Piano Sonata No. 6 (Prokofiev)

Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 6 in A major, Op. 82 (1940) is a sonata for solo piano.

Quotes

• In fact, one could argue that in the Sixth Prokofiev turned toward the Romantic concept of the sonata, with its traditional exploration of the conflict between the individual and fate or other impersonal forces beyond one’s control. The mechanistic qualities of Prokofiev’s music, familiar to us from his earlier works, play the crucial role in this drama; they collide with the warmly human thematic material, suppressing and brutalizing it. The carnival atmosphere or the “masques” of the early sonatas and the objective neoclassicism of the Fifth are abandoned, never to return in Prokofiev’s subsequent works in this genre.
  • Boris Berman, Prokofiev’s Piano Sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), "Sonata No. 6 in A Major, op. 82"

• The remarkable stylistic clarity and the structural perfection of the music amazed me. I had never heard anything like it. With wild audacity the composer broke with the ideals of Romanticism and introduced into his music the terrifying pulse of twentieth-century music. Classically well-balanced in spite of all its asperities, the Sixth Sonata is an utterly magnificent work.
  • Sviatoslav Richter, In: Bruno Monsaingeon, Sviatoslav Richter: Notebooks and Conversations, trans. Stewart Spencer

• The Sixth Sonata is magnificent. From beginning to end. I am very happy that I had the opportunity to hear it two times, and regret that it was only two times.
  • Dmitri Shostakovich, quoted in Harlow Robinson, Sergei Prokofiev: A Biography (1987)