Over the course of his career, Mozart wrote some three dozen sonatas for violin and piano. Most were designed to showcase his virtuosity at the keyboard and cast the violin in a decidedly subservient role. But in 1784, Mozart met his match in the brilliant Italian violinist Regina Strinasacchi, who had recently arrived in Vienna; it was her exceptional artistry that inspired him to write the B-flat–Major Sonata. Strinasacchi and Mozart gave the first performance of the sonata at the Kärntnertor Theater on April 29, 1784. By all accounts, she was especially in her element in the stately Andante movement. As Mozart’s father observed, “No one can play an adagio with more feeling than she does. Her whole heart and soul are in the melody that she is playing, and her tone is as beautiful as it is powerful.”
The premiere of the sonata gave rise to one of the more enduring legends in the Mozart literature. According to his biographer Hermann Abert, Mozart was dilatory in copying out the piece, and “it was only with difficulty that the violinist was able to extort [her] part from the composer on the eve of the concert. She had to rehearse it on her own the next morning. Mozart himself turned up at the concert with a sketch containing only the violin line and a few accompanying chords and modulations, playing the work virtually entirely from memory and without any rehearsal, a feat observed by the emperor in his box by means of his lorgnette. In spite of this, the performers achieved an excellent rapport and were much applauded.” Whether true or apocryphal, this fetching anecdote has long given the “Strinasacchi” Sonata a special place in Mozart’s oeuvre.
Light in weight and mood, the sonata’s two outer movements share a spirit of good-humored competition, the two players matching wits in decorous dialogue and nipping impishly at each other’s heels. In some respects, K. 454 resembles a miniature violin concerto. A majestic introduction sets the stage for the exuberantly athletic Allegro and offers a foretaste of the sonata’s exquisite slow movement. The final Allegretto is a cheery rondo that culminates in a playful sprint to the finish line, the piano’s cascading 16th-note runs outpacing the violin’s sprightly triplets. But the expressive energy of the sonata is concentrated in the central Andante. The violin presents the principal theme, a broad melody in E-flat major, which the piano picks up and elaborates. A moment later, the violinist strikes off in a bold new direction, once again challenging the pianist to follow suit. In the ensuing game of imitation and variation, each instrument alternately takes the lead as the music journeys through a succession of tonal centers before returning to the home key.
Despite rapidly deteriorating health and recurring bouts of depression, Schubert produced one masterpiece after another in the last year or so of his all-too-short life. In addition to the two piano trios that cemented his reputation as Beethoven’s peer in the field of chamber music, these late works include the brooding song cycle Winterreise, the effervescent concert aria “Der Hirt auf dem Felsen,” the last three piano sonatas, the great String Quintet in C Major, and the brilliantly virtuosic Fantasy in C Major.
Composed in December 1827, the Fantasy was intended first of all for Schubert’s wide circle of friends, who gathered in private homes and public houses throughout Vienna for fellowship and music making. At these intimate Schubertiads, the composer was assured of a sympathetic reception for his work. Public performances were another matter. When violinist Josef Slavík and pianist Carl Maria von Bocklet premiered the C-Major Fantasy in early 1828, one newspaper tartly commented that the piece “occupied rather too much of the time a Viennese is prepared to devote to pleasures of the mind.”
The Fantasy is indeed of substantial, almost sonata-like proportions, and its corresponding wealth of themes showcases Schubert’s unflagging melodic genius. The centerpiece is a set of mesmerizing variations on a song he had written several years earlier; the majestic tune in A-flat major catches the listener by surprise after the playful antics of the preceding Allegretto in A minor. That, in turn, is preceded by a magical introduction in which the violin’s soaring melody is enmeshed in a web of shimmering tremolos in the piano. As is often the case in Schubert’s music, the flickering interplay of lyricism and drama is enhanced by the juxtaposition of major and minor keys.
A disciple of Wagner and Liszt, 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 awaited. Although he rejected the more radical innovations of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, he continued to break new musical, dramatic, and psychological ground 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 year. 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 he was vacationing with relatives in the country. Dedicated to Strauss’s 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 literary or philosophical programs.
The young Strauss’s technical prowess is on display in the opening Allegro, with its driving rhythms, restless chromatic harmonies, and densely textured piano writing. Although the composer pays lip service to traditional musical forms and thematic development, the sonata constantly pushes against the bounds 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.
Thirteen years younger than Debussy, Ravel made his mark in Paris at the turn of the 20th century with a group of brilliantly crafted piano pieces, including the Pavane pour une infante défunte and Jeux d’eau, and the masterful String Quartet. Over the ensuing decades, he refined his art, ruthlessly pruning away superfluous notes and gestures in search of the definitive clarity that was his professed ideal. By the time Debussy died in 1918, Ravel was widely hailed as his successor and the new standard-bearer for French music. He shared with Debussy a poetic sensibility and a fondness for sensuous, impressionistic timbres and textures. But unlike the senior composer, Ravel was a classicist at heart. Many of his works evoke composers and styles of the past, even as they incorporate ultramodern harmonies and compositional styles.
Around the time he heard the jazz band that inspired his Violin Sonata, Ravel struck up a friendship with British-Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Arányi. It was her captivating renditions of gypsy music that prompted him to write this colorful and bracingly virtuosic rhapsody in the gypsy style (the title Tzigane means “gypsy” in French). “This Tzigane must be a piece of great virtuosity,” Ravel told the violinist. “Certain passages can produce brilliant effects, provided that it is possible to perform them—which I’m not always sure of.” Although Ravel frequently consulted with d’Arányi while the piece was in progress, she reportedly received the finished score only a couple of days before giving the premiere in London on April 26, 1924. On that occasion, the music’s gypsy flavor was enhanced by the use of a modified piano called a luthéal, outfitted with a device that made it sound something like a Hungarian cimbalom or dulcimer.
Tzigane opens with a lengthy cadenza-like solo that explores the violin’s sultry lower register. After what sounds like an extended warmup, the violinist introduces a passionate, gypsy-flavored melody that grows increasingly animated and intense. As the music gradually climbs into the stratosphere, double-stops, roulades, and other virtuosic accoutrements offer a foretaste of the pyrotechnical display that lies ahead. The improvisatory feeling of the music is a reminder that Ravel incorporated many of d’Arányi’s improvised embellishments into the score. The violin part eventually subsides on a quiet double trill, to which the piano responds with rippling passagework. Out of this ethereal duet emerges the dance-like main theme, which Ravel presents in a series of bravura variations, chock full of surprises and culminating in a dazzling exhibition of violinistic fireworks.
—Harry Haskell
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