Piano Sonata No. 7 in B‑Flat Major

Prokofiev began his Piano Sonata No. 7 in 1939, though he had to put it aside several times. In October 1939, following the arrest of his close colleague, the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, Moscow’s All-Union Radio Committee commissioned Prokofiev to compose a cantata celebrating Stalin’s 60th birthday. With a young family to support and facing the possibility of being arrested himself, Prokofiev had no option but to accept. The Seventh Sonata’s central movement opens with an allusion to Robert Schumann’s song “Wehmut” (which was unrecognised until almost 50 years after its composition), the text of which starts: “I can sometimes sing as if I were glad, yet secretly tears well and so free my heart.” The music builds to an impassioned climax, clangorous with the sound of bells which continue to toll as the music winds down, desolate, to a final recollection of the Schumann song. The framing outer movements are a nervy and sometimes almost atonal “Allegro inquieto” and a hair-raisingly relentless toccata finale (“Precipitato”) in 7/8. Prokofiev completed the work in 1942, after the further disruption caused by Germany’s invasion of Russia; Sviatoslav Richter gave the premiere early in 1943.