Violin Sonata in E minor BWV 1023 (before 1720) — Johann Sebastian Bach

Violin Sonata in E minor BWV 1023 (c 1715?)

Allegro – Adagio

Allemande

Gigue

The best known of Bach’s works for violin and keyboard are the set of six duo sonatas he assembled during his time as Capellmeister at Anhalt-Cöthen round about 1720. There are, however, two other violins sonatas, BWV 1021 in G major and the present BWV 1023 in E minor. They are quite different from the duo sonatas in that the keyboard, rather than acting as an equal partner in a dialogue with the violin, has nothing more to do than supply a harmonic accompaniment to it. The E minor Sonata is different again in that, unlike all of Bach’s other sonatas, it consists of only three movements, including an allemande and a gigue – dance movements of the kind he usually confined to his suites and partitas.

While the presence of dance movements in the Sonata in E minor might suggest that it was written before Bach had formulated a clear distinction between the sonata and the suite, there is little or no evidence to support or contradict the notion. The only source for the work is a manuscript by an unkown copyist, who might well have been responsible for the “sonata’ title of the work and who might even have compiled it from separate pieces. There could be another clue to the date, however, in the virtuoso figuration of the opening section of the first movement which, though in much the same style as that of the first movement of the solo Partita in E major of about 1720, still has something of the keyboard toccata about it. Anyway, it is an effective introduction to the following Adagio, which is an expressive aria beautifully written for violin. The Allemande is a characteristically fluent, freely modulating example of the dance in binary form (in two repeated halves) each part beginning with the upbeat diagnostic of the form. The theme of the Gigue, which is similarly constructed in two repeated halves, has a beginning not unlike that of the Allemande – which would be unfortunate coincidence if the if the lively rhyhms of the this last movement were not so distinctive.

the first movement. But, as the piano repeats that theme, the violin enters to personalise it with an expressive reminder of the four-note motif by which Shostakovich signs himself in many of his works. Not that anyone familiar with his music would have much difficulty in identifying the composer when – once those two ideas have been thoroughly associated with each other in an extended melodic dialogue – a new march-like theme in detached rhythms makes an appearance on the piano. It too is a twelve-note theme but at the same time entirely characteristic of Shostakovich. The rest of the movement is concerned with developing that material, but not without introducing two other sounds – a whispered cascade of arpeggios falling from high on the violin to the bottom of its range and, a few bars later, an omiinous warning of two loud notes a fourth apart made by piano trills and pizzicato violin. The latter is echoed in hushed tones on the bridge of the violin in the closing bars.

The second movement is a hard-driven, mainly loud or very loud kind of scherzo. Beginning and ending as a grotesquely aggressive march, it includes a more tuneful if still fierce episode in triple time in the middle. In its unremitting hyperactivity and frequent recourse to multiple stopping it calls for immense stamina from the violinist.

Like Britten, Shostakovich was more than once drawn to the passacaglia. The 11-bar theme of the passacaglia-shaped last movement of the Violin Sonata is first heard, after a short but heavily emphatic Largo introduction, in plucked notes on the unaccompanied violin, then low on the piano under a variant on violin, then in the right hand of the piano over a variant in the left, then in double-stopped chords on the violin… And so it goes on, generally increasing in activity (though not in tempo) until the intervention of a massive Liszt-like cadenza for the piano and a Paganini-like cadenza for the violin at the climax of the construction. The opening Largo gesture and the passacaglia theme are recalled and, as the work draws to a close, so are ideas from previous movements – including the whispered cascade of violin arpeggios and, in the very last bars, the ominous warning in eerie sul ponticello tremolandos.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Violin Sonata in A minor D385 (1816)

Allegro moderato

Andante

Menuetto: allegro

Allegro

Schubert’s first thee violin sonatas were written when he was no more than 19 but remained unpublished until eight years after his death, when they were issued, somewhat patronisingly, as “Sonatinas.” Certainly, deriving as they do from Mozart and bypassing the ten Beethoven examples as though they didn’t exist, they are not enormously ambitious. They are more than domestic entertainments, however – particularly the two four-movement works in minor keys.

The present Sonaata in A minor makes a liberated point at an early stage, when the assertive first entry of the violin dramatically expands the intervals of the main theme introduced by the piano in the opening bars. From then on it rarely goes in the direction convention would lead one to expect. Indeed, the first-movement recapitulation gets into a tonal situation with no classical precedent as the main themes are recalled in the (by ordinary standards) wrong keys. Having put things right, Schubert then takes another risk in the closing bars. The melodious Andante in F major is also unusually shaped in that rather than developing its material it presents it a second time in a different key (A flat major) before returning it to the harmonies to which it belongs. The Menuetto is not so much a minuet as a driven minor-key scherzo in the modern style. Any uncertainty about how the work might end, with perhaps a conciliatory gesture to A major, is settled in the last movement by two comparatively aggressive episodes of triplet figuration passing between the violin and the piano left hand: after that the uncompromsing closing bars are more or less inevitable.

Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924)

Violin Sonata in A major Op.13 (1875–76)

Allegro molto

Andante

Allegro vivo

Allegro quasi presto

Although it created a sensation on its first performance in Paris in 1877, and although it has retained a prominent place in the repertoire ever since, Fauré’s Violin Sonata in A major has still not received due recognition as a major historical landmark. It is generally agreed that it emerged more or less out of the blue at a time when the violin sonata was virtually extinct in French music and it is universally acknowledged that it was written as long as ten years before Franck’s masterly example in the same key. What is not understood is that so much of the Franck Sonata is anticipated in the earlier work that it is Fauré rather than Franck who should be credited as the epoch-maker in this respect.

Nothing Fauré had written before 1875 suggested that he would be capable of composing the assured and idiomatic Violin Sonata which he all but completed within a few summer months in Normandy that year. He did have the benefit of the use of a friend’s country retreat on the coast at Sainte-Adresse and he did have the advantage of advice from one or two violinists – including the dedicatee of the work, Paul Viardot, brother of the Marianne Viardot to whom the composer was to become (briefly) engaged a year or so later. Even so the enthusiastic reception of the Violin Sonata at a concert of the Société Nationale in January 1877 – after every Parisian publisher had turned it down – surprised the composer no less than it surprised his colleagues in the audience. “The success of my Sonata this evening exceeded all my hopes!!!” he wrote on the day of the first performance.

Among the less obvious reasons for its success – apart, that is, from such attractions as its shapely melodic lines and its resourceful scoring – is the subtlety of its construction. Its four movements are as thoroughly unified as any cyclic composition but discreetly and spontaneously, with nothing of the deliberate thematic manoeuvring later to be practised by César Franck and his followers.

Not surprisingly, the main theme of the first movement is basic to the economy. It appears in two versions – as the piano introduces it in the opening bars and as the violin takes it up on its first entry – both with an immediate melodic appeal and both with a long-term structural function. The rising scale figure which emerges at an early stage from the violin version is fruitful too, not least when the violin turns it upside down and quietly presents it as the second subject in E major. Both versions of the first subject are thoroughly developed, making way for the second subject only at a late stage, and both are awarded to the violin in the recapitulation.

The melody which rises from the dark D minor harmonies on the piano in the opening bars of the Andante is, as has often been stated, an arpeggiated diminished seventh. More to the point, it is also a clear reflection of a phrase in the piano version of the main theme of the first movement, not only in its melodic intervals but also in its syncopated rhythm. A variant of the same phrase is presented (in inversion) as the second subject – a theme which, though evasive about its true tonality at this stage, plays a prominent part later on in changing the key to D major and bringing the movement to an end in poetic tranquillity.

“The Scherzo was encored so insistently,” wrote Fauré after the first performance, “that we had no choice but to play it again.” It is, indeed, a delightfully scored study in staccato bowing and displaced rhythmic accents, all of it – including the contrastingly lyrical violin melody in the middle – based on themes reminiscent of the scalic material in the first movement. The transition from the slower F sharp minor middle section back to the A major Allegro vivo is most artfully contrived.

If the audience at the Société Nationale was less enthusiastic about the Allegro quasi presto finale – “which people found too abrupt” – it could be because they wanted the culmination of the structural strategy plainly spelled out, as Franck would so triumphantly spell it out it in his Violin Sonata ten years later. Fauré, however, prefers to avoid that kind of thing. His references back to the first theme of the first movement are as discreet as, for example, the short phrase on the second entry of the violin. As far as the main themes of the movement are concerned, the scalic material predominates in a brilliantly sustained impetus towards the last page where, preferring grace to grandiloquence, he inserts a delicately articulated coda just before the fortissimo final bars.