Frang & Lifits

Sentiment and Virtuosity

Works for Violin and Piano

Paul Thomason

In the 19th century, the violin-piano sonata came into its own, moving from its earliest beginnings—where the emphasis was almost exclusively on the keyboard instrument with the violin merely providing bits of often-disposable decoration—to a partnership of equals. Brahms’s three violin-piano sonatas, gems of the repertoire, celebrate the unique strengths of both instruments. Typical for the composer, he destroyed the manuscripts of at least three other violin sonatas before embarking on what we know today as the Sonata in G major for Violin and Piano Op. 78. It was written during the summers of 1878 and 1879 while he relaxed in the southern Austrian countryside on Lake Wörth at Pörtschach, a place where he said inspiration came easily.

Brahms was a master at the piano. According to biographer Jan Swafford, Clara Schumann, herself a famous pianist, “once came indoors thinking someone was playing fourhand duets and discovered Brahms alone at the piano, his hands flashing all over the keyboard. He loved drawing great handfuls of sound from the instrument.” Nonetheless, in writing his First Sonata for Violin and Piano Brahms took care to not swamp the more delicate violin with the sound of the piano. In fact, the string instrument often takes the lead in presenting musical material—singing from beginning to end—with the piano providing rhythmic crosscurrents and intriguing comments.

The sonata was inspired by two songs the composer had written in 1873, Regenlied and Nachklang, to words by the North German poet Klaus Groth. Like most of Groth’s work, these two poems are permeated with melancholy and nostalgia, moods that found a strong resonance in Brahms. Regenlied begins “Pour down, rain, pour down, reawaken for me the dreams I dreamed in childhood,” while in Nachklang, the poet compares the raindrops falling from the trees to tears flowing from his eyes.

Both songs begin with a dotted motif—long, short, long—on one pitch. The violin announces this, on the note D, at the beginning of both the Sonata’s first and third movements, and this gesture remains the main motif of the entire piece, occurring throughout all three movements, sometimes directly, sometimes (as in the second) slightly modified. In the opening Vivace, the three Ds forms the beginning of a seven-note phrase that tumbles gracefully to D an octave below. It’s one of Brahms loveliest and most haunting ideas, which he justifiably repeats to great effect. (Ironically, he used this same phrase in the piano part of both songs, but in each of them it is heard only once and passes almost unnoticed.) Brahms further ties the Sonata together by bringing back the opening theme of the second movement (where it is announced by the piano), in the middle of the third, where it is given to the violin. Here, in the finale, we also get to hear the extended melody of the two songs as well as the piano’s arpeggio accompaniment, which is used as the main building block for the movement.

Clara Schumann’s youngest child, Felix, had died in January 1879 at the age of 24. According to Swafford, “On a copy of the sonata’s slow movement that he sent to Clara, Brahms told her that he composed it to ‘tell you, perhaps more clearly than I otherwise could myself, how sincerely I think of you and Felix.’ (The thought did not persuade Clara to like the adagio; she preferred the outer movements.)” Clara always referred to the work as the “Regenlied Sonata.” Swafford also points out that when Brahms sent the piece to his publisher he asked that the fee he was owed for it be placed anonymously into an account from which Clara drew. Apparently she never realized what he had done.

When Brahms finished the work, he sent a copy to his friend, the doctor and amateur musician Theodor Billroth, along with a typically tongue-in-cheek note: “It’s not worth playing through more than once, and you would have to have a nice, soft, rainy evening to give the proper mood.” Billroth immediately got the broad hint and replied, “You rascal! To me the whole sonata is like an echo of the song.”

A song composed several years earlier also plays an important part in the genesis of Schubert’s Fantasia in C major for Violin and Piano. Unlike Brahms, Schubert was not a virtuoso pianist. Musicians such as Mozart and Beethoven had achieved fame first for their performing and then for their composing, often dazzling their listeners with works they had written for themselves. Not only did their prowess at the keyboard earn them money, but their fame as virtuosos also added to the public interest in buying copies of their music. According to Schubert’s friend Louis Schlösser, “From the standpoint of virtuoso performance, his piano playing could not in any way compete with the world-famous Viennese master pianists. With Schubert, the expression of the emotions of the world within him obviously far outweighed his technical development.” But he goes on to comment that when Schubert played, it was “like the outpourings of a soul which creates its musical forms from the depths of its being and clothes them in the garment of immaculate grace.” On one occasion Schubert was playing his own “Wanderer” Fantasy to a group of friends and had to give up in the last movement when the music was just too difficult. “He sprang up from his seat with the words: ‘Let the devil play the stuff!’” a friend remembered.

But Schubert could write music that did, indeed, give virtuoso performers plenty to sink their teeth into. One such piece is the Fantasia for Violin and Piano he composed in December 1827, shortly after completing the first 12 songs of Winterreise. It was written for the young Bohemian violinist Josef Slavík, who had arrived in Vienna the year before and was making quite a name for himself (Chopin referred to him as “a second Paganini”). The pianist was Carl Maria von Bocklet, a member of Schubert’s circle of friends who often performed at the Schubertiades, sometimes playing piano duets with the composer.

At the premiere on January 27, 1828, the piece did not make a favorable impression on the audience. For one thing, Slavík had trouble with the music. For another, the concert was overlong and by the time Schubert’s piece was finally given many people had left and those who remained seemed unimpressed. In the words of one critic, “the new Fantasy did not meet with the slightest success. One may assume the popular composer has composed himself astray.” Still, the reviewer for London’s Harmonicon reported the piece “…possesses merit far above the common order.”

The work is in seven sections that are linked together into one through-composed entity. At its heart is an Andantino in 3/4 time, a set of variations on Schubert’s 1822 song Sei mir gegrüsst. The words, by Friedrich Rückert, are a ghazal, a type of Arabic love poem, addressed to an absent beloved. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau warns, “A sentimental interpretation can, of course, reduce this wonderful song to banality… Inwardness and nobility are needed to accord the song its true status.” It is in these variations of ever-increasing difficulty that Schubert pulls out all the virtuoso stops for both instruments.

The Fantasia begins with mysterious tremolos in the piano, over which the violin soars passionately. After a pair of cadenzas (first for the violin, then the piano) the mood shifts to a jaunty Allegretto that one critic called “Paganinilike,” which, in turn, leads to the poignant variations. Schubert then briefly repeats the opening of the work, the piano tremolos and heartfelt lyrical violin part, before treating us to an extraverted, full-throated return of Sei mir gegrüsst, first as a quick Allegro vivace, then a more delicate Allegretto in 3/4 time. The Fantasia closes with a delightful, romping Presto coda.

Béla Bartók’s First Sonata for Violin and Piano is another work that makes colossal demands on both performers, but never merely for the sake of showing off— rather, the technical difficulties serve the composer’s very personal, expressionist vision. The Sonata was written in Budapest between October and December of 1921 for the Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Arányi who gave the first performance—with Bartók himself at the piano—in London on March 24, 1922. They had played the work several days before at a private gathering at the home of the Hungarian Minister. Bartók wrote to his mother: “Although it was not open to the public, The Times printed a review on thefollowing day, and a very favorable one, too. My arrival had already been reported—in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail and in 2 music periodicals.”

Bartók and d’Arányi repeated the Sonata in Paris at a concert on April 8. Afterwards there was a party at the home of Henry Prunières, editor-in-chief of Le Revue Musicale, that was attended by Stravinsky, Ravel, Szymanowski, Roussel, and members of the group of composers known as “Les Six.” (Prunières later commented that only Schoenberg had been missing.) Bartók and d’Arányi performed an encore of the Sonata, which impressed Stravinsky: he was intrigued by the way Bartók had written for the violin without being able to play the instrument himself. Bartók reported to his mother that “most of [the composers] were very enthusiastic about the Sonata for violin, and not less so about Jelly’s playing, for she excelled herself that evening.”

Though the Sonata was extremely well received in Europe, it was slower to find its public in the U.S. After Bartók performed it in Washington with Joseph Szigeti in a concert that also included his First Rhapsody for Violin and Piano, the New York Times critic found the Rhapsody pleasant but said of the Sonata: “Ideas are drawn out, the themes and rhythms are scrappy, and the least agreeable elements of the violin are singled out for emphasis. There are moments when the composer suggests and maintains a mood, but he breaks off quickly, as if emotion were something to be avoided.”

During a series of lectures Bartók gave in America in the winter of 1927–28, he referred to the time in which he wrote the two Sonatas for Violin and Piano and The Miraculous Mandarin as well as various piano works as “a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in the works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable.”

Bartók stated that the key of the First Sonata was C-sharp minor, with the first three notes of the piano being the tonic triad, but the violin enters not on C sharp, as one would expect, but on C natural—setting up the rather feisty relationship between the two instruments. Unlike most violin- piano sonatas, throughout this score the instruments share hardly any material, there are no themes that bounce back and forth between them. Some critics have commented that it is almost as if the two instruments were playing different, but cooperating, pieces simultaneously, yet in the process creating a third work of vast scope.

The first movement begins with soft piano arpeggios that bring to mind the sound of the Balinese gamelan and have been compared to Debussy. The violin enters, with considerable élan, in a forte dynamic. Throughout, the opening movement is robust and bristles with details that reward close study. The violin begins the second movement alone, with the piano finally entering with some muted, almost impressionistic chords. The music builds to a section of sweeping, passionate lines before dying away softly. Bartók’s delight in Hungarian folk music appears full force in the finale, an energetic dance movement that becomes increasingly wild.

The thoughtful assessment of the composer by musicologists Vera Lampert and László Somfai could equally sum up his First Sonata for Violin and Piano: “His greatness lies not so much in his technical and stylistic innovations as in his extraordinary aptitude for creative synthesis—and, finally, in the ideal he formed and realized that modern, alienated man might create deeply personal art by turning to some pure and precious source.”