About the Composer
Bach was in his early 30s and already enjoyed widespread renown as an organist when he accepted an appointment as Kapellmeister, or director of music, to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen in 1717. The young composer felt lucky to be in the employ of a “gracious prince who both loved and knew music.” It was during his six happy years in Cöthen that Bach wrote much of his most beloved instrumental music, including the “Brandenburg” Concertos, the solo suites and sonatas for unaccompanied violin and cello, and the sonatas for violin and keyboard, BWV 1014–1019. All were grouped in sets of six, which the systematic composer evidently intended to illustrate various genres of chamber music.
About the Work
Bach’s early chamber music for violin was no doubt written for a member of the small but excellent court orchestra at Cöthen. Although Bach himself, according to his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, played the violin “clearly and penetratingly,” it is questionable whether his technique was equal to the daunting challenges posed by his own music for the instrument. However, one can easily imagine the composer working out intricate passages on his fine violin by Jacob Stainer, a leading violin maker of the Baroque period. Bach’s proficiency on both string and keyboard instruments proved useful when he became director of the Leipzig collegium musicum in 1729 and began presenting regular concerts of secular music—including the sonata on tonight’s program—to a paying public.
A Closer Listen
In constructing his exemplary set of six sonatas, Bach took pains to achieve an overall tonal equilibrium, composing three sonatas in major keys and three in minor. The sequence of the sonatas likewise reflects his penchant for order and symmetry; for instance, the major-key pairing of the second and third sonatas (BWV 1015 and 1016) is balanced by the fourth and fifth sonatas (BWV 1017 and 1018) in minor keys. The Sonata in E-Major has a decidedly virtuosic flavor. In the opening Adagio, the violin’s floridly embellished melodic line mimics the vocal acrobatics of an 18th-century operatic diva. The ensuing Allegro is an invigorating three-voice fugue whose jaunty theme is volleyed back and forth between the two instruments (and between the keyboardist’s two hands). The Adagio ma non tanto casts a more seductive spell with its insistently rising and falling triplet figures in plaintive C-sharp minor, and the sonata ends on a bravura note with another playfully imitative Allegro.
About the Composer
Busoni was one of the most complex, visionary, and unclassifiable figures in the history of music. Italian by birth but Germanic in temperament, he was at once a prodigious piano virtuoso, pathbreaking composer, gifted writer, and musical thinker of great depth and originality. In 1907, he published his Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, a short but influential manifesto that served as a clarion call for forward-looking musicians. A soulmate of Liszt, Busoni was endowed with a restless, experimental mind that expressed itself in both words and music, enabling him to anticipate such modernist innovations as microtonal harmony and electronic music. Thanks largely to his clarinetist father, who introduced him to Bach at an early age, Busoni tempered his futuristic leanings with a solid grounding in music of the past. He was one of the first modern virtuosos to perform Mozart’s concertos regularly, and over some three decades he edited and transcribed most of Bach’s keyboard music for the piano.
About the Work
Busoni evinced his lifelong reverence for Bach in the second of his two violin sonatas, dating from the tail end of the 19th century: The last movement is a set of variations on the chorale “Wie wohl ist mir, o Freund der Seelen” (“How blessed I am, O friend of spirits”), from the notebook Bach compiled for his wife, Anna Magdalena. (Busoni would return to the chorale in 1916, this time as the basis for a two-piano “improvisation.”) In the late 1890s, his burgeoning career as a concert pianist took up most of his time and energy, but he had already produced a number of chamber works, including three string quartets and the Violin Sonata No. 1 of 1890. Despite the acknowledged excellence of the latter work—it won the prestigious Rubinstein Prize at the St. Petersburg Conservatory—Busoni considered its sequel the marker of his artistic maturity. In addition to Bach, the E-Minor Sonata evokes the music of César Franck, whose popular A-Major Violin Sonata of 1886 epitomized the spirit of French Romanticism.
A Closer Listen
The muscular lyricism, quasi-symphonic sonorities, and sensuous chromaticism of the Second Violin Sonata have a distinctly Franckian feel, as does Busoni’s use of thematic recall to tie his loosely organized work together. (It’s unlikely that Busoni was consciously influenced by the French composer, though it’s worth noting that he played a series of concerts in Paris in 1898, the year he began writing the Second Sonata.) A light, lyrical impulse dominates the first movement, which sets the overall tone for the sonata in its variety of themes and moods. After a momentary pause, Busoni plunges into a fast, pounding tarantella in 6/8 meter, like a feverish dance of death. Its breathless energy eventually dissolves in a wistful reminiscence of a graceful, Franck-like melody heard earlier in the Presto. From its tranquil wake emerge the sturdy four-bar phrases of the Bach chorale (whose text just happens to be a meditation on mortality), followed by four variations of contrasting characters and a luminous, ethereal coda marked apoteotico (“like an apotheosis”). The sonata culminates in a Bachian fugue that neatly encompasses past, present, and future.
About the Composer
Born in 1906, Shostakovich came of age in the 1920s, during the brief halcyon period of the workers’ state. Outwardly, he remained a loyal citizen of the Soviet Union, alternately lionized and demonized by the Communist Party’s cultural apparatchiks. Yet throughout his life, the highly strung composer played an elaborate game of feint and attack with the Soviet establishment, cannily balancing his more abrasive, cutting-edge music with a stream of reassuringly patriotic and artistically conservative works. His musical language—fundamentally tonal yet laced with pungently dissonant harmonies and raw kinetic energy—epitomizes the turbulent, existentialist spirit of
W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety. Like Mahler, with whom he is often bracketed, Shostakovich was a composer of extremes: Many of his works juxtapose jarringly disparate styles and elements. It is in the reconciling of these opposing tendencies—the harmony he forged out of the discordant raw materials of human life and emotion—that much of the power and beauty of Shostakovich’s music lie.
About the Work
In the “thaw” that followed the death of Stalin in 1953, Shostakovich reached a precarious entente with his political overlords. Free to travel abroad, he belatedly established relationships with Benjamin Britten and other Western composers. It was through Britten that he acquired his late-in-life interest in 12-tone music—not as a comprehensive theory of composition, but as a supplement to more traditional compositional techniques. Britten used a 12-note theme to striking effect in his opera The Turn of the Screw, which Shostakovich saw in Edinburgh in 1962. Six years later, the Russian composer adopted the technique in his own Violin Sonata and String Quartet No. 12. The sonata was conceived as a 60th-birthday present for violinist David Oistrakh, who had premiered Shostakovich’s Second Violin Concerto in 1967. Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter gave the first performance of the sonata in Moscow on May 3, 1969. Composer and performers were depicted on a Soviet stamp issued to commemorate the premiere, a sure sign of Shostakovich’s hard-won eminence in the eyes of the Kremlin.
A Closer Listen
The Violin Sonata is cast in three sections, with a savage scherzo sandwiched between two longer and largely introspective slow movements. The latter are both based on ominous-sounding 12-note themes, which are presented at the outset in the clearest possible way, as if to advertise Shostakovich’s new compositional toy. There is, however, nothing playful about this bleak and uncompromising work, even if flashes of the composer’s characteristically sardonic humor occasionally pierce the funereal gloom. The opening Andante, with its hollow textures and tortured lyricism, projects a mood at once aimless and purposeful. In sharp contrast is the madcap Allegretto, whose slashing dissonances convey a raw sense of anger that Shostakovich seldom displayed so openly. The finale is the last of his mighty, Bach-inspired passacaglias: a variation form that features a repeating melody taken up by each instrument in turn. In one variation, the players switch roles, the piano presenting the theme in octaves while the violin supplies the harmonies. Later, each player has a cadenza-like solo variation. The sonata ends with an echo of a crisp drumbeat figure from the first movement and two unforgettable shudders, like death rattles, as the music expires.
—Harry Haskell
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