Sonata for solo cello, Op.8

Kodály’s Sonata for solo cello was written in 1915, just a year after the equally inspired Duo for violin and cello, Op.7. If the Duo is the more original score, in that there was no precedent for it, the Sonata is no less remarkable for that. As Bartók said, “No other composer has written music that is at all similar to this type of work – least of all Reger, with his pale imitations of Bach.” But what could Bartók have meant when he added that it is done “with the simplest possible of technical means”? True, the Sonata is scored for one unaccompanied string instrument but the technical demands made on the cellist are anything but simple. The Sonata is a work of extraordinary virtuosity that explores – over a pitch range of no fewer than five octaves – just about every means of colouring, articulation and textural elaboration known to cellists at the time.

One requirement that is not so difficult to comply with is the retuning of the two lowest strings, the C and G strings, to B and F sharp – which, with the other strings tuned as usual to D and A, gives the work a B-minor kind of orientation. The first chord is, in fact, pure B minor and, with the three lowest notes all on open strings, it has a clearly distinctive sound. This is important because it is one way in which Kodály holds a long and improvisatory work together. In the first movement the opening chord is heard in its original form only once more, in the closing bar. But, as the most distinctive feature of the first subject of a basically sonata-form structure, it occurs in three recognisable variant forms, two of theme in the development and the other at the beginning of the recapitulation.

The basic chord is not heard in its original form in the slow movement. Echoes of it reverberate throughout the Adagio outer sections, however, not least in the left-hand pizzicato accompaniment to the elaborately decorative and highly expressive Hungarian folk-instrument improvisations that alternate with the contemplative material first heard in the opening bars. After the comparatively brief Con moto middle section, the improvisation is even more passionate and its harmonic identity correspondingly more clearly defined by the left hand.

The infinitely resourceful last movement could be described as a folk-dance suite except that the opening derives not from Hungarian sources but, as the composer has confirmed, from the Presto finale of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op.10 No.2. There is no mistaking, on the other hand, the origin of the bagpipe tune that follows with the cellist ingeniously supplying his own drone accompaniment. It is only just before the first recall of the Beethoven theme, after an extraordinary episode of tremolandos and trills bowed on the bridge and on the fingerboard, that the basic harmonies are recalled. From now on, however, there is a tendency to sharpen the D, culminating at the end of a brilliant coda in a firm B major.