Shostakovich's own feelings about the sonata fluctuated over the years. It was one of the few piano works from his artistic maturity which he did not record himself. In May 1943, shortly after Shostakovich completed the sonata, he met with Marietta Shaginyan, to whom he dismissed his newest work as a "trifle, something impromptu", and that he was "pulled" to wanting to write an Eighth Symphony instead. Shaginyan's own opinion was that the sonata was "somewhat dry" and "subdued"; Shostakovich later gifted her two autographed pages of the sonata. But in early 1973, he told Inger Wikström during a meeting in Copenhagen that he esteemed the Piano Sonata No. 2 as the most important of his piano works.
