Prokofieff's Eighth Piano Sonata

Extract

Prokofieff finished the Eighth Sonata in 1944. It is unusual among his mature ‘abstract’ works in its stylistic kinship with his theatre music of the period. In earlier years, before his return to Soviet Russia, Prokofieff had composed two symphonies (Nos. 3 and 4) which derived much of their musical substance from stage works written shortly before them, but later the styles of his ‘absolute’ and ‘theatre’ music diverged considerably. Guided by the notion that the theatre in all its guises reached the mass public more directly than any other means of artistic communication, he addressed his Soviet theatre audience in a tremendously effective idiom exemplified in such works as Alexander Nevsky, Peter and the Wolf, and Romeo and Juliet. In his ‘abstract’ works of the same period he did not feel the need to carry the pursuit of ‘accessibility’ of idiom so far, and the exceptional character of the Eighth Piano Sonata among his work in this form is in some part attributable to the untypical presence of these ‘theatrical’ elements in it.