Christian Tetzlaff & Alexander Lonquich

Coming Full Circle

Responses to the Romantic Sonata

Gavin Plumley

Like its G-major predecessor, Brahms’s A-major Violin Sonata, his second, was composed during a summer break away from Vienna. Following successful and prolific sojourns on the Wörthersee in Carinthia, Brahms had moved to the more fashionable Austrian resort of Bad Ischl, then to Pressbaum, much closer to Vienna, and on to Wiesbaden, where in 1883 he wrote his Third Symphony, coinciding with the death of Wagner. But as well as cultural concurrences that year, there were emotional ones too, when Brahms met Hermine Spies, a vivacious contralto who was to become one of his major infatuations.

She was also a prominent interpreter of Brahms’s works and one of several visitors to the composer’s 1886 summer retreat, this time in Switzerland. Again, Brahms enjoyed a fertile period of composition, basing himself on the banks of the Thunersee, a place “so full of melodies,” he explained, “that one has to be careful not to step on any.” Consequently, both the Alpine landscape and his friendship with Spies inspired numerous compositions that summer, including a (predictable) clutch of songs, the Second Cello Sonata in F major Op. 99 for Robert Hausmann, a quartet colleague of Joseph Joachim’s, and the A-major Sonata, which Brahms and Joseph Hellmesberger Sr. first performed in Vienna on December 2, 1886.

Notably, this is a Sonata “for piano and violin,” as indicated at the opening, when the keyboard takes a charming but purposeful lead. The Sonata’s radiant mood may well derive from its three opening notes, which trace the shape of a motif from the young Walther von Stolzing’s prize-winning, dawn-drenched “Morgenlich leuchtend im rosigen Schein” from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Did this allusion constitute a harking back to 1883 and the death of the opera’s composer or, moreover, the moment when Brahms first met Spies? Certainly, the subsequent suggestion of one of Brahms’s own songs in the second subject, Wie Melodien zieht es, from the Op. 105 group he dedicated to the singer, maintains her presence:

More ardent still, then, is the third (wordless) theme in the first movement, which comes to dominate the development, before the two earlier melodies return in the recapitulation and the extended coda.

Yet when words come and capture them And bring them before my eyes, They turn pale like grey mist And vanish like a breath.

The middle movement sits somewhere between an andante and a scherzo. Although it is, as a result, unsettled in nature—there are parallels with the “slow” movements of the symphonies—the Sonata’s lyrical generosity endures, as it does in the finale, featuring another allusion to the Op. 105 songs. Here, however, it is not the “spring flower” thoughts of Wie Melodien zieht es, a poem incidentally written by Klaus Groth, another visitor during the summer of 1886, but the more soulful Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer, with a text by the Bavarian writer Hermann Lingg.

Yes, I shall have to die, You will kiss another When I am pale and cold. Before May breezes blow, Before the thrush sings in the wood; If you would see me once again, Come soon, come soon!

The “quasi andante” qualification of the tempo marking suggests something more reflective, with Brahms perhaps acknowledging that, for all his hopes, Hermine would remain but a source of inspiration. In this, there is also a link to the composer’s relationship with Clara Schumann, made more tangible by another allusion to an earlier song, Meine Liebe ist grün Op. 63 No. 5, setting words by Robert and Clara’s son Felix, who had died in 1879. For all the outward lyrical contentment of this Sonata, it is, ultimately, symptomatic of the unrequited nature of much of Brahms’s affection.

Two years after the premiere of Brahms’s sonata, the teenage, Romanian-born George Enescu entered the Konservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. His teacher of chamber music was none other than Joseph Hellmesberger Sr., the violinist at that first performance of Brahms’s work, and Enescu, a fellow violinist (taught by Hellmesberger’s son), often played in the Conservatory orchestra in Brahms’s presence. But Vienna and its establishment would come to form only part of Enescu’s musical personality. Graduating in 1893, albeit remaining in Vienna to continue harmony and composition studies with Brahms’s colleague and friend Robert Fuchs, Enescu then entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1895, where his musical horizons were much broadened, both by Massenet and, more crucially, Fauré, following the former’s resignation.

Enescu’s first orchestral work, Poème roumain, appeared in a program in Paris in January 1898, just after the completion of his First Violin Sonata, which had shown the enduring influence of Vienna. By the time Enescu came to write its successor, in 1899, his idiom was already expanding, though the work’s inception had, at least according to later recollections, begun a few years earlier. “At the age of 14, when I was walking alone in Prince Maurouzi’s garden, a theme came into my head. I carried it inside me for three years; then, at the age of 17, I wrote my Second Violin Sonata in the space of a fortnight.”

Viennese, Parisian and, to some extent, (homesick) Romanian influences pervade this heterogenous composition. It begins with that mysterious theme, carried by Enescu for three years and then carried through the entire Sonata. Harmonically, rhythmically, there is much to mine here, given the somewhat disorientating nature of its long-breathed phrases. Indeed, a dialectic of spontaneity, gleaned from Fauré, and far-sighted musical syntax, with Franck’s D-minor Symphony as its model, is present in all three sections of the Sonata. In each, too, there is evidence of what Schoenberg would later call (particularly in Brahms’s work) “developing variation” technique, where everything is in flux, despite crucial motivic relationships. The central movement, headed “Tranquillement,” in particular tells of the mutability of Enescu’s style, with harmonies switching between major and minor. Within the Viennese tradition, these might show kinship with Schubert, mirrored in the lied-like form of this slow movement, though they also hark back to a vital facet of the music of Enescu’s native Moldavia. A contrasting and almost Classical sensibility is suggested at the start of the finale, a breezy rondo, though, as in earlier movements, structural subdivisions are as much blurred as they are confirmed, before the violinist and pianist stride ahead to major-key resolution.

The violent aphorism of Webern’s compositions may seem light-years away from Enescu’s pliant style, yet both represent unique responses to the legacy of the Romantic sonata. Indeed, Webern’s Four Pieces for Violin and Piano Op. 7 of 1910 trace the four individual movements of a sonata-form work while condensing them into the running time of just a quarter of that model. It was Schoenberg who had called for a rejection of the “maximalism” that dominated contemporary musical life. “Away with protracted ten-tonne scores, from erected or constructed towers, rocks and other massive claptrap,” he had written to Busoni in one of his most vehement letters. “My music must be brief. Concise! In two notes: not built, but ‘expressed’!!”

Whether Webern or Berg, Schoenberg’s leading pupils, knew of the content of this letter is moot, for it contains sentiments that Schoenberg would repeat elsewhere. Certainly, his two charges followed its lead, with Webern, as ever, proving the most dogged of disciples: the Op. 7 pieces represent an almost literal conversion of Schoenberg’s rallying call into musical terms. At times, there are just a handful of notes, where once there might have been a flowing first subject. And yet lyricism is far from banished, as is clear in the doleful vocalise of the Sehr langsam, before it fractures, becoming just two rocking notes. An unsmiling scherzo of sorts follows, alternating with vestiges of a trio-like cantabile, but the latter is silenced by ill-tempered flourishes, brusque violence too.

The angst of Mahler’s Alpine landscapes is translated into miniature in the third piece, the symphonist’s “aus der Ferne” (from the distance) becoming “kaum hörbar” (barely audible) and suggesting an almost Beckettian crisis. The violin then seeks to restore energy at the beginning of the fourth piece, though it is promptly dampened by the piano. In turn, the pianist repeats the violinist’s charge, before putting out his own fire. As a whole, the movement deftly mirrors the first piece, with Webern thereby providing his own form of cyclical return and a short but no less staggering response to the violin sonata.

Franck’s contribution to the genre, written in 1886, the same year as Brahms’s A-major work and sharing that tonality, is comparable in its genius of concision to the work of Webern, albeit taken to more full-blooded ends. The entire root of its material is to be found in intervals at the beginning of the yearning first movement. Indeed, this section of the Sonata was originally conceived as an introduction, a motivic honeypot, for the whole work.

The piece was written as a wedding present for the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, who as well as being one of the Belgian-born Franck’s cherished “bande” was a close friend of Enescu’s. A play-through of the Sonata took place at the marriage itself, in September 1886, before the official premiere a few months later, on a dark afternoon in the unlit Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Ysaÿe and his pianist, Marie-Léontine Bordes-Pène, had not reached Franck’s work, the final piece on the program, by the time the light failed. They were therefore forced to play the first movement much faster than the specified marking and, by the end of the Sonata, with the room entirely dark, had to perform from memory.

Despite these trying circumstances, it was, by all accounts, an extraordinary event, unfolding with “mystic intensity” in the “winter twilight,” according to one report. So impressed was Franck with the premiere that he even adopted the performers’ tempo marking in the first movement when it came to publication. Following its wistful music and scudding modulations, passions left (nearly) unspoken, the ensuing Allegro turns those initial gestures—revolving around a third—into a torrid stream, shifting from D minor to D major. Throughout, the yearning tones of the first movement brim to the surface, with its melancholy keeping outspoken anger (or premature triumph) in check.

The key of the second movement’s commotion is presented again at the beginning of the Recitativo-Fantasia, providing yet more recollections of what has gone before, as well as imagining new melodies from old motifs at its key-changing close. Such vision befits the freer form of this movement but likewise begins to turn our focus to how the Sonata will end. For if the work can appear somewhat front-loaded, Franck defies any such reading with an amazing display in the finale, not only presenting two versions of the basic material in canon—said by some to represent the relationship between Ysaÿe and his new wife—but also incorporating melodies from the third movement. And then everything is united by the Sonata’s exultant close.