Sonata for violin and cello (1920–22)

Allegro

Très vif

Allegro

Vif, avec entrain

For Ravel the attraction of the violin and cello duo was its austerity. “I believe that this Sonata,” he wrote, “marks a turning point in the evolution of my career. Economy of texture is here pushed to the extreme with a renunciation of harmonic charm and an increasingly marked reaction in favour of melody.” He first approached the medium in a Duo he wrote for a special number of the Revue musicale published in 1920 as a tribute to Debussy who had died two years earlier. Performed in 1921, together with the other contributions to the Tombeau de Claude Debussy, the Duo was then incorporated, as the first movement, into a full-scale Sonata.

Writing three more movements to go with the first was not, however, an easy task. “This devil of a duo is giving me a lot of trouble,” he wrote to a friend in October 1921. “The duo was finished,” he wrote again four months later, “but then I realised that the scherzo was much too extended and, moreover, a mess. I am starting it again from the beginning.” The Sonata was eventually first performed by Hélène Jourdan-Morhange and Maurice Maréchal in April 1922. “It looks nothing much, this thing for two instruments: there is almost a year and a half’s hard labour in it.”

The duo Sonata is, in fact, a great achievement of ingenuity and will power against extreme technical odds. The paradox at the heart of it is the way the two instruments so willingly collaborate without actually merging their harmonic identities. So there is a tension between them – varying in abrasiveness according to the nature of the material – even in the Allegro first movement, where they exchange ideas most freely and graciously. The second movement, the scherzo which was completely rewritten in February 1922 and which draws for its primitive colour effects on Bartók’s most recent developments in string scoring, makes a special point of the harmonic divergence by awarding the two instruments frankly different key signatures.

In compensation, the slow movement is a profoundly thoughtful conversation, rising melodiously from the lower register of the cello to an accelerated central climax and returning to the initial idea without once resorting to the conventional contrapuntal procedures the linear material seems to invite. Both the central movements make more or less subtle thematic allusions to the opening Allegro. The last movement, based on a militant fanfare motif, seals the cyclic unity in an attractively lyrical episode referring back to the first movement and then marches on to a climax of melodic aggregations scored for what sounds like four instruments rather than two.

Allegro

Très vif

Allegro

Vif, avec entrain

Although Ravel might well have known of the existence of Kodály’s Duo for violin and cello, it is highly unlikely that he heard it played or even saw a score before he wrote his Sonata for the same two instruments. Kodály’s Duo was written in 1914, first performed four years later in Budapest (a city which Ravel first visited in 1932) and was not heard again before its publication in 1922. By then Ravel had been working on his Sonata - which, unlike Kodály’s Duo, encourages a basically contrapuntal relationship between the violin and the cello - for eighteen months or more.

For Ravel the attraction of the violin and cello duo was its austerity. “I believe that this Sonata,” he wrote, “marks a turning point in the evolution of my career. Economy of texture is here pushed to the extreme with a renunciation of harmonic charm and an increasingly marked reaction in favour of melody.” He first approached the medium in a Duo he wrote for a special number of the Revue musicale published in 1920 as a tribute to Debussy who had died two years earlier. Performed in 1921, together with the other contributions to the Tombeau de Claude Debussy, the Duo was then incorporated, as the first movement, into a full-scale Sonata.

Writing three more movements to go with the first was not, however, an easy task. “This devil of a duo is giving me a lot of trouble,” he wrote to a friend in October 1921. “The duo was finished,” he wrote again four months later, “but then I realised that the scherzo was much too extended and, moreover, a mess. I am starting it again from the beginning.” The Sonata was eventually first performed by Hélène Jourdan-Morhange and Maurice Maréchal in April 1922. “It looks nothing much, this thing for two instruments: there is almost a year and a half’s hard labour in it.”

The duo Sonata is, in fact, a great achievement of ingenuity and will power against extreme technical odds. The paradox at the heart of it is the way the two instruments so willingly collaborate without actually merging their harmonic identities. So there is a tension between them – varying in abrasiveness according to the nature of the material – even in the Allegro first movement, where they exchange ideas most freely and graciously. The second movement, the scherzo which was completely rewritten in February 1922 and which draws for its primitive colour effects on Bartók’s most recent developments in string scoring, makes a special point of the harmonic divergence by awarding the two instruments frankly different key signatures.

In compensation, the slow movement is a profoundly thoughtful conversation, rising melodiously from the lower register of the cello to an accelerated central climax and returning to the initial idea without once resorting to the conventional contrapuntal procedures the linear material seems to invite. Both the central movements make more or less subtle thematic allusions to the opening Allegro. The last movement, based on a militant fanfare motif, seals the cyclic unity in an attractively lyrical episode referring back to the first movement and then marches on to a climax of melodic aggregations scored for what sounds like four instruments rather than two.

Gerald Larner©