Carnegie Hall: Yefim Bronfman Performs Prokofiev's War Sonatas

On Saturday evening at Carnegie Hall, Yefim Bronfman performed what was to have been the third and final installment of the complete cycle of Sergei Prokofiev's piano sonatas.  But the second, which was originally to have taken place on March 9th, was rescheduled and will instead be performed on June 18th at Zankel Hall.  The three sonatas Mr. Bronfman played on Saturday evening were the Nos. 6, 7 and 8, collectively referred to as the "war sonatas."  The title is misleading, though, since Prokofiev had begun work on all three in 1939 when the Soviet Union was, however uneasily, still at peace.  Since Prokofiev worked on the three compositions simultaneously, it is necessary to see each as part of a whole and to understand the relationships and dynamics they share among themselves.

The Piano Sonata No. 6 in A Major, Op. 82 that opened the program was completed in 1940.  As mentioned above, at the time the Soviet Union, still adhering the protocols of the Nonaggression Pact with Germany, was not yet at war.  Still, the the pervading mood, expressed immediately in the opening bars, is one of desperation and of fear barely held under control.  It is an awareness of the horror lurking in the shadows and waiting only the right moment to manifest itself.  (It could, of course, be argued that this had as much to do with the paranoia generated by Stalin's purges as with the war then raging in Western Europe.  Prokofiev's friend Vsevolod Meyerhold and his wife Zinaida Reich had both been arrested and murdered by the NKVD shortly before he began composing the sonatas.)  The opening movement is filled with dissonance as each hand plays in a different key, the one in A major and the other in A minor.  There is no stability here, only a sense of impending collapse.  It is impossible for us living in the twenty-first century to imagine what it must have been like for those who had lived through the horrors of World War I, touted as the "War to End All Wars," to once again see their world slipping inexorably into the cataclysm of death and destruction they thought they had left behind once and for all.  It must have seemed to these poor people, Prokofiev among them, that they were trapped in a relentless cycle from which there was no escape.  I think it was this scenario, the sense of being caught up in a nightmare from which one could not awaken, that inspired the mood of the No. 6.  The interludes of calm, as in the third movement marked Tempo di valzer lentissimo, are only brief respites before the madness begins all over again.  The final movement is one of unstoppable violence as an unrelenting mechanized first theme smashes against a softer second theme filled with yearning.

Prokofiev completed the second of the series, the Piano Sonata No. 7 in B-flat Major, Op. 83 two years later in 1942 but had already begun sketching it out as early as 1939 when he was already at work on the No. 6.  The work was premiered in Moscow in January of 1943 by the great Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter.  By then the Soviet Union was at war and fighting for its survival as the decisive Battle of Stalingrad raged.  The work captures perfectly the spirit of the times.  If anything, the mood of desperate uncertainty expressed in the No. 6 is only heightened in this work whose opening movement is marked allegro inquieto.  As Richter later remarked:

"With this 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 unleashed. But this does not mean that what we lived by before thereby ceases to exist. We continue to feel and to love. Now the full range of human emotions bursts forth. In the tremendous struggle that this involves, we find the strength to affirm the irrepressible life-force."

The most interesting movement, for me at least, is the second marked Andante caloroso.  This part could at first be mistaken for the work of Rachmaninoff, so completely does it recall the Russian Romantic tradition.  Though Prokofiev could never have admitted it, the work seems filled with nostalgia for the pre-Revolutionary Russia.  To Soviet citizens living through the horrors of war and Stalinism the old days must have seemed in retrospect an ideal time now lost forever.

After intermission, Mr. Bronfman returned to the stage to perform the Piano Sonata No. 8 in B-flat Major, Op. 84 completed in 1944 but again begun much earlier.  The soloist at its premiere was Emil Gilels.  This work was in a sense anticlimactic.  The end of the war was now in sight and the world could once again return to normal.  Not only that but Prokofiev had found some degree of personal happiness in his romance with Mira Mendelson who was to become his second wife.  (After the USSR issued a proclamation announcing that all marriages of Soviet citizens to foreign nationals were annulled, Prokofiev's first wife Lina was sentenced to prison where she would remain until 1956 despite the composer's efforts to have her released.)  Prokofiev himself stated that the sonata was primarily "lyrical in character" and included in it themes taken from his incidental music to both The Queen of Spades, Op. 70, and Eugene Onegin, Op. 71.  This should not be taken to indicate, however, that the No. 8 was in any way inferior to the two sonatas that had preceded it but rather that it provided a resolution to the conflict raised within them.

Yefim Bronfman is one of the finest pianists now active and he once again demonstrated that convincingly at Saturday evening's recital.  Dressed simply in black, he came onstage, sat down at the piano and performed the works at hand without indulging in any drama or theatrical flourishes but instead showed total respect for Prokofiev's music.  His performance of these technically demanding works was masterful and as authoritative as one could hope to find.