder assumed since to have been authorised by Beria, Stalin's recently appointed head of the NKVD. Meyerhold himself, tortured and silenced, was shot on 2 February 1940 - not that anyone was aware. For Prokoviev – who, in Schnittke's words, ‘knew the awful truth about the time in which he lived’ - life and survival went on. A new cantata, Zdravitsa, marking Stalin's sixtieth birthday, was premiered, 21 December 1939, a pièce d'occasion that 'in explicit contrast to the reality of mass incarceration, starvation, and execution, [offered] benign images of resplendent harvests and harmonious labour' (Morrison). Three weeks later, in Leningrad, 11 January 1940, Ulanova and Sergeyeva starred in a heavily revised version of Romeo and Juliet – putting it on the Soviet and world map.

Richter didn't forgive Prokofiev for his lack of principle (though not ‘genuine inspiration’) in writing Zdravitsa – but had handsome words in praise of the Sixth Sonata, playing it more than any other of the series ‘The remarkable clarity of style and structural perfection of the music amazed me […] The composer, with barbaric audacity, breaks with the ideals of the Romantics and introduces the shattering pulse of the 20th century […] This is a magnificent sonata, classically well-balanced despite the sharp corners’.17 Shostakovich, too, thought it ‘magnificent’. Epically sculpted, the outer movements motto bound, its contrasts and tempo changes conceived with a larger organic canvas in mind, it reminds us repeatedly of the place it commands in the arena of great Western masterworks. Veritably a near-symphony. The opening anapaestic cell, fortissimo, is distinctive – descending major thirds in the right hand, ascending augmented fourths in the left, both elements questioning key and mode. Staccato, strummed and oily, not too fast, an ‘orchestrated’ march-like scherzo comes second (the theme drawing on a sketch a minor-third higher jotted down in 1931-33), ‘ironic mockery’ pervading the landscape (Berman). The C major Valzer lentissimo third movement deals in long-breathed cantabile phrases, sonorities melting into each other, landscapes hewn out of glistening rivulets and sudden explosions of thunder.

DK: ‘The Sixth is absorbing at many levels – the scale of thought and organisation, the pianistic sonorities, the references (so definite) to ballet music. It's not merely a suite of movements, the whole edifice has to be seen, played and calculated globally. The second movement is a result of the first, the third a result of the second and so on. All correspond in their ideas, each, not necessarily motivically, are linked or set up/resolve expectations in some way ... choices of sound, colour and tempo trace the journey and help confirm oneness of conception.’

No 7 in B flat major Op 83

I Allegro inquieto-Andantino- Allegro inquieto, come prima-Andantino- Allegro inquieto

II Andante caloroso-Poco più animato-Più largamente-Un poco agitato-Tempo I

III Precipitato

1936[1939]-2 May 1942, completed in Tbilisi, Georgia (Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa invasion having hastened Prokofiev’s evacuation from Moscow in the summer of 1941). Premiered by Richter, 18 January 1943, Moscow, October Hall of the House of Trade Unions. Stalin Prize, second class. ‘Restless ... Warm ... Precipitate’. Championed from the start by Horowitz (the first to record it commercially, in 194518), Cherkassky, Gulda, Glenn Gould and William Kapell. ‘We are brutally plunged into the anxiously threatening atmosphere of a world that has lost its balance. Chaos and uncertainty reign. We see murderous forces ahead. But this does not mean that what we lived by before thereby ceases to exist. We continue to feel and love. Now the full range of human emotions bursts forth. Together with our fellow men and women, we raise a voice in protest and share the common grief. We sweep everything before us, borne along by the will of victory. In the tremendous struggle that this involves, we find the strength to affirm the irrepressible life-force’ (Richter).19 A Khruschev era Soviet perpective on the work has ‘one dramatic idea [permeating the whole]. It seems that contradictory tendencies in the musical style of Prokofiev are exposed and lead to a greater synthesis. Romantic exaggeration of feelings in this sonata sharply contradicts the ironclad logic of the classical sonata-allegro. This bipolarity is reflected in the combination of the essentially two-part, Scarlatti-like piano writing with harsh chords of complex harmonic nature, in the complex modal structure of the sonata-allegro, and, most importantly, in the character of musical images ... this sonata has none of [Prokofiev’s] beloved masques, nor has it the polypersonalia of early sonatas. The Seventh [...] has one protagonist and one purpose. In this sense, it is a monodrama’ (Givi Ordzhonikidze, 1962). Post-war Britain wasn't that enthralled: ‘a particularly dry example of a composer who could on occasion outdo most others in dryness ... [But] it should interest amateurs of pianistic writing [sic]. The toccata-like finale ... has the excitement of a film chase’.20

‘Anyone who hears [the Andante, tritonally distant], I imagine, starts thinking about their secrets’ (Mira). In his 2008 biography of the composer Daniel Jaffé links its doloroso melody with ‘Wehnut (Sadness), the ninth of Schumann's Liederkreis songs, Op 39 – in so far as both share the same key (E major), ¾ time signature, and melodic contour. 'I can sometimes sing as if I were glad, yet secretly tears well and so free my heart. Nightingales ... sing their song of longing from their dungeon's depth ... everyone delights, yet no one feels the pain, the deep sorrow in the song'. With Shostakovich, Prokofiev had the capacity to encode and sub-text, forging notes mightier than his masters. Notably without tempo or metronome indication, the 7/8 (2+3+2) ‘toccata’ finale, a cauldron of molten iron, drives relentlessly forwards, the accented second note of the bass subject teasing between (tensioned, rising, written) C# and (relaxed, falling, unwritten) D♭, the precise degree of inflexion or intention left to the executant.21 Beethoven-like, the spiralling climax of the music is down less to naked speed than targetted cellular gyration.

DK: ‘What is the finale? Is it a [lopsided] bolero? Is it Stravinskyian? Is it the kind of theme you might meet in one of Prokofiev's operas, for instance Lyubka's mad scene in Semyon Kotko [premiered in 1940]? Do you play it percussively, do you phrase it? What was Prokofiev saying?’

No 8 in B flat major Op 83

I Andante dolce-Poco più animato-Andante I-Allegro moderato-Andante-Andante dolce, come prima-Allegro

II Andante sognando

III Vivace-Allegro ben marcato-Pochissimo meno mosso-Andantino-Vivace, come prima

1936/39[1943]-44. Premiered by Emil Gilels, 30 December 1944, Grand Hall, Moscow Conservatoire, the composer having trialled it twice at the Composers' Union. Stalin Prize, first class. Dedicated to Mira Mendelson-Prokofieva. ‘The Eighth Sonata,’ Gilels wrote (7 January 1959), ‘is profound ... impressing one by the symphonic nature of its development, the tension, breadth and charm [emotion] of the lyrical passages ... [Studying it for the first time] I would play to [Prokoviev] from the rough draft of the work, and he would check certain passages, making corrections in the text. Sometimes he sat down at the piano himself and showed me, without playing in full, what he wanted.’ Gilels lived by notes and deeds, not words. Richter talked: ‘Of all Prokofiev’s sonatas, [the Eighth] is the richest. It has a complex inner life, profound and full of contrasts. At times it seems to grow numb, as if abandoning itself to the relentless march of time. If is sometimes inaccessible, this is because of its richness, like a tree that is heavy with fruit’.22 Planned on the back of a 1939 sketch for the Sixth Sonata, some of the material draws on a pair of unproduced manuscript theatre/film scores written for the 1937 Pushkin centenary – Eugene Onegin and Queen of Spades. The first subject of the opening Andante quotes ‘Liza's theme’ from Queen of Spades – Lizaveta, the pretty, blushing, exploited ward of the story. The second movement, sognando (dreaming), borrows the minuet from ‘Larina's Ball’ - Tatiana's name day celebration - in Eugene Onegin, the same key too, D-flat major. DK: ‘Prokofiev never let any of his ideas disappear’. Extremes away from the drawn-out (Fifth Symphony) expansiveness of the first movement (the only slow opener of the canon), the rondo finale's coda floods into another of Prokofiev's white water tumults, cascading the octaves without a safety net.

DK: ‘In the Eighth - a mature, very dark work, near static in places - I see a lot from Prokofiev's earlier sonatas. The runs in the second movement, for example, are very similar to those in the Andante of No 2. There are striking moments in the outer movements, too, reminding of the re-transition into the reprise of No 3. Like Bach, who could freely exchange or transcribe material between works, Prokofiev was comfortable taking motifs from one context and adapting them to another – the Onegin kernel of the second movement, for instance. It didn't present an aesthetic issue.’

‘Ah!... Prokofiev’s playing!!! It was marrrvellous! I worshiped [it]… he played on a level with the keyboard, 

with an extraordinary sureness of wrist, a marvellous staccato. He rarely attacked from on high; 

he wasn’t at all the sort of pianist who throws himself from the fifth floor to produce the sound. 

He had a nervous power like steel, so that on a level with the keys 

he was capable of producing sonority of fantastic strength and intensity, 

and in addition - I recommend this to all players of Prokofiev - the tempo never, never varied.’

~ Francis Poulenc ~23

No 9 in C major Op 103

I Allegretto-Poco meno mosso-Meno mosso

II Allegro strepitoso-Meno mosso-Andantino-Allegro I-Andante

III Andante tranquillo-Allegro sostenuto-Andante tranquillo, come prima-Allegro sostenuto-

Andante tranquillo, come prima-Allegro-Andante tranquillo

IV Allegro con brio, ma non troppo presto-Poco meno mosso-Tempo I-Poco meno mosso-Andantino-

Allegretto-Tempo I-Poco meno mosso

Circa 1945-47, published 1955, Atovmyan's edition occasionally disagreeing with the manuscript. Premiered by Richter, 21 April 1951, Composers' Union, anticipating Prokofiev's sixtieth birthday celebrations. Dedicated to Richter – who played this the least often of the Prokofiev cycle but had fond things to say in his notebooks. 27 April 1947. The composer's dacha at Nikolina Gora, twenty-five kilometers west of Moscow, haunt of Stalin's elite artists, writers and scientists. Pre-1948 purges. Prokofiev's birthday. ‘“I've got something interesting to show you,” he announced ... [producing] the sketches of his Ninth Sonata. “This will be your sonata. But don't think it's intended to create an effect. It's not that sort of work to raise the roof of the Grand Hall”. And at first glance it did indeed look a little simplistic. I was even a tiny bit disappointed ... a radiant ... even intimate work. In some ways it is a Sonata domestica. The more one hears it, the more one comes to love it and feel its magnetism. And the more perfect it seems. I love it very much.’23 Mira M-P's Diary, 29 September 1947: ‘This sonata is very different from the three preceding ones. It is calm and deep. When I told [Sergei] that my first impression was of it being both Russian and Beethoven-like, he answered that he himself found both of these qualities present in it’. The architecture of the music is pristine, the pianistic lining, articulation and hand-shapes of a lifetime clarified but familiar. Tranquil sonata-allegretto; scherzo placed second (Prokofiev's preferred late Beethoven/Chopinesque schemata); double-theme, double-tempo 'slow' movement, A-flat major at the core; rondo finale glimpsing childhood, artfully tempered ‘young pioneer’ optimism, Andantino interpolation, and Beethoven Op 111 Arietta allusion redressing the first movements's white-key opening (Op 111, too, was behind the structure of Prokofiev's mid-'20s Second Symphony). That outgoing endings anticipate incoming beginnings (in different keys) is an unusual cyclic angle. ‘The music remembers the future; it is a circular set of reminiscences about that which has yet to occur’ (Morrison).

DK: ‘Acceptance, kindness, purity ... acceptance of the universe Prokofiev had confronted in his early works. In the Ninth Sonata he lands among the flowers, in a good sense, while still being himself, still holding his point of view. A very ill man, he didn't need to challenge his relationship with the outside world any more. He'd come to terms.’

‘Ah!... Prokofiev’s playing!!! It was marrrvellous! I worshiped [it]… he played on a level with the keyboard, 

with an extraordinary sureness of wrist, a marvellous staccato. He rarely attacked from on high; 

he wasn’t at all the sort of pianist who throws himself from the fifth floor to produce the sound. 

He had a nervous power like steel, so that on a level with the keys 

he was capable of producing sonority of fantastic strength and intensity, 

and in addition - I recommend this to all players of Prokofiev - the tempo never, never varied.’

~ Francis Poulenc ~24

© Ateş Orga, Dinara Klinton

2020 revised 2024

1 ‘The Style’, translated Lenya Ryzhik, University of Chicago; Ateş Orga, ‘Samuil Feinberg In Sound and Thought’, MusicWeb International, 6 June 2006.

2 Music since 1900, 4th edition, New York 1971.

3 In a Paris interview with his friend Serge Moreux, Prokofiev maintained he was right to return to Russia. ‘He saw himself as escaping the threat of Nazi Germany in the West, but obviously did not yet recognise the menace in the East’. Simon Morrison, ‘Against Bare Bottoms’, London Review of Books, 21 March 2013.

4 Simon Morrison, preface to the Henle urtext, Munich 2024.

5 Interview, Cambridge Hilton, 3 March 2020.

6 Bruno Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations, Princeton 2001.

7 Memorialised in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto (premiered 23 August/5 September 1913, Pavlovsk, reconstructed 1923).

8 At Lenin’s instigation, the Russian calendar changed from Julian to Gregorian in 1918 - February 1st becoming February 14th.

9 In conversation with the author.

10 Autobiography, edit M G Kozlova, Moscow 1973/1979.

11 12/25 April 1910. Sergey Prokofiev Diaries, 1907-1914: Prodigious Youth, translated Anthony Phillips, Ithaca, London 2006.

12 Subsequent to the 2021 circulation of this essay, John Kruspe, University of Toronto, commented: ‘The depth of intimate feeling surrounding the second theme, plus the “hidden” content (hidden from the audience!), the overlapping nature of the octave separations, as if the two lovers are intertwined as each “E” makes its entrance, as well as at the end of the exposition, when the left-hand half-notes [minims] start their [tenor] climb up by step and the right-hand steps inexorably down, until both meet [aurally] in a unison C, the closest to a physical “kiss” at the piano one could imagine - all this makes me wonder [if] that girl wasn't simply 'one of the many' but his true love, his “distant beloved”, the one that got away’. Academia.edu, October 2023.

13 Facsimile, Prokofiev by Prokofiev, edited David H Appel, New York 1979.

14 Prokofiev's Piano Sonatas: A Guide for the Listener and the Performer, New Haven 2008.

15 ‘Prokofiev's Early Solo Piano Music: Context, Influences, Forms, Performance’, PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, July 2013. 

16 Simon Morrison, The people’s artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet years, New York, Oxford 2009.

17 Monsaingeon, op cit.

18 1st, 3rd movements 23 September; 2nd movement 6 October. Hunter College Auditorium, New York City.

19 Monsaingeon, op cit.

20 Edward Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor, The Record Guide, London 1951.

21 In a crowded field of recital encounters, Simon Trpčeski’s emphatically edged C# polarisation endures in the memory (World Piano Competition, London April 2000). Dinara Klinton takes, ‘feels’, the D♭ route.

22 Monsaingeon, op cit.

23 Ibid.

24 Francis Poulenc, Stéphane Audel, My Friends And Myself: Conversations [with] Francis Poulenc, translated James Harding, London 1978.