Piano Music - Sergei Prokofiev

Sergei Prokofiev


1891 - 1953
Sergei Prokofiev was a Russian Soviet composer, pianist and conductor.



📖 "My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices."


📖 "There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major."


📖 "In my view, the composer, just as the poet, the sculptor or the painter, is in duty bound to serve Man, the people. He must beautify life and defend it. He must be a citizen first and foremost, so that his art might consciously extol human life and lead man to a radiant future."


📖 "I have never doubted the importance of melody. I like melody very much, and I consider it the most important element in music, and I labour many years on the improvement of its quality in my compositions."


📖 "Formalism is music that people don't understand at first hearing."


📖 "Of course I have used dissonance in my time, but there has been too much dissonance. Bach used dissonance as good salt for his music. Others applied pepper, seasoned the dishes more and more highly, till all healthy appetites were sick and until the music was nothing but pepper."


📖 "I want nothing better, more flexible or more complete than the sonata form, which contains everything necessary for my structural purposes."


📖 "I strenuously object to the very word "grotesque" which has become hackneyed to the point of nausea...I would prefer my music to be described as "Scherzo-ish" in quality, or else by three words describing the various degrees of the Scherzo - whimsicality, laughter, mockery."


📖 "When the Second World War broke out, I felt that everyone must do his share, and I began composing songs and marches for the front. But soon events assumed such gigantic and far-reaching scope as to demand larger canvasses."


📖 "It seemed to me that had Haydn lived to our day he would have retained his own style while accepting something of the new at the same time. That was the kind of symphony I wanted to write: a symphony in the classical style. And when I saw that my idea was beginning to work, I called it the Classical Symphony."


📖 "My mother had to explain that one couldnt compose a Liszt rhapsody because it was a piece of music that Liszt himself had composed."


📖 "At home we didn't talk about religion. So gradually the question faded away by itself and disappeared from the agenda. When I was nineteen my father died; my response to his death was atheistic."


📖 "I abhor imitation and I abhor the familiar."

Quotes by Sergei Prokofiev


🔔 Reload the page a few times if you see orange widgets instead of books and music.








Piano Music by Sergei Prokofiev


Op. 1 Sonata no.1, f [after Sonata no.2, 1907], 1909

Op. 2 Four Etudes, 1909

Op. 3 Four Pieces [rev. of 4 Pieces, 1907–8], 1911: Skazka [Story], Shutka [Jest], Marsh [March], Prizrak [Phantom]

Op. 4 Four Pieces [rev. of 4 Pieces, 1908], 1910–12: Vospominaniya [Reminiscences], Porïv [Elan], Otchayanie [Despair], Navazhdeniye (Suggestion diabolique)

Op. 11 Toccata, d, 1912

Op. 12 Ten Pieces, 1906–13: March [after Little Songs, 5th ser., no.6], Gavotte, Rigaudon, Mazurka, Capriccio, Legenda, Prelude, Allemande, Humoresque Scherzo, Scherzo; see chbr works, op.12bis

Op. 14 Sonata no.2, d, 1912

Op. 17 Sarkazmï [Sarcasms], 5 pieces, 1912–14

Op. 22 Mimoletnosti (Visions fugitives), 20 pieces, 1915–17

Op. 28 Sonata no.3 (from old notebooks), a [after Sonata no.3, 1907], 1917

Op. 29 Sonata no.4 (from old notebooks), c [after Sonata no.5, 1908 and Sym., 1908], 1917

Op. 31 Skazki staroy babushki [Old Grandmother’s Tales], 4 pieces, 1918

Op. 32 Four Pieces, 1918: Dance, Minuet, Gavotte, Waltz

Op. 33ter March and Scherzo from The Love for Three Oranges, 1922

Op. 38 Sonata no.5, C, 1923, rev. as op.135

Op. 43 bisDivertissement [after orch work], 1938

Op. 45 Veshchi v sebe [Things in Themselves], 2 pieces, 1928

Op. 52 Six Pieces, 1930–31: Intermezzo, Rondo, Etude [all from The Prodigal Son], Scherzino [from 5 Songs, op.35], Andante [from Str Qt no.1, op.50], Scherzo from Sinfonietta, op.48]

Op. 54 Two Sonatinas, e, G, 1931–2

Op. 59 Three Pieces, 1933–44: Progulka [Promenade], Peyzazh [Landscape], Pastoral Sonatina, C

Op. 62 Mïsli (Pensées), 3 pieces, 1933–4

Op. 65 Music for Children, 12 pieces, 1935; see orch works, op.65bis

Op. 75 Ten Pieces from Romeo and Juliet, 1937

Op. 7 7bisGavotte [from Hamlet], 1938

Op. 82 Sonata no.6, A, 1939–40

Op. 83 Sonata no.7, B, 1939–42

Op. 84 Sonata no.8, B, 1939–44

Op. 95 Three Pieces from Cinderella, 1942

Op. 96 Three Pieces, 1941–2: Waltz [from War and Peace], Contredanse, Mephisto-waltz [both from Lermontov]

Op. 97 Ten Pieces from Cinderella, 1943

Op. 102Six Pieces from Cinderella, 1944

Op. 103 Sonata no.9, C, 1947

Op. 135 Sonata no.5, C [rev. of op.38], 1952–3

Op. 137 Sonata no.10, c, inc., unpubd

Op. 138 Sonata no.11, unrealized

– Dumka, after 1933, unpubd





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