Although The White Peacock, The Lake at Evening, and The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan remain the best known works of American composer Charles T. Griffes, his Sonata for Piano represents his highest musical achievement. The Sonata for Piano has its roots in an unfinished work that Griffes undertook in the fall of 1917, not long after completing his incidental music for the Celtic play The Kairn of Koridwen. The unfinished piece was the torso of a Sonata for Piano that Griffes was ultimately to abandon in December of that year. At that point, Griffes decided to start over from scratch, and happily completed the 15-minute sonata in just one month. Griffes himself gave the premiere of the Sonata for Piano at a concert of his works held at the MacDowell Club in New York on February 26, 1918. At this juncture the sonata was cast in a single movement only; however, during preparation of the work for publication, Griffes changed his mind and divided the piece in three movements to be played without pause.

The Sonata for Piano is unique among Griffes' output. Whereas his earlier music tended to rely on a variety of approaches ranging from German-styled post-Romanticism to pseudo-oriental exotica, Griffes demonstrates a tough and single-minded attitude in the Sonata for Piano. The sonata shares little if anything with stylistic traits exhibited in Griffes' earlier works, and is cut from whole cloth that is free from exterior influences. Griffes' Sonata for Piano is dramatic, even tempestuous, dynamic (much of it is played forte) and makes quite liberal use of dissonance, although that is not to say the sonata is in any way disorienting to listen to. Griffes adheres strongly to a predetermined strategy of key relationships, and exercises a masterly control over the overall structure. Griffes does not digress, and his Sonata for Piano is a taut, highly disciplined, and compelling realization of his ideas.

Griffes' Sonata for Piano came along at a time when an important younger generation of American composers was coming of age, and few, if any, escaped the example it provided. Virgil Thomson once said that the sonata was "shockingly original." Critical reception to the sonata was immediate and overwhelmingly positive, with pianist/composer Rudolf Ganz proclaiming it as "the finest abstract work in American piano literature." The quality of the Griffes Sonata for Piano is attested to by the fact that since its introduction in 1918 there have been relatively few serious challenges to its status in this regard. The Griffes sonata has such "long legs," in fact, that in 1941, upon receipt of a manuscript copy of this sonata, Griffes' publisher G. Schirmer thought it a newly discovered work, and promptly signed a contract with the Griffes family to publish it. Only then did Schirmer realize that they'd already had it in their catalog for 20 years.

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