The Many Faces of the Violin

Works by Ysaÿe, Messiaen, Berio, and Strauss

Harry Haskell

The violin belatedly came into its own as a solo instrument in the 18th century, at the hands of such brilliant (and chiefly Italian) composer-violinists as Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi. Nineteenth-century audiences fell under the spell of the “cult of virtuosity” epitomized by Nicolò Paganini, Pablo Sarasate, Eugène Ysaÿe, and other concert-hall idols of the Romantic era. By the late 1800s, when Ysaÿe and Richard Strauss wrote the two works that bookend tonight’s program, the image of the globe-trotting superstar violinist, executing dazzling feats of technical derring-do, was firmly established in popular culture. If the late Romantic ethos fused poetry and virtuosity, 20th-century composers like Olivier Messiaen and Luciano Berio created a different kind of synthesis, combining up-to-date serial procedures and formal structures with innovative instrumental techniques and sonorities that nevertheless remained audibly linked to tradition.

A Prismatic Elegy

Few performers have left a more lasting mark on the repertory for their instrument than the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. Dozens of composers, chiefly French and Belgian, were inspired by his formidable technique, impeccable musicianship, and adventurous taste. Among the major works written for or dedicated to him are Debussy’s String Quartet, Chausson’s Poème, sonatas by Franck and

Lekeu, the first string quartets of Saint-Saëns and d’Indy, and Fauré’s Piano Quintet No. 1. Ysaÿe’s own compositional style was firmly rooted in the soil of late Romanticism. Although most of his music features the solo violin, his oeuvre also includes a number of chamber and orchestral works, as well as an opera that was staged in Brussels shortly before his death in 1931. Poème élégiaque, composed in the early 1890s and dedicated to Fauré, is the first of Ysaÿe’s small-scale tone poems for sundry combinations of instruments. These richly expressive single-movement essays gave him unfettered freedom to explore the world of pure emotion and sound. “The ‘poem’ form has always attracted me,” Ysaÿe explained, noting that it “is subject to none of the restrictions imposed by the hallowed sonata form of the concerto. It can be dramatic or lyrical, for by its very nature it is romantic and impressionistic; it allows for weeping and singing, for depicting light and shadow—it is a refracting prism. It is free, it lays no restrictions on the composer, who is able to express feelings and images outside any literary framework.”

Poème élégiaque opens with a darkly urgent violin melody in D minor, accompanied by agitated flutterings in the piano, that surges to an impassioned climax before falling back into an uneasy repose. An unobtrusive modulation to the harmonically remote key of B-flat minor transports us into a new section subtitled “Scène funèbre,” whose sultry sonorities are enhanced by the violin’s scordatura, with the bottom G string tuned down to F. (A group of Ysaÿe’s pupils played this somber, dirgelike interlude at his funeral in Brussels.) The violinist’s increasingly virtuosic rhapsodizing culminates in a reprise of the “funeral” music in octave double-stops marked triple forte, whereupon the two themes converge in the work’s concluding section, which winds down on a chain of sparkling trills, like an extended sigh. In its blend of elegiac tenderness and technical bravura, Poème élégiaque exemplifies Ysaÿe’s commitment to “combining musical interest with virtuosity on a large scale.”

A Wedding Present and an Homage to Bach

Olivier Messiaen was the vital link in French music between the free, luminous harmonies of the impressionists and the tightly organized serialist procedures favored by the post–World War II avant-garde. A devout Catholic, he served for more than six decades as organist of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Paris. The intensity of his spiritual life is reflected in such works as the piano cycle Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus (Twenty Aspects of the Infant Jesus) and the opera Saint François d’Assise, as well as in the Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time), a paean to eternal peace that he composed in a German concentration camp in 1941.

In the early 1930s, Messiaen began giving recitals with the violinist and composer Claire Delbos. They had met as students at the Paris Conservatoire and soon fell in love; Messiaen composed the Thème et variations as a wedding present for his adored “Mi” in 1932. (Four years later, he would pay a more elaborate homage to Delbos in the song cycle Poèmes pour Mi.) The duet had a forceful impact on the young Pierre Boulez, who made up his mind to study with Messiaen after a single hearing. The violin introduces the theme, long-breathed and sensuous, which floats languidly atop the piano’s delicately pulsing chords. The piano takes the lead in the first of five increasingly animated variations and thereafter plays a role commensurate with the violin’s. As the variations venture farther and farther afield, the focus shifts from the theme to Messiaen’s shimmering modal harmonies, contrapuntal textures, and incisive rhythms. At last the work comes full circle: the lyrical melody returns in a higher register and swells to an ecstatic climax before dissolving into silence.

A pioneer in the emerging fields of electronic and electro-acoustic music in the second half of the 20th century, Luciano Berio drew inspiration from sources as disparate as twelve-tone music, bel canto opera, and semiotics. Although a hand injury sustained at the tail end of World War II put paid to his ambition of becoming a concert pianist, he continued to mine the instrument’s expressive resources in a series of works whose idiosyncratic harmonies, timbres, and gestures are often infused with a keen sense of drama. Sequenza VIII for Solo Violin, composed in 1976, is one of 14 similarly titled pieces designed to explore and exploit the idiomatic personalities of various instruments. The Italian composer described his 14-minute tour de force as a tribute to Bach’s great D-minor Chaconne, a series of elaborately wrought variations underpinned by a simple repeating bass line: “Sequenza VIII is built around two notes (A and B), which—as in a chaconne—act as a compass in the work’s rather diversified and elaborate itinerary, where polyphony is no longer virtual but real, and where the soloist must make the listener constantly aware of the history behind each instrumental gesture. Sequenza VIII, therefore, becomes inevitably a tribute to that musical apex which is the Ciaccona from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita in D minor, where—historically—past, present, and future violin techniques coexist.”

A sonically rich amalgam of stasis and motion, Berio’s work traces a far-ranging trajectory from the monotonal iterations of A at the beginning to the final dissonant double-stopping of A and B. As with Bach’s masterpiece, the effect is of musical journey in which, as T. S. Eliot wrote, “the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”

A Straussian Watershed

A disciple of Wagner and Liszt, Richard Strauss kept the embers of late Romanticism glowing long into the 20th century. (He died in 1949, leaving as his musical epitaph the voluptuously nostalgic Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra.) Following Liszt’s lead, he established his avant-garde credentials in the late 1800s with a series of lushly orchestrated symphonic tone poems, including Don Juan, Also sprach Zarathustra, and Ein Heldenleben. By the end of the century, Strauss was celebrated both at home and abroad as Germany’s leading modernist composer, and premieres of his works were eagerly anticipated. Although he rejected the more radical innovations of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, he continued to break new musical, dramatic, and psychological ground in the early 1900s in operas such as Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, and Ariadne auf Naxos

In addition to the operas and tone poems for which he is best known, Strauss produced a handful of appealing chamber works, all written before his 24th birthday. Taking a break from his duties as a second-string conductor at the Munich Court Opera, he began work on the Op. 18 Violin Sonata in mid-1887 and finished it early that autumn, while vacationing with relatives in the country. Dedicated to Strauss’s chemist cousin Robert Pschorr, the Sonata followed hard on the heels of his orchestral travelogue Aus Italien. Together, the two works marked a watershed in Strauss’s artistic development, establishing the sensuous, richly chromatic style with which he would be identified for the rest of his life. The Sonata was his last piece of abstract chamber music; virtually all of his later instrumental works would be inspired by extramusical literary or philosophical programs.

The young composer’s technical prowess is on display in the opening Allegro, with its driving rhythms, restless chromatic harmonies, and densely textured piano writing. Although Strauss pays lip service to traditional musical forms and thematic development, the Sonata constantly pushes against the boundaries of convention. The second movement, aptly titled “Improvisation,” is by turns lyrical and dramatic, the violin’s soaring cantilena underpinned by delicate, Chopinesque filigree in the piano. The exuberant finale is based on an athletic motif that bears a strong family resemblance to the opening theme of Strauss’s 1889 tone poem Don Juan.

A former performing arts editor for Yale University Press, Harry Haskell is a program annotator for Carnegie Hall in New York, the Brighton Festival in England, and other venues, and the author of several books, including The Early Music Revival: A History, winner of the 2014 Prix des Muses awarded by the Fondation Singer-Polignac.