Sonata No.2 for violin and piano (Sz76)

Together with a few other works dating from around 1920, like the Studies and the Improvisations for piano, the two violin sonatas written for Jelly d’Arányi represent the most progressive point in Bartók’s development. Although he himself is said to have declared the First Violin Sonata to be in C sharp and the Second in C, they are both virtually atonal and plainly indebted to the liberating influence of Schoenberg’s harmonic revolution. At the same time, they remain unmistakably characteristic of the Bartók personality formed, most distinctively, by obsessive involvement with folk song during the preceding decade. So, after its enigmatic opening bars, where a repeated E on the violin is set against a stubborn F sharp nearly four octaves lower on the piano, the Second Violin Sonata offers as its main theme an eloquently expressive and clearly Hungarian melody of the kind classified by the folk-song collector as “parlando rubato.”

Another progressive aspect of the two d’Arányi sonatas is that, far from attempting to reconcile the mutually antagonistic features of the two instruments – which was a primary preoccupation of every composer of violin and piano music up to that time – Bartók accepts the situation and makes a positive virtue of it. If it is not quite true to say that, in the words of one eminent Bartók authority, “it is as if the players were engaged upon different works simultaneously,” it is true that they engage in intelligent conversation without flattering each other and without sharing their thematic material.

Although the piano comments not unsympathetically on the violin’s parlando theme, it never repeats it. After further examination of the harmonic implications of the enigmatic opening bars, the piano introduces a second theme under sustained violin harmonics and obliquely supports the violin in introducing two more. This material is not so much developed as recapitulated in altered form, the parlando theme then being recalled again to act as a transition into the second movement.

The Allegretto is a rondo based on a dance tune presented pizzicato at first in a very deliberate tempo, as though to give the ear time to perceive that it is a backwards version of part of the parlando theme. When the piano sets off more briskly with a syncopated dance tune of its own, the violinist is stimulated to apply the bow to the once pizzicato theme and at a still quicker tempo. Perhaps the most attractive episode, and the one instance of apparently conscious textural collaboration between the two instruments, is a passage of glissandos and sustained legato lines on the violin set against lightly articulated chord clusters on the piano. From time to time, amid the otherwise prevailing primitive sounds and rhythms, there are allusions to several aspects of the first movement, including a brief and eerie echo of the opening theme in false harmonics just before the recapitulation. But it is only in the coda that the formative parlando melody is restored in full eloquence - and in such a way that it leads, illogically but convincingly, into a C major ending.

Incidentally, although Jelly Arányi was the authoritative interpreter of the two sonatas Bartók wrote for her, she gave the first performance of neither. The Second Violin Sonata was actually introduced to the world by Bartók and Imre Waldbauer in Berlin in February 1923.