Prokofiev’s 7th piano sonata was the showpiece that established Richter’s reputation. He premiered it in 1943 and is the second of his so called War Sonata’s. It is also called the Stalingrad. And if associations of war and atrocities come up in your mind, it is meant like that.
In 1940 Prokofiev’s friend actor and theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold and his wife were murdered by the secret service. This happened during what is later referred to as the Great Purge. During his arrest, he wrote a letter complaining about his treatment. It was found and published after the Sovjet Union fell apart in the 90s.
The investigators began to use force on me, a sick 65-year-old man. I was made to lie face down and beaten on the soles of my feet and my spine with a rubber strap. They sat me on a chair and beat my feet from above, with considerable force… For the next few days, when those parts of my legs were covered with extensive internal haemorrhaging, they again beat the red-blue-and-yellow bruises with the strap and the pain was so intense that it felt as if boiling water was being poured on these sensitive areas. I howled and wept from the pain. They beat my back with the same rubber strap and punched my face, swinging their fists from a great height … The intolerable physical and emotional pain caused my eyes to weep unending streams of tears. Lying face down on the floor, I discovered that I could wriggle, twist and squeal like a dog when its master whips it … When I lay down on the cot and fell asleep, after 18 hours of interrogation, in order to go back in an hour’s time for more, I was woken up by my own groaning and because I was jerking about like a patient in the last stages of typhoid fever … “death, oh most certainly, death is easier than this!” the interrogated person says to himself. I began to incriminate myself in the hope that this, at least, would lead quickly to the scaffold.
Prokofiev put all his rage about what happened in this music, and indeed, it sounds like outrage. At the same time he had to placate Stalin in a present for his 60th birthday. He wrote that work, generally referred to as Hail to Stalin, and then put his real feelings in his piano sonata’s. In an ironic twist of fate, they were awarded a Stalin Prize.