Cello Sonata in A minor Op.36 (1883)

Grieg composed only one Cello Sonata: having designed it, apparently, as the cello sonata to end all cello sonatas, he no doubt felt that one was enough. His cellist brother John Grieg, for whom he wrote the work in 1883 and who cannot have come across anything like it before, must have been amazed by the scope of its construction, the breadth of its expression and the extravagantly heroic role in which the cello is cast. The scale of the ambition behind it can be assessed from the drastic contrast between the two main themes of the opening Allegro agitato – the first a hurried expression of desperate urgency in A minor, the second a tranquil reflection of serenity in C major. Such contrasts, where there is no melodic or rhythmic relationship between the two extremes, are not easily or quickly resolved.

Grieg was too good a composer, however, not to cover himself in circumstances like this. As he introduces the first subject he is careful, in spite of his apparently breathless spontaneity, to draw special attention to one particular motif – three notes in even rhythm followed by an upward triplet figure – and it is this motif that, much slowed down, effects a peaceful transition to the second subject. He makes extensive use of it elsewhere in the movement, most effectively perhaps to intensify the drama before the concerto-scale cello cadenza. In a slightly different form it becomes a means for the piano to return to the central argument as the cello continues to roll out its arpeggios at the end of the cadenza. Strangely, it does not reappear in the coda where, neither for the first or the last time in the work, the Piano Concerto in A minor is vividly brought to mind.

There is another, more deliberate memory of an earlier work in the slow movement. The answer to the question what the “Homage March’” from the Sigurd Jorsalfar incidental music is doing in the Cello Sonata could be that it opens with three notes in even rhythm followed by a triplet figure, even though in this case it is a downward rather than an upward triplet. Or it could simply be that the tune, which is just as effective in a reflective context as in a march, is too good to use only once. Definitively presented in F major on the cello, after a harmonically evasive piano introduction, it is offset by a less expansive melody that first appears in F minor on the piano. A sure indication that the rising and falling triplets figures are not a coincidental feature of the second idea is the effort Grieg makes, between the vehement central climax and the idyllic ending, to merge the identities of    the two themes by means of that same figure.

It would be convenient to be able to declare that the unaccompanied cello statement at the very beginning of the last movement is another allusion to the link motif. In fact, the two have little in common and, while the opening cello utterance might have been intended by Grieg as a message his brother would understand even if no one else did, the only sure thing that can be said about it is that it reappears in the middle of the construction, extended and coloured by piano tremolandos. Its function in the first place is to introduce an abundantly generous exposition of no fewer than four main themes, beginning with a characteristic halling in A minor and including a charming variant of that same dance tune in C major. On its second appearance it rescues an eventful development section from an obsessive exchange, argument even, between the two instruments and clears the way for the recapitulation.

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