Violin Sonata in C minor Op.30 No.2 (1801–02)

The C minor Violin Sonata – the centre piece of the set of three sonatas dedicated to Czar Alexander I of Russia in 1803 – is very much more ambitious than its companions. Although the composer himself was not entirely satisfied with the work, it is certainly worthy of its place in the very special line of Beethoven’s works in C minor and is surely no less compelling than either of the earlier piano sonatas (including the Pathétique) in that key.

There is obvious dynamic potential in the quiet but tense opening bars of the Allegro con brio where the latent energy of the first subject finds an early and explosive release in the exchange of muscular chords between piano and violin. The second subject, in the relative major, is more playful but still restless. In fact, from now – through the development and until the dramatic restatement of the first subject – there is a scarcely interrupted semi-quaver activity in one instrument or the other. The pressure is not relaxed until the Adagio cantabile, which rests peacefully in the security of A flat major. Or so it seems until almost the end of the movement, when peace and tonal stability are rudely (if only temporarily) disrupted by abruptly violent scales of C major, first in the piano and then in the violin as well.

Beethoven must have felt that the progress of the Adagio had been all too easy up to that disruptive point. It might have been some similar feeling that led him to think seriously about dropping the Scherzo which – the only such movement in the Op.30 set – he seems to have thought inappropriate in its context. A delightfully witty movement in C major, it is inspired and apt enough by anyone else’s standards. In any case, the urgency of Beethoven’s message is immediately re-affirmed by the last movement. Here is an abundance of the “tumult” Beethoven said he liked in the finale of a violin sonata. It is precipitated by the near panic of the opening bars, which constantly reappear to keep the movement alert until, paradoxically, they slow it down to make the maximum effect of the brilliant Presto coda.