Late-Period Wonders

Works for Violin and Piano

Thomas May

For their first-ever duo collaboration, Guy Braunstein and Martha Argerich have chosen three works from the literature for violin and piano, each of which dates from the final decade of their respective composers’ careers.

Robert Schumann ignited a late-in-life love affair with the sviolin with his astonishingly rapid creation of the A-minor Sonata. According to the biographer John Daverio, “Schumann’s later music recapitulates, in microcosm, the achievements of an entire creative life.” The Sonata thus is a work that “with its alternation of Florestinian and Eusebian movements, nicely exemplifies the Davidsbündler persona from Schumann’s early years” in ripe retrospect. The Davidsbündler were the composer’s fictional society of artists fighting against the Philistinism of the modern era, in which he integrated his “split personality” as Florestan and Eusebius (the former outgoing and impassioned, the latter given to inner reflection).

Sergei Prokofiev, like Schumann, found his instrumental alter ego in the piano. But when he looked back over his output amid the upheaval of the Second World War, he decided to compensate for having neglected the flute. The resulting composition, the source for his D-major Violin Sonata, pays homage to the Neoclassical idiom Prokofiev initially forged early in his career—but from the perspective of his later persona as a Soviet artist. And César Franck, also writing from the viewpoint of a master of the keyboard, channeled his creative power into a handful of exquisitely wrought final works that include his sole Violin Sonata.

At the beginning of 1850, Ferdinand David, the violinist who had served as a consultant for and premiered their late mutual friend Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, asked Robert Schumann to write something for violin and piano: “There is a real lack of good new pieces, and I can think of no one who would do it better than you,” he wrote, adding that the splendid result would be just the thing for him and Clara Schumann, Robert’s celebrity pianist wife, to play together.

Schumann took up David’s proposal more than a year later, having since moved his family to Düsseldorf for what would be the unfortunate last position of his public career, as that city’s music director (from which post he was relinquished in 1853). In September 1851 —within a mere five days—he composed the first of his three violin sonatas. The much longer Sonata No. 2 followed a few weeks later, and in 1853 Schumann completed No. 3, though this was withheld by Clara and remained unpublished until 1956.

These creative bursts reflect Schumann’s tendency to focus on particular genres during a concentrated period—as at the start of the previous decade, when he first began writing chamber music with his three string quartets in 1842. The aforementioned John Daverio comments that Schumann’s renewed interest in instrumental chamber music in the fall of 1851—“the genre in which public and private styles achieve an ideal balance”—is the natural result of “the alternation of larger and smaller forms” found in the composer’s output since he had moved to Düsseldorf. Schumann created his Third Symphony (the “Rhenish”), for example, within months of resettling there—and this score left a mark on the finale of the A-minor Violin Sonata.

Clara Schumann and Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski, a member of the orchestra in Düsseldorf and friend of the composer, premiered the new sonata at a private gathering in October 1851. Wasielewski would write the first Schumann biography, in which he praised it highly, emphasizing its “melancholy atmosphere” (a mood Clara later identified with the late chamber music of Brahms). For her part, following this first performance, Clara commented on the “very elegiac first movement and the charming second movement,” but confessed that the third was “less appealing and more stubborn, more recalcitrant.”

Clara’s judgment was apparently shared by her husband, who complained that he, too, felt the last movement did not work and thus immediately returned to the genre to write the Sonata No. 2, “which I hope has turned out better.” He revised the score of the A-minor work before the first public performance, given by Clara and Ferdinand David in Leipzig in March 1852. Clara afterwards expressed a newfound appreciation for the finale. This is the version that was published as Op. 105, under the title “Sonata in A minor for Pianoforte and Violin.” The Second Sonata, which was dedicated to David, reverses the order (“Grand Sonata for Violin and Pianoforte”). Schumann’s late-period love affair with the violin would also inspire the Fantasy and Violin Concerto in 1853.

The A-minor Sonata is a taut, sophisticated composition in three movements. Schumann’s pronounced use of imitation tightly integrates the contributions from both instruments. The violin at once presents the main theme in its lower register, from which the first movement essentially unfolds (“with passionate expression”). The coda is especially notable, wavering between A major and minor before the field is ceded to the latter in a passage of dramatic concision.

Not unlike a later habit of Brahms, Schumann interpolates an intermezzo-like movement in lieu of a true slow movement (Allegretto—his only use of an Italian tempo indication in his violin sonatas). The leisured main idea in intermingled with two passages in the minor. The restless, rapid-fire finale, which gave Schumann the most trouble, begins with a rising idea that echoes an episode from the scherzo of the “Rhenish” Symphony. A rhapsodic new theme in E major emerges at the climax, shining a new light on the sonata’s opening theme as Schumann weaves the latter back into the coda.

A Wartime Sonata of Peaceful Neoclassicism

Of the several chamber works Sergei Prokofiev wrote for violin, only one was originally conceived as a sonata for violin and piano—the somber and haunting Sonata No. 1 in F minor, which he actually completed in 1946, after the more frequently heard Sonata No. 2. But the F-minor score was already in progress and so had laid claim to the designation “Sonata No. 1.” Earlier, the composer had transcribed the soprano line of his Five Melodies for voice and piano (1923) for violin. In 1932, he wrote the Sonata for Two Violins. The late so-called Sonata for Solo Violin (1947) was composed specifically as an educational piece commissioned by the government.

The Sonata No. 2 derives from a sonata Prokofiev wrote for flute and piano in 1943 (Op. 94), during the period of the Second World War when he had been evacuated with other artists to Alma-Ata (today known as Almaty) in Kazakhstan. In Central Asia, he continued with his interrupted ballet music for Cinderella and worked on two epic projects as well: his score for Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible and his opera War and Peace. Prokofiev undertook the Flute Sonata as a side project, since, he recalled, “I had long wished to write music for the flute, an instrument which I felt had been undeservedly neglected.” David Oistrakh, described by the composer as “one of our best violinists,” attended the premiere in December 1943 in Moscow, to which Prokofiev had returned in the fall. The performers were the flutist Nicolai Kharkovsky and Sviatoslav Richter. Oistrakh persuaded Prokofiev—whose long-gestating F-minor Sonata, also for the violinist, was not yet complete—to transform the piece into a violin sonata. Oistrakh supplied suggestions for passages that needed to be changed. “With a pencil, [Prokofiev] marked what he found suitable and made a few corrections. That is how—with a minimum of discussion—the violin version of the Sonata was completed,” the violinist recalled.

Most of the few changes to the original flute part involved bowing; the piano part remained unchanged. Oistrakh and pianist Lev Oborin premiered the result (referred to as Op. 94a or 94bis) in Moscow in June 1944. It quickly superseded the Flute Sonata in popularity and remains one of the composer’s best-known works. In his autobiography, Prokofiev said his aim in writing for the flute was to create “a sonata in delicate, fluid, classical style.” The D-major Sonata is in fact in the same key as his famous youthful breakthrough in lucid Neoclassicism, the “Classical” Symphony. Biographer Harlow Robinson notes that in its incarnation for violin and piano, the music is “more aggressive and biting than the original flute version, and loaded with technical difficulties for the violinist.” The four movements are tastefully proportioned, the most substantial coming first. Prokofiev casts it in clear-cut sonata-allegro form, presenting themes whose beauty is transparent. Along with his “classical” line, the writing manifests the lyrical “new simplicity” of the composer’s Soviet period: embedded even in the scherzo is a contrasting lyrical section, while the short Andante in F major recalls the composer’s admiration of Mozart. The biographer Daniel Jaffé also points to “a striking passage of bluesy rumination” and reminds us of Prokofiev’s admiration for jazz. The finale is a bold, vigorous Allegro con brio that again makes room for the ingratiating but never sentimental lyricism characteristic of this sonata.

A Priceless Wedding Gift

While the opera house was where French composers of the Romantic era expected to make their reputations, the legacy of César Franck—born only a dozen years after Schumann—rests on a handful of instrumental works. And although he started out as a variant of the exploited child prodigy, Franck is an exemplary “late bloomer” in that he was already well into his 50s when he started composing the masterpieces for which we remember him, including his sole mature contributions to the genres of the symphony, string quartet, piano quintet, and violin sonata. The Violin Sonata in A major dates from 1886, when he was 63 years old.

Not that Franck was passively waiting for a late-in-life blossoming of the remarkable musical gifts he had already started demonstrating as a young child. Born in Liège—nearly a decade before modern Belgium was established—Franck, at the instigation of his overbearing father, became a French citizen when he was a teenager. Franck père wanted young César to gain credentials from the Conservatoire and was simultaneously exploiting him (along with his violinist brother) through commercial concert promotions.

The virtuoso piano career desired by the senior Franck failed to take shape. César’s demeanor was, frankly, too introspective and modest to be comfortable in that role. He eventually found a niche through his various organ posts, being named organist at SainteClotilde in Paris in 1857 and building on his reputation as an improviser and composer of organ and sacred music.

Franck’s appointment as organ professor at the Conservatoire in 1872 signaled a new phase of intense creativity. In the wake of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, the desire to promote an authentic French style in instrumental music intensified. Franck’s synthesis of the Romantic legacy and classical forms made a profound mark on his devoted circle of students, part of a new generation of French composers.

Scores like the Violin Sonata and Piano Quintet burst with passions that were hard to square with the sober, pious figure that Franck’s reputation as an organist had encouraged. Rumors that the Quintet, for example, secretly encoded the composer’s infatuation with one of his pupils, the highly colorful Irish firebrand and fellow composer Augusta Holmès, generated scandal (and furnished the backdrop for the 1978 historical novel by Ronald Harwood, Cesar and Augusta). Franck composed the Violin Sonata as a wedding gift for the “king of the violin,” Eugène Ysaÿe (also born in Liège) and his wife. Ysaÿe and the pianist Marie-Léontine Bordes-Pène hastily rehearsed the new score to play it for the gathered wedding guests on September 26, 1886; the public premiere took place at an afternoon concert on December 16 at the Musée Moderne de Peinture in Brussels.

Vincent d’Indy, one of Franck’s most devoted followers, later described the dramatic circumstances of the performance, which nearly had to be canceled because darkness was falling and no artificial illumination was allowed in the museum: “The two artists, plunged into gloom … performed the last three movements from memory, with a fire and a passion the more astounding to the audience in that there was an absence of all externals which could enhance the performance. Music, wondrous and alone, held sovereign sway in the darkness of night.”

This ambitious Sonata is cast in four movements, with the first and second forming a slow-fast pairing that is even more pronounced with the third and fourth movements. In the latter pair, the fantasia-like third movement suggests a preludial function to the faster movement that follows—not unlike the older church sonata from the Baroque era. Yet alongside any archaic tendencies, Franck devises a tightly integrated narrative based on the cyclical reappearance and transformation of thematic material across the entire work— a “progressive” compositional technique advanced by Liszt, one of Franck’s early admirers.

Franck adapts the technique as well as the classical forms he draws on in highly personal ways. The violin lays out the germinal idea in the opening, barcarolle-like movement, which features subtle dialogue as the two instruments exchange different material. White-hot passion bursts forth in the ensuing, chromatically heaving Allegro. Franck, whose keyboard style reflects his unusually large hands, places extravagant demands on the pianist in particular in this movement.

The recitative-fantasy of the third movement introduces a memorably yearning phrase on the violin—a possible candidate for the “little phrase” from Vinteuil’s fictional Sonata that takes possession of the protagonist’s memory in Swann’s Way? (Franck was one of Proust’s favorite composers.) The finale starts off as a rondo based on a charming theme that is presented in decorous canonical exchanges between the instruments. But this music, too, grows impassioned as Franck recalls earlier ideas, including the “little phrase,” before concluding the Sonata—and his wedding gift—with the cheerful affirmation of the two partners.

Thomas May is a freelance writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work has been published internationally. He contributes to the programs of the Lucerne Festival as well as to The New York Times and Musical America.