Prokofievs three War Sonatas, the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Piano Sonatas, were conceived in late 1939 and the collective title is something of a misnomer.

This trilogy was planned, sketched, and partly composed at a time when Russia was not yet at war: the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was signed in August 1939, and the Great Patriotic War, as it was known in Russia, began only in June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

The inspiration behind these three works is more complex, and more personal. In 1938 Prokofiev met Mira Mendelson (1915 1968), then in her early twenties, and the two began a passionate relationship that led, eventually, to marriage (once Prokofiev had obtained a divorce from his first wife, Lina, from whom hed been increasingly estranged since his return to the Soviet Union in 1936).

Prokofiev intended the first two sonatas (the Sixth and Seventh) to be restless and storm-like, while the last (the Eighth) was tender and dreamlike, with an opening theme that came to him after one of his woodland walks with Mira when they first met.

The impetus for these sonatas was thus as much to do with love as it was with war, though some sketches even date back to before Prokofiev met Mira. But there was another important stimulus that sprang in part from Prokofievs summer reading in 1939: he read Romain Rollands Vie de Beethoven (published in English as Beethoven the Creator), paying particular attention to the passages on the Appassionata Sonata. Rolland wrote that no other of [Beethovens] sonatas shows to the same degree the union of unrestrained passion and rigid logic ... The work body and spirit is an indestructible tissue.

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