“I have never been busier or happier with my work,” Schumann declared in September 1849. As he reviewed his accomplishments of the past few months, the composer had much to be happy about. He had written some 40 pieces and was bringing in more income than ever before. The year had started off promisingly with the publication of his best-selling collection of easy piano pieces titled Lieder-Album für die Jugend (Songs-Album for the Young). Hungry for worldly success, Schumann went on to write a string of works tailored for the amateur Hausmusik market.
Conceived in February 1849, the Adagio and Allegro followed hard on the heels of the Songs-Album for the Young but had a different target audience: The music’s technical demands place it beyond the reach of all but professional-caliber players. Originally scored for the recently introduced valve horn, the work anticipates Schumann’s brilliant Koncertstück for four horns and orchestra. With an eye on sheet-music sales, the composer authorized alternate versions for both cello and violin.
The Adagio, marked Langsam, mit innigen Ausdruck (“Slowly, with tender feeling”) serves as a broadly lyrical introduction that never strays far from the home key of A-flat major. A quiet cadence leads to an Allegro of a markedly different character—Rasch und feurig (“Fast and fiery”)—and tonal range. The Allegro is cast in rondo form, the vigorously athletic main theme alternating with episodes based on the gently arching melody of the Adagio.
Prokofiev rose to fame before World War I as a leader of the Russian avant-garde on the strength of such driving, acerbically dissonant works as the Scythian Suite and the Second Piano Concerto. Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, he turned his back on the Soviet Union 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 US he competed for attention with Sergei Rachmaninoff. Many of his best-loved works date from this period of self-imposed exile, including the fairytale 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 shifted and he and his music came under withering ideological criticism. He died in 1953, on the same day as his diabolical patron and persecutor, Joseph Stalin.
Dating from 1949, the Cello Sonata is the fruit of Prokofiev’s late-life friendship with the young Mstislav Rostropovich. The two men met in 1947, when the cellist was a 20-year-old student at the Moscow Conservatory. After hearing Rostropovich play the Cello Concerto he had written a decade earlier, Prokofiev excitedly rushed backstage and promised on the spot to rewrite the work especially for him. The upshot was the bravura Sinfonia concertante for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 125. Another product of that propitious encounter was the Cello Sonata in C Major, a work in which Rostropovich’s hand is so evident that it could almost be termed a collaboration. By the late 1940s, Prokofiev’s health had deteriorated to such an extent that he could only concentrate on his work for an hour or so each day. Holed up at his summer dacha outside Moscow, he and Rostropovich spent weeks exploring the cello’s technical and expressive capability, thrashing out ideas that Prokofiev would incorporate in the sonata.
The line from Maxim Gorky that Prokofiev inscribed on the first page of his manuscript of the sonata (“Man—that has a proud sound”) is a tribute both to Rostropovich’s powerhouse technique and to his life-affirming musicianship. The cello has the first few bars to itself, its languorous cantilena surging upward from the sonorous depths of the C string. A brittle, unsettling element is soon introduced in the piano’s throbbing eighth notes and the cello’s slashing pizzicato chords. Forsaking its somber bottom register, the cello soon launches into a luminous, high-flying melody in G major, and these contrasting lyrical and percussive strains intermingle throughout the rest of the movement. Prokofiev injects a note of whimsy in the Moderato, with its mincing staccato notes and ungainly jumps, while the character of the final Allegro is energetic and muscular, culminating in a kaleidoscopic blaze of fireworks and a final burst of pure C-major sunlight.
Throughout his life, Brahms struggled to reconcile the essentially percussive nature of the piano with the sustained, singing voices of the violin, viola, and cello. The contrast in sound and character is central to many of his greatest chamber works, from the first version of the 1854 B-Major Piano Trio to the two sonatas for clarinet (or viola) and piano of 1895. Late in life, Brahms came to believe that the clarinet, with its unique ability both to blend and to stand out in mixed company, was “much more adapted to the piano than string instruments”—yet there is no hint in either of his two cello sonatas that he had any qualms about the instrument’s ability to hold its own in dialogue with the piano.
In 1886, Brahms spent the first of three consecutive summer holidays at a rented villa nestled in the Swiss Alps near Thun. There—his creative juices stimulated by vigorous hikes, convivial company, voracious reading, and a copious supply of cigars and strong coffee—he produced no fewer than four chamber music masterpieces: the Second and Third violin sonatas, the Third Piano Trio, and the Cello Sonata No. 2 in F Major.
The Cello Sonata No. 2 opens with a heraldic two-note motto in the cello, characterized by its jagged rhythm and interval of a rising fourth (C to F). It and the piano’s nervously roiling tremolos resonate throughout the Allegro vivace, generating much of its atmosphere and thematic material. After straying down various tonal byways, the music circles home to F major for the recapitulation section. Next comes the luminous Adagio affettuoso in F-sharp major, which Brahms originally wrote for his First Cello Sonata and fortunately retrieved from the cutting-room floor. The turbulent Allegro passionato in F minor, with a contrasting middle section in F major, is notable for its restlessly shifting harmonies and rhythms. The sonata culminates in an exuberant Allegro molto, which blends limpid lyricism with percussive brilliance and striking pizzicato effects in the cello part.
Chopin is so intimately associated with the culture and society of 19th-century Paris that it’s easy to forget he lived there, on and off, for less than two decades. In recent years, scholars have devoted much effort to uncovering the roots of Chopin’s art in his native Poland and exploring his relationship with the Polish émigré community in Paris. His friendship with exiled poet Adam Mickiewicz, a fervent nationalist, fortified his enthusiasm for Polish independence in the wake of the abortive uprising against Russian rule in 1830. It is against this backdrop that the Introduction and Polonaise brillante for cello and piano must be considered.
In the fall of 1829, fresh from a triumphant tour of Austria and Germany, Chopin accepted an invitation from Prince Antoni Radziwiłł to visit his hunting lodge in the mountains outside Warsaw. An amateur composer and cellist, as well as the future dedicatee of Chopin’s Piano Trio in G Minor, the prince was eager for his daughters to have high-level musical instruction. It was for one of the “two young Eves in this paradise,” as the highly temptable 19-year-old Chopin called them, that he composed the Introduction and Polonaise brillante. “I wanted Princess Wanda to learn it,” he confided to a friend. “I had been giving her lessons. She is quite young, 17, and pretty. Really, it was a joy to guide her little fingers.” Chopin modestly described his effervescent showpiece as “nothing but tinsel, for the drawing room, for the ladies.” Generations of listeners and performers, however, have found its high spirits irresistible.
The title describes the work in a nutshell: Polonaise alludes to a national dance of Chopin’s homeland, while brillante reflects the cosmopolitan influence of the glittering salon style. In the slow introduction (which Chopin added to the polonaise a few months later), the piano’s lacy filigree meshes smoothly with the cello’s more chaste cantilena. A strutting triple-time figure heralds the start of the main attraction, and soon the cello is off and running with a high-spirited, lightly syncopated tune. After echoing the polonaise’s main theme, the piano plunges into a thicket of complex figurations, while the cello introduces a second theme of a more languorous and sustained character.
—Harry Haskell