Beethoven’s 10 sonatas for violin and piano date from the years 1797 to 1812, when he emerged from the shadow of Haydn and Mozart and forged the “heroic” style of his so-called middle period. It was as a barnstorming pianist that he first captured the imagination of Viennese audiences; no less a judge than keyboard virtuoso Wenzel Tomaschek was so bowled over by his playing that he couldn’t touch his own instrument for days. Yet Beethoven’s rapid maturation as a composer in the 1790s was no less impressive. By his 30th year, he had to his credit a clutch of masterpieces—including three piano concertos, six string quartets, and one symphony—that any composer would envy. Over the next dozen years, his increasing deafness notwithstanding, a flood of ambitious and formally innovative works flowed from his pen: the opera Fidelio, the Third (“Eroica”) Symphony and its three successors, the Violin Concerto, the three “Razumovsky” quartets, the “Waldstein” and “Appassionata” piano sonatas, and, not least, the “Kreutzer” Sonata.
In his first eight violin sonatas, Beethoven gradually moved away from the 18th-century sonata style, in which the violin was subordinate to the piano. With the “Kreutzer” Sonata of 1802–1803, number nine in the series, there is no longer any question that the two players are equal partners. In this case, the players were Beethoven himself and English violinist George Bridgetower, who met the composer in Vienna in the spring of 1803. Beethoven had already sketched the first two movements of the sonata, and when a concert with Bridgetower was arranged for late May, he hastily combined them with a ready-made finale he had written for another sonata in the same key. Both the work’s popular success and the exuberance of its violin writing owed much to Bridgetower’s virtuosity, as Beethoven freely acknowledged. Unfortunately, the two men later quarreled, prompting Beethoven to award the dedication and naming rights of the sonata to French virtuoso Rodolphe Kreutzer—who, ungratefully, refused to perform it.
Beethoven described the “Kreutzer” Sonata as having been written “almost in the manner of a concerto,” and a formidably difficult work it is indeed for violinist and pianist alike. As if in recognition of their equal status, the Adagio sostenuto introduction opens with a chordal phrase for the violin alone. The piano answers in kind, and together the two instruments insinuate a little two-note motif that we soon recognize as the germ of the Presto. The main part of the first movement is a tour de force that proceeds by fits and starts, moving between A minor and A major, with frequent lyrical interludes and a majestic second theme in Beethoven’s best heroic mode. The second movement—a genial set of variations on a lilting, syncopated theme in F major—is no less dazzling in its intricate, finger-twisting passagework. The final Presto, this time solidly in A major, bursts out of the gate in helter-skelter triple time. Its athletic rhythms, lively repartee, and explosive outbursts encapsulate the bravura spirit of the entire sonata.
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.
In the fall of 1850, the 40-year-old Schumann moved from Dresden to Düsseldorf to succeed Ferdinand Hiller as municipal music director. Although his new duties at first left little time for composing, he soon hit his stride. By the middle of the following year, one work after another was flowing from his pen, including the Third and Fourth symphonies (both begun earlier), the Cello Concerto, the G-Minor Piano Trio, and two sonatas for violin and piano, the first of which was completed on September 16, 1851.
Schumann seems to have rediscovered the violin in the last half-dozen years of his life. It was while he was at work on his Violin Concerto in the fall of 1853 that he met the young Johannes Brahms and proposed that they collaborate with a third composer—his pupil Albert Dietrich—on a sonata honoring the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim. Schumann later incorporated his contribution to their joint effort in his Violin Sonata No. 3. (Like the Violin Concerto, it was not published until long after his death.) Joachim was not Schumann’s only source of inspiration, however; the Sonata in A Minor was written for the concertmaster of the Düsseldorf orchestra.
Like much of Schumann’s music, the A-Minor Sonata plays on the contrasting personas of his literary alter egos, the gentle Eusebius and the impassioned Florestan. The first movement features a warmly urgent theme in the violin’s lower register that gradually rises in pitch and intensity before wandering off (as was common in Schumann’s works) in a kind of lyrical reverie. The middle Allegretto, in F major, is winsome and somewhat capricious in character. But the lively finale—with its dancing passagework and fluid shifts from minor to major—is by turns demonic and playful.
—Harry Haskell