Violin Sonata in G major (1892)

Très modéré – Vif et passionné – Très modéré

Très lent

Très animé – Très modéré – Très animé

“I kill myself trying to put my all my soul into my music,” said Guillaume Lekeu. He was determined that he would “never write anything trivial.” His music, he conceded, might be “bizarre, deranged, horrible, whatever you like. But it will at least be original.” The Violin Sonata in G major, commissioned by no less a musician than his Belgian compatriot Eugène Ysaÿe, is certainly original: Lekeu was evidently prepared to take all kinds of technical risks to give full expression to his youthful passions. What saved the Sonata from the chaotic fate that might have befallen a work by an ambitious but until recently self-taught 22-year-old composer was his faith in the cyclic principal that he had learned from a year’s work with César Franck and further study with Vincent d’Indy.

Of course, as a committed admirer of Beethoven, Lekeu knew all about sonata form. He didn’t forget it in the first movement of the Violin Sonata but, with a concern for the overall structure of the work, he created his own brilliantly strategic and at the same time freely spontaneous variant on it. The opening Très modéré section is an introduction not only to the Vif et passioné that follows but also, in that it has such a far-reaching influence, to the Sonata as a whole. The key to the work is the expressive melody introduced by the violin over Franckian piano harmonies in the opening bars, above all its initial falling octave, its rising triplet figure and its falling fifth. This is a dry way to describe an inspiration that clearly meant much to the composer but its melodic outline and rhythmic identity are worth remembering.

The Vif et passioné section of the first movement could be described as a sonata-form construction. Its first subject is heard at the start on the piano in G major and, after some development and a short pause, its second subject follows pianissimo on the same instrument in B major. But it is a sonata construction that has to accommodate dramatic intrusions of the cyclic theme – in B minor on violin over a strenuous tremolos on the piano, for example, or in F sharp minor on violin again over a galloping piano ostinato. The first subject is recapitulated Très joyeusement on the piano in G major but under the cyclic theme on violin and, while the second subject is not forgotten, it is the other themes which predominate up to the quiet Très modéré ending.

The cyclic theme has a more discreet part to play in the Très lent second movement. On the surface this is an idyllic retreat in E flat major with a lovely 7/8 melody in the outer sections and a B minor folk-song middle section in 3/4. But it is not entirely remote from the rest of the work, as the piano demonstrates with a gentle reminder of the cyclic theme in the transition to the middle section and as the violin confirms before recalling the opening section. Full-scale celebratory treatment of the cyclic theme is reserved until the passionately inspired Très animé last movement completes its impatiently heroic course from G minor to G major. Its glorification is modestly anticipated in a Très modéré episode in the middle and finally realised in a thunderous coda.

What Lekeu would have achieved if he had not succumbed to typhoid fever only a few month after Ysaÿe’s triumphant first performance of the Violin Sonata in G must, sadly, remain a matter for awestruck speculation.