Violin Sonata No.2

Bartók was not himself a violinist. Several of his best friends were, however – Stefi Geyer, Jelly d’Arányi, Zoltán Székely, Yehudi Menuhin, to name only the most influential – and it was partly through their inspiration that he came to compose some of the greatest violin music of his day. But he must also have had an instinctive understanding of the instrument: his first chamber piece was a Violin Sonata written at the age of 14 and he wrote two more such works before he completed his officially designated First Violin Sonata in 1921. The Second Violin Sonata followed a year later.

Both the First and the Second Violin Sonatas were dedicated to Jelly d’Arányi, great-niece of Joachim and pupil of Hubay, whom the composer had known since his student days. It is an indication of her intelligence that she was willing to become involved with two works which, written at the most progressive point in Bartók’s development, were among the most radical of all violin and piano scores. Far from attempting to reconcile the mutually antagonistic features of the two instruments Bartók accepted the situation and made an exhilarating if uncomfortable virtue of it, awarding each one its own kind of material and excluding any kind of mutual flattery.

Of the two Sonatas, the Second is the more accessible, partly because of its traditional Hungarian-rhapsody construction in two movements and partly because, in spite of its near-atonal harmonic orientation, it so clearly draws on the folk idiom for its basic material – a parlando melody introduced by the violin in the Molto moderato opening bars and repeated by the same instrument to form a transition into the Allegretto where it recurs several times, most poetically in a brief and eerie echo in false harmonics just before the recapitulation and most eloquently on its conclusive appearance in the closing bars.

Gerald Larner©