Second Sonata for violin

“A great composer in Parisian literary circles,” as one critic both wittily and truthfully described him in 1924, George Antheil was never a musician’s musician. He was an instant success in Paris when he moved there from Berlin in 1923 but, with the major exception of Erik Satie, his most influential supporters - Joyce, Yeats, Pound, Picasso - were poets and artists rather than fellow composers. They welcomed his characteristically American independence from European conservatoire conformity and the contemporary relevance, as they saw it, of such recent piano works as the Airplane Sonata, the Death of the Machine Sonatina and the Sonate Sauvage. Aaron Copland, who was in Paris at the same time admired Antheil’s “great talents” but felt that “the very violence of his own sincere desire to write original music has hindered rather than helped his attainment of his own ends.”

Ezra Pound, on the other hand, was so thrilled by Antheil’s music that, with the violinist Olga Rudge, he commissioned the two violin sonatas which were first performed at the Salle Pleyel in November 1923. The single-movement Second Sonata clearly anticipates the rhythmic interest of the notorious Ballet mécanique, which Antheil was to write in 1924, while the occasional lyrical inspiration offers a glimpse of the Hollywood product he was to settle for a few years later. The tenor and bass drum parts at the end were presumably written for Pound, to whom the work is dedicated as “the best of friends” and who certainly performed the roles of page-turner and percussionist in early performances of the work in Paris.