Violin Sonata in A major Op.13

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

Not surprisingly, the main theme of Fauré’s 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 scalic 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 a clear reflection of a phrase in the piano version of the main theme of the first movement. 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 based on themes reminiscent of the scalic material in the first movement. If the audience at the Société Nationale was less enthusiastic about the Allegro quasi presto finale it could be because they wanted the culmination of the structural strategy plainly spelled out, as that of Franck’s Sonata would be 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.