Cello Sonata No.3 (1952)

There are few, if any, cello sonatas as consistently joyful as Martinu’s Third. Although it is dedicated to the memory of an old friend – Hans Kindler whom the composer had first known as a cellist in his pre-war years in Paris – there is nothing elegiac about it. Even so, while he was obviously happy when he was writing the work, on a return vist to Paris from the United States in 1952, there is an occasionally perceptible undercurrent of nostalgia. Geographically so near to Czechoslavakia, which he hadn’t seen since before the war, and yet politcally so far away that he couldn’t go back there, he was homesick enough to let the sentiment show through even in a score as happy, basically, as this one.

The mood of the work is set by the exultant harmonies and the syncopated sprung rhythms proclaimed by the piano in the opening bars of the first movement. The cello has a more lyrical role, not least by way of the dolce theme it introduces on its initial entry as the tempo changes from Poco andante to Moderato. These two ideas motivate not only the whole of the first main section but also the extended piano solo at the beginning of the next. In a slower episode at the very centre of the construction, however, a new melody emerges on the cello, rising from low in its range to assume a shape clearly expressive of what Martinu described at the time as “a longing for home, for our hills.” It is heard once more before the quicker tempo is resumed and a varied reprise of the opening section completes a finely balanced ternary construction.

The central Andante is less clearly defined in form than either of the outer movements. Apparently uncertain where to go at first, trying out a suggestion on pizzicato cello and another in even quavers on the piano, it adopts a a variant of the cello rhythms and develops it into an ever more animated scherzo episode. It stops abruptly, however, with loud dissonances on the piano, to make way for a melodious cello contemplation – of “our hills” perhaps – which is sustained with such intensity that the scherzo is respectfully subdued when it is admitted for its closing appearance.

The last movement is another ternary construction, the outer sections in this case being based on vigorously jig-like 12/8 material. For all its zestful syncopations, however, and its frenzied recall shortly before the end, the significant event here occurs in the comparatively modest middle section in 4/4 time where the cello remembers its nostalgically expressive melody from the first movement.