A few months before, he heard about the death of his former piano teacher Leonid Nikolayev, which affected him profoundly; the sonata is dedicated to his memory.

Originally, Shostakovich had planned a four-movement sonata in C-sharp minor, but by March 1943 had abandoned that idea in favor of the work's final three-movement form.

[1] In late 1942, Shostakovich and his family were living in the city of Kuybyshev (present-day Samara), where they had been evacuated by the Soviet government in order to escape the Nazi siege of Leningrad.

[2] That October, the composer learned about the death of his former piano professor Leonid Nikolayev, who had died in Tashkent earlier that month from typhoid fever.

[11] The restless mood of the first movement is established by the running sixteenth notes which begin the sonata, leading to a melodic line which is a verbatim quote in retrograde of the opening motif of Shostakovich's Symphony No.

Musicologist David Haas likened it to a waltz,[13] while Sofia Moshevich said the movement forecasts the textures and moods of Shostakovich's late music.

[14] The finale begins with the statement of a thirty-measure theme which is then developed upon by nine variations; allusions to the compositions of Nikolayev,[15] as well as to what would later become Shostakovich's musical monogram, appear.

[20] Sollertinsky wrote privately in a letter marked November 1, 1943, that the sonata was "likely one of [Shostakovich's] best works (far superior to the rest of his piano music)".

[10] Nevertheless, in a letter to a friend dated June 14, 1944, Heinrich Neuhaus expressed mixed feelings: Utmost mastery, novelty, intellect—empty for the soul and severe—clever and ancient—ancient sorrow consumes and oppresses.

In the middle episode, one is amazed by his orchestral imagination—as if a solo flute, accompanied by lower strings, is heard playing ... And, ultimately, the theme of the Finale [appears]—single voiced, without supporting chord.

[29] Alma Lubin, music critic of the Cincinnati Enquirer, recorded that the unusual amount of attention accorded to the sonata had less to do with its intrinsic worth than with historic circumstances of the day: [O]f course, this kind of treatment to a new work is hardly typical.

For, granted the sonata is a splendid and deserving modern composition, its journalistic appeal no doubt largely stems from the fact that its composer's Seventh Symphony recently had its dramatic and sensational career.

From Shostakovich writing it in Leningrad under fire, all the way to Toscanini conducting the premiere, that symphony had more news value than any other single musical composition of modern history.

[18]Reviews following Brodsky's broadcast and later performance at Carnegie Hall, the latter held under the auspices of the American Russian Institute, were mixed.

[It] begins with a lengthy march-like "Allegretto" movement, in which the thematic material is of a virile nature, easily assimilated, sharply defined, and expertly developed.

But the final "Allegro", a set of free variations of a passacaglia effect, proved masterly in its inventiveness and led, toward the end, to a brooding variant built up over the first two notes of the theme that brought the work to an extremely impressive close.

2's composition, Lev Danilevich eulogized it as a significant development in Shostakovich's piano writing, taking especial note of its "anti-virtuosic" austerity of texture.

Notwithstanding that he made a present to her of two pages from the sonata manuscript,[12] he dismissed it to her as a "trifle, something impromptu",[33] and that he was "pulled" to wanting to write an Eighth Symphony instead.