Beethoven’s 10 sonatas for violin and piano date from the years 1797–1812, when he emerged from the shadow of Haydn and Mozart and forged the boldly “heroic” style of his so-called middle period. The first nine sonatas are concentrated in the three years before and after the turn of the 19th century; in addition to demonstrating Beethoven’s virtuosity on the keyboard, these early works attest to his rapid maturation as a composer. Just as his Op. 18 string quartets of 1798–1800 at once acknowledge his debt to Haydn and proclaim his artistic independence, so Beethoven’s violin sonatas both emulate and transcend their 18th-century models.
Published in 1799, the three Op. 12 sonatas were dedicated to the court Kapellmeister Antonio Salieri, with whom Beethoven studied on and off for a decade after moving to Vienna in 1792. Although tame by comparison with Beethoven’s later chamber music, the sonatas grated on the ears of one contemporary listener, who heard in them “a striving for strange modulations, an objection to customary associations, a heaping up of difficulties on difficulties till one loses all patience and enjoyment.” After poring diligently over the scores, the critic complained that he “felt like a man who had hoped to make a promenade with a genial friend through a tempting forest and found himself barred every minute by inimical barriers.”
The Allegro con brio opens with a conventional flourish, but soon veers off into less familiar territory, juxtaposing smoothly conjunct motion in one voice with exuberantly athletic leaps in the other. Harmonically, the movement is decidedly wayward, straying repeatedly from the straight and narrow path of the home key as the two instruments lead each other on a merry chase. The slow movement is a set of four variations on a genial A-major theme. Beethoven first festoons the melody with lacy filigree, then shifts to the minor mode for a stormy interlude in which mighty billows of sound surge and crest. The soft syncopations of the last variation make a sharp contrast with the jaunty triple-time finale, a high-spirited Rondo full of unpredictable twists and turns.
Prokofiev spent much of his life balanced precariously between two stools, his music being regarded as too conservative by some and too advanced by others. Having established himself before World War I as a leader of the Russian avant-garde with works like the Scythian Suite and the Second Piano Concerto, Prokofiev turned his back on the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution and immersed himself in the cosmopolitan culture of the West. In Europe he soon found himself eclipsed by his fellow émigré Igor Stravinsky, while in the United States he competed for attention with Sergei Rachmaninoff. Many of his most popular works date from this period of self-imposed exile, including the fairy-tale opera The Love for Three Oranges, the Third Piano Concerto, and the Lieutenant Kijé Suite. But the pull of Mother Russia remained strong, and in 1936 Prokofiev returned to a hero’s welcome in Moscow. Within a few years, the political winds changed and he and his music came under withering ideological criticism. He died in 1953, ironically on the same day as his diabolical patron and persecutor, Stalin.
By the time Prokofiev began sketching his F-Minor Violin Sonata in 1938, two years after his return to the Soviet Union, he had already written his two violin concertos and the Sonata for Two Violins, Op. 56. He dedicated the Op. 80 Sonata to the great Ukrainian violinist David Oistrakh, who gave the premiere with pianist Lev Oborin in Moscow on October 23, 1946. The work was well received and won the composer a coveted Stalin Prize in 1947. Shortly after, however, the Soviet Union’s cultural thought police began ratcheting up the pressure on Prokofiev. In a formal condemnation issued in 1948, he, Dmitri Shostakovich, and several other prominent composers were charged with trafficking in “formalist distortions and antidemocratic tendencies.” Although Prokofiev desperately tried to rehabilitate himself by issuing a public mea culpa, he and his music remained under a cloud for the remaining five years of his life.
A somber mood prevails throughout this virtuosic four-movement sonata, intermittently dispelled by passages of radiant lyricism. Prokofiev’s aggressively modernist (but fundamentally tonal) language is spiked with pungent dissonances and driving, percussive rhythms. The plodding, funereal theme of the opening Andante assai is subtly transfigured in the movement’s second half, as the muted violin drapes a delicate tracery of runs over glacial piano chords—a sonority characteristic of Prokofiev. Equally typical is the broad, soaring melody that surges up unexpectedly in the aptly named Allegro brusco, tempering the movement’s peasant-like vitality and crudeness. The last two movements are a similar study in contrasts: The gently oscillating arpeggio patterns of the Andante make an effective foil for the restlessly shifting meters of the final Allegrissimo, a deliciously off-balance moto perpetuo that comes to rest on a tranquil recollection of the sonata’s beginning.
In both his music and his life, Ernest Bloch served as a conduit linking the conservative traditions of Eastern European Jewry with the secular melting-pot culture of his adopted home across the Atlantic. Born in Geneva, Bloch grew increasingly attuned to his Jewish heritage as a conservatory student in Belgium (where his teachers included the great violinist Eugène Ysaÿe), Germany, and France around the turn of the 20th century. After moving to the United States in 1916, he became an American citizen and eventually ended his distinguished teaching career at the University of California, Berkeley. Along the way, the explicitly Judaic elements that had characterized such early works as Trois poèmes juifs, the “Israel” Symphony, and Schelomo gradually made room for the more cosmopolitan idiom represented by his two neo-Baroque concerti grossi, the rhapsodic America for chorus and orchestra, and a wide range of “abstract” chamber and symphonic works.
Composed in 1923, “Nigun” is the second of three short “pictures of Hasidic life” that comprise Bloch’s Baal Shem suite. The title of the piece refers to the improvisatory song associated with Hasidic Judaism, whose founder, Baal Shem Tov, espoused an ecstatic, personalized form of spirituality that challenged the authority of Talmudic scholars. Bloch’s brand of Judaism was similarly mystical and undoctrinaire. “It is the Jewish soul that interests me,” he wrote, “the complex glowing agitated soul that I feel vibrating throughout the Bible; the freshness and naïveté of the Patriarchs; the violence that is evident in the prophetic books, the Jew’s savage love of justice; the despair of the Preacher in Jerusalem; the sorrow and immensity of the Book of Job, the sensuality of the Song of Songs. All this is in us; all this is in me, and it is the better part of me. It is all that I endeavor to hear in myself and to transcribe in my music: the venerable emotion of the race that slumbers way down in our souls.”
In fusing the idioms of synagogue and concert hall, “Nigun” translates the spiritual intensity of religious devotion into a secular context. After a slow, lugubrious introduction marked lamentoso (“mournful”), the violin breaks into an agitated, strenuously virtuosic cadenza that soars above the piano’s rumbling tremolos. Thereafter, the violinist plays the role of cantor while Bloch’s musical vignette takes on the aspect of an extended cantillation, adorned with the grace notes and augmented seconds characteristic of the “Jewish” mode. The quasi-hypnotic repetition of melodic motifs and gestures accentuates the music’s rhapsodic character. After building to an ecstatic climax, a musical emblem of oneness with the divine, “Nigun” falls to rest on a quiet D-major chord.
By his early 20s, César Franck had several widely acclaimed works under his belt, including a series of piano trios designed to showcase his prowess at the keyboard. Nonetheless, he was slow to win recognition as a leading figure of the French Romantic school. Not until his 50th year did he achieve the equivalent of a tenured position as professor of organ at the Paris Conservatoire, where his pupils would include Debussy and Bizet. Among his best-known works are the majestic Prélude, fugue et variation for organ, the ebullient Variations symphoniques for piano and orchestra, and the Lisztian symphonic poem Le Chasseur maudit.
Although Franck wrote a mere a handful of chamber works, clustered at the beginning and end of his career, they include some of his greatest and most characteristic creations. The A-Major Sonata of 1886, which many consider his masterpiece, was dedicated to Belgian violin virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe. Such was its éclat that it was soon taken up by cellists, violists, and flutists, making it one of the most frequently performed works in the recital repertoire. It figures memorably in literature as well: In John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga, it is Irene’s playing of Franck’s “divine third movement” that triggers Young Jolyon’s fateful decision to tell his son about the tragedy that has loomed over their family since before his birth.
The Violin Sonata is deeply indebted to Ysaÿe’s purity of tone, liquid phrasing, and tasteful reticence. After hearing him play the opening movement, Franck adjusted the tempo marking to a livelier Allegretto ben moderato, imparting an undercurrent of urgency to the gently undulating principal theme. For all its rich chromaticism and quasi-symphonic textures, the sonata has a chaste, limpid quality that permeates even the restless, driving intensity of the second-movement Allegro. The work lacks a true slow movement. In its place, Franck injected an oasis of repose in the form of a spacious minor-mode meditation that revisits earlier thematic material. Freely declamatory in style, the Recitativo—Fantasia mediates between the muscular lyricism of the first two movements and the disciplined canonic writing of the final Allegretto poco mosso.
—Harry Haskell
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