Sonata Movement in A major (“Torso”)

Enescu got to know Brahms – not only the music but also the man – at a very early stage in his career, when he was a prodigiously gifted ten-year-old student at the Vienna Conservatoire. He retained his allegiance    to Brahms for the rest of his life, devoting himself above all to the Violin Concerto (for which he wrote his own cadenza) but also to the chamber music, not least the violin sonatas. So it is scarcely surprising if the first two of his own violin sonatas, written in 1897 and 1899 respectively, show a clear Brahms influence, even though the later work owes more to Gabriel Fauré, his composition teacher at the Paris Conservatoire.

A projected violin sonata in A major, which was abandoned in 1911, would have been very different, or so it seems from the one movement Enescu completed. Known as the “Torso,” since it is only the first part of what was to be a longer work, the Sonata Movement was written in a period of    doubt and stylistic experiment. In this case Enescu seems to have turned away from main-stream precedent towards Romanian folk music – not by making use of actual folk material, as he had a dozen years earlier in his phenomenally popular Romanian Rhapsodies, but by re-creating its spirit. That much is clear from the beautifully scored opening of the work, with its expressive, exotically inflected violin melody and, a little later, the folk-instrumental decorations applied to the piano part. If it deviates stylistically as it goes on, developing one melodic idea from another – sometimes dramatically, often poetically – it at least conforms to Enescu’s requirement that “a piece deserves to be called a musical composition only if it has a line, a melody, or even better, melodies superimposed on one another.”

The early intrusion of a few bars that might have come straight out of Brahms is disconcerting but not so much, surely, as to cause Enescu to discard the piece. It is more likely that he felt that spontaneity, inspired though it might be, needs to be contained in a firmly disciplined construction.