Written for the Tippet Rise Art Center. Not to be reprinted without permission.
Sergei Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata is the middle entry of his three war sonatas. The earliest ideas for the sonata date to 1939, and he completed it in 1942. It was written at the height of the Second World War, when its outcome was far from certain, but it was premiered in Moscow by Sviatoslav Richter on January 18, 1943, just as the Russian Army came within reach of victory at the Battle of Stalingrad.
It is a ferocious piece: one of Prokofiev’s harshest and most dissonant, mostly untempered by whimsy or subversive wit. It is also one of his most visceral and straightforward in meaning: the piece is exactly what it sounds like.
Richter had just four days to learn and memorize the sonata, which he quickly did while staying in the Moscow apartment of Heinrich Neuhaus, another pianist. Neuhaus’s wife was sick at home with a fever as Richter practiced. “The piano was in her bedroom,” Richter recalled. “The poor woman had to submit to the onslaughts of the final movement for three or more hours at an end.” Imagine the sounds of the raucous sonata shaking a Moscow apartment building in midwinter of 1943. It was hailed as a triumph at its premiere in Moscow’s Hall of the House of Trade Unions, with Prokofiev in the audience. It won him his first of six Stalin Prizes.
The sonata unfolds in three movements. The first, Allegro inquieto (restless), starts with jagged lines, mostly in just two voices, punctuated by crunching, martial chords. Eventually a lyrical theme intercedes, but is subdued by the first idea. The lyrical theme returns once more, but is again subdued before the movement ends.
The second, Andante caloroso (warmly), offers a reassur- ing alto melody, shadowed in the bass. The middle section grows with active lines and incessant, bell-like chords— punishing in volume, ominous in rhythm, even as the harmonies are sweet. The opening melody returns as an ending refrain.
The finale, Precipitato (hurried), is brief, with jazzy syncopations popping out of frantic textures. The movement builds to cacophony, before a final run arrives at pure and decisive B-flat.
Richter offered his own impression of the work:
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 pro- test 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.
