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.
In the seven years that separated his First and Second violin sonatas—written in 1879 and 1886, respectively—Brahms added a clutch of major works to his chamber music portfolio, including the Second and Third piano trios (in C major and C minor, respectively), the Cello Sonata No. 2 in F Major, and the first of his two brightly exuberant string quintets (Op. 88 in F Major). Each of these works is the product of mature and unostentatious mastery. The muscular lyricism that characterized much of Brahms’s earlier chamber music had receded into the background. In its place was a more restrained, but no less compelling, mixture of tenderness and strength.
Echoes of Brahms’s art songs pervade the gracefully lyrical score of the A-Major Sonata. (Hovering in the background may be the blithe spirit of the young contralto Hermine Spies, the object of the 53-year-old composer’s latest infatuation.) Brahms’s friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg described the sonata as being “constructed in the plainest possible way from ideas at once striking and simple, fresh and young in their emotional qualities, ripe and wise in their incredible compactness.” The premiere took place in Vienna on September 2, 1886, with Brahms at the piano and Joseph Hellmesberger on violin. According to Brahms’s biographer Max Kalbeck, Hellmesberger’s “playing had the hot breath and the agitated pulse of human passion, his violin the ethereal tone of an angel’s voice.”
The sonata’s first movement—marked, somewhat unusually, Allegro amabile—exudes the relaxed give-and-take of a companionable dialogue. The pianist introduces a lilting four-bar melody, whereupon the violinist echoes the final phrase as if to say, encouragingly, “Yes, I’m listening. Go on.” After two or three more false starts, the violin takes up the theme and runs with it. From then on, the two players pass the ball back and forth, now lightheartedly, now in earnest, always careful to avoid upstaging each other. The amiable repartee continues in the Andante tranquillo, with slow and quick sections alternating in rounded A-B-A-B-A form. The main theme of the concluding Allegretto grazioso, like that of the first movement, surges upward in rising arcs before returning to rest at its starting point.
One of the greatest pianists of her time, Clara Schumann (née Wieck) didn’t come into her own as a composer until nearly a century after her death. The child prodigy made her debut in the Leipzig Gewandhaus at age 11, playing one of her own compositions, and went from one triumph to another during the 1830s. After her marriage to Robert Schumann in 1840, she led the stressful double life that was the common lot of gifted women in the 19th century. Equally devoted to her family and her music, she managed to rear eight children (all but four of whom would die before her) even as her brilliant but increasingly erratic husband succumbed to mental illness. Robert encouraged her creative work on the tacit understanding that his career took precedence over hers, but Clara virtually stopped composing after he died in 1856.
The spring of 1853 saw an uptick in Clara’s compositional activity. In June, she wrote a set of variations based on one of Robert’s piano pieces and presented it to him as a birthday offering. The Three Romances for Piano, a set of six songs, and the Three Romances for Violin and Piano completed the season’s output. (Robert was also on a compositional roll that summer—his last, as it turned out, before he began his long descent into severe mental illness.) Dedicated to the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, with whom Clara often performed, the Op. 22 Romances are a charming, if lightweight, sequel to her powerful Piano Trio of 1846. In their fanciful spontaneity of expression, they bear a marked family resemblance to Robert’s own “character pieces,” such as the Romances for Oboe and Piano, Op. 94.
The first Romance, in the warm key of D-flat major, is characterized by a leisurely, rocking rhythm in the piano, which provides supple support for the violin’s soaring, decorously ornate melody. In the Allegretto, the violin’s theme—embellished with grace notes and trills—flits capriciously between G minor and G major; it echoes the first of Robert’s Op. 94 Romances in its playfully arching contours. The long-breathed lyricism of the third Romance is accentuated by the softly rippling arpeggios in the piano part. As a contemporary reviewer remarked: “All three pieces display an individual character conceived in a truly sincere manner and written in a delicate, fragrant hand; although the violin melodies are simple, they are handled very effectively with interesting harmonies and accompaniments as well as with contrasting melodies, all without exaggeration.”
Johannes Brahms first met the violinist and composer Joseph Joachim in the spring of 1853. Although only two years older than Brahms, the concertmaster of the Hanover court orchestra was already an international celebrity. “As an artist I really have no greater wish than to have more talent so that I can learn still more from such a friend,” Brahms wrote in the first flush of their friendship. Joachim’s practical knowledge of both violin and orchestra made him a valuable sounding board. Brahms turned to him for advice throughout his life, especially in the decade between 1878 and 1888, when he was writing his D-Major Violin Concerto and three violin sonatas.
Brahms’s Third Sonata, in the “dark” key of D minor, is weightier and more overtly dramatic than its predecessors in G major and A major. Its dedicatee, Hans von Bülow, cut a notably titanic figure at the keyboard as well as on the podium, and the sonata’s impassioned, virtuosic character may well bear his stamp as much as that of Joachim. The music may also allude to Brahms’s long-simmering love for the pianist-composer Clara Schumann. Upon receiving the score, she wrote coquettishly to the 55-year-old composer that the third movement reminded her of “a beautiful girl sweetly frolicking with her lover—then suddenly in the middle of it all, a flash of deep passion, only to make way for sweet dalliance once more.”
Whatever feelings it expresses, the D-Minor Sonata is unquestionably infused with passion. From the first bars of the opening Allegro, the staggered eighth notes and recurrent dynamic swellings indicate the music’s underlying turbulence. The mood of barely contained wildness is briefly dispelled in the majestic D-major Adagio—one of Brahms’s most concentratedly intense slow movements, despite its brevity. This leads to an ethereal scherzo in F-sharp minor, whose opening theme returns at the end in a deceptively tranquil reminiscence. (Clara Schumann likened this delicate and devilishly difficult passage to walking on eggshells.) In the final Presto agitato, the sonata’s pent-up energy bursts forth in a high-spirited romp in 6/8 meter, charged with stabbing accents and syncopations.
—Harry Haskell