SERGEI PROKOFIEV

(1891 – 1953)

THE COMPLETE PIANO SONATAS

ATEŞ ORGA

“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 ~

“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.

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 - “Prokofiev's used to travelling, so let him live out of his suitcase while he's here”
wasn't good enough he reminded Bulganin (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). Compromising his style and
vocabularly, moderating his manner, and producing such recognised masterworks of “new clarity”
as Alexander Nevsky, War and Peace, Romeo and Juliet and the wartime Fifth Symphony, was
insufficient to save him in 1948 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, incoporated
or revised earlier juvenilia. Nos 6-8 comprise the so-called War trilogy – World War II from a
Western Front perspective (1939-45), the Great Patriotic War from a Soviet/Eastern Front one
(1941-45): the sobriquet is not used in Russia. A 44-bar fragment of a Tenth survives (1952, Op
137), but nothing for a projected Eleventh (1953, Op 138).

Dinara Klinton: “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 gains 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” (Bruno Monsaingeon, Notebooks and Conversations, 1998/2001). 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 (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,
marked in “heavy” pedalling, subsequently omitted from Jurgenson's edition two years later. (Pedal
indications in the sonatas are typically 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 (1912), premiered by the composer, 23 January/5 February 1914,

Small Hall, Moscow Conservatoire. Dedicated to Maximilian Schmidthof, a pianist friend of
Prokofiev's (responsible for having introduced him to Schonpenhauer, favouritve of the Russian
intelligentsia) who'd committed suicide in a 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
– but faced 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) in the style of a fancifully “orchestrated” skazka or fairy tale, a shadowy multitude of
voices in ritual communion; and a whirling finale that's a brilliant arena 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 the northern counties, 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 (1907/1917) A re-working of earlier sonata
ideas and sketches, premiered by the composer during a week-long fest of his works in Petrograd,
15 April 1918. Dedicated to the dilettante poet Boris Verin (Bashkirov), a friend from the early St
Petersburg days with whom Prokofiev would share Schopenhauer readings. The shortest of
Prokofiev's piano sonatas, it follows the single-movement format of the First, subdivided into eight
variously inter-related main sections: Allegro tempestoso (triplet motion) – Moderato (duplet) -
Allegro tempestoso - Moderato - Più lento - Più animato - Allegro I - Poco più mosso. 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, it was to be he, in the opening of the Third Sonata (printed in
in Moscow in 1918), who provided 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” (Autobiography, edit M G
Kozlova, 1973/1979). À la Schumann, the subsidiary theme of the Moderato is based on the name
of a girl (one of many) Prokofiev used to “watch” at the Conservatoire – Eshe (German: Esche
[“ash tree”], French: Eche). In German nomenclature the notes E-Eb-C-B-E – Piece on the Theme
of “Esche” in C minor (1907, revised 1910). In French a four-note cryptogram, E-C-B-E –
followed in the sonata.

Sonata No 4 in C minor Op 29, From Old Notebooks (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, 2nd version Op 135 (1923/1952-53). Composed in Ettal near

Oberammergau, premiered by the composer, 9 March 1924, Paris. The only one of the piano
sonatas 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 Pierre Souvtchinsky, a wealthy
Russian emigré and publisher based in Paris whose friendships and passions spanned Myaskovsky
and Stravinsky (he ghosted La poétique musicale) 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” 2 nd version, Op
135, played here - premiered 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 (2008), 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 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
proved the catalyst. Recognised but indifferently explored, Beethoven's influence on the Sixth,
Seventh and Eighth Sonatas has been examined by Gary O'Shea (“Prokofiev's Early Solo Piano
Music: Context, Influences, Forms, Performance”, doctoral thesis, University of Sheffield, July
2013). Relevantly, he particularises how the “Fate” motif of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (either
straight or in triplet guise, both of long classical precedent) is “a recurring motif throughout all three
sonatas”, portraying “fate and melancholy” - most notably in the Seventh. The Appassionata also
has a rôle.

Sonata No 6 in A major, Op 82 (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 (Simon Morrison, 2009). 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. Silenced and tortured,
Meyerhold himself 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.

Long-standing friend and advocate, 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”. Shostakovich, too,
thought it “magnificent”. It's an epic sculpture, the outer movements motto bound, its contrasts and
tempo changes conceived with a larger organic canvas in mind, reminding us repeatedly of the
place it commands in the canon 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 built 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 (1936[1939]-42, Tbilisi), premiered by Richter, 18 January 1943,

Moscow, 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
September/October 1945), 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). 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” (The Record Guide, 1951).

In his biography of Prokofiev (2008) Daniel Jaffé links the doloroso melody of the tritonally
removed E major second movement with “Wehnut” (Sadness), the ninth of Schumann's Liederkreis
songs, Op 39 – in so far as both share the same key, 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". Like Shostakovich, Prokofiev had the capacity to encode and sub-text,
forging notes mightier than his masters. Notably without tempo indication, the 7/8 finale, a cauldron
of molten iron, drives relentlessly forwards, the accented second note of the bass subject teasing
between (tensioned, rising, written) C-sharp and (relaxed, falling, unwritten) D-flat, the precise
degree of inflexion or intention left to the artist (DK “feels” it as a D-flat). 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 (1936/39[1943]-44), premiered by 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-Prokieva. “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”.
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.”

“Prokofiev played … with extraordinary sureness of wrist, a marvelous 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 even though he played level with the keyboard he was capable of
producing sonority of fantastic strength and intensity, and in addition, the tempo never, never varied.”
~ Francis Poulenc ~

No 9 in C major, Op 103 (c 1945-47, published 1955, Atovmyan's edition not always in agreement
with the autograph), 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 sonatas 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.” “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” (Mira M-P's diary, 29
September 1947). 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 (andante/allegro
sostenuto) 'slow' movement; rondo finale glimpsing childhood, artfully tempered “young pioneer”
optimism, Andantino interpolation, and Beethoven Op 111 Arietta allusion (re-dressing 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 he 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.”

© Ateş Orga 2021

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