Piano Sonata No. 6 in A Major

Prokofiev’s Piano Sonatas Nos. 6, 7 and 8, conceived as a trilogy in 1939, conveniently became known as his War Sonatas. Yet Piano Sonata No. 6 was completed in the spring of 1940, well over a year before the Soviet Union was drawn into the Second World War. In the late 1930s, several of Prokofiev’s colleagues were arrested by the NKVD, very few to be seen again (most of them were shot just months after arrest). It appears—though, inevitably, there is no documentary evidence to confirm it—that it was the arrest of Prokofiev’s staunch champion, the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold, that prompted him to begin this work (its opus number immediately follows that of his opera Semyon Kotko, the premiere of which Meyerhold had been due to direct). The Sixth Sonata’s opening is both baleful and brutal: an A-major chord promptly negated by the bass leaping up the interval of a tritone, known as the diabolus in musica. This disruptive interval holds sway through much of this movement, even determining the acidulous counterpoint which opens the development section—itself of such violence that the pianist is instructed to literally thump note clusters in the bass with their fist. After the brittle, sardonic second movement comes a wistfully nostalgic slow waltz, then a lively finale, interrupted halfway through by a chilling recollection of the first movement’s motif.