Contrasting Sonorities Works for Violin and Piano
Richard Wigmore
When Ludwig van Beethoven composed his three Op. 12 violin sonatas in the winter of 1797–8, he had established himself as Mozart’s successor in Vienna, dazzling the cognoscenti with his improvisations and a stream of brilliant compositions for piano. Diplomatically dedicated to the court Kapellmeister Antonio Salieri, the sonatas are among the young firebrand’s most genially Mozartian works. Or so they seem to us. After hearing an early performance, the critic of the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung complained that they were “… learned, learned and always learned—and nothing natural, no song … a striving for strange modulations … a heaping up of difficulties till one loses all patience and enjoyment.” That exasperated critic seems to have been a member of the minority. By 1799, when the Op. 12 sonatas appeared in print (still with the traditional designation “for the harpsichord or fortepiano, with a violin”), Beethoven’s popularity extended far beyond a “fringe” group of aristocratic connoisseurs. Talented amateurs throughout northern Europe were now eager to snap up his latest compositions; and within a few years the sonatas had been published in Paris, London and several German cities. Although Mozart’s influence is present throughout these works, Beethoven’s rhetoric, as ever, tends to be that much more emphatic. No. 1, in the violin’s most brilliant key of D major, is the most assertive of the three. After a trumpeting fanfare, the first theme sets a sustained melody, beginning with an octave leap, against a piano counterpoint in smoothly flowing eighth notes. The second group of themes begins with a lyrical recasting of the flowing eighth-note motif and continues with a dolce melody that turns into a modulating dialogue between the two instruments. In the development Beethoven works the two elements of the opening theme 13
