Violin Sonata No. 1 in A minor (one movement)

Violin Sonata in A minor

(in one movement)

No one knows exactly what moved Ravel to write his Violin Sonata in A minor. Having at that stage in his development completed nothing more ambitious than short piano pieces and even shorter songs, he would obviously have had to extend himself sooner or later. But, left to himself, he would surely have turned to his own instrument, which was the piano, rather than one he knew comparatively little about. The likelihood is that it was written as a kind of sonata-movement exercise for André Gédalge, whose class at the Conservatoire he had recently joined. It is likely too that it was first performed by the young but famously promising Romanian violinist and composer, George Enescu, who was a member of the same class at the Conservatoire and for whom Gédalge himself had written a Violin Sonata.

Sympathetic teacher though he was, Gédalge must have been shocked by the eleven pages of manuscript Ravel eventually brought him. Surely, no one else in 1897 was writing music with such freely changing metres: 7/8 in the first bar, 6/8 in the second, 4/4 in the third, then 7/8, 6/8, 5/4 and so on. And as for the harmonies, unless he shared his pupil’s obsessive interest in clashing bell sounds and his taste for Chabrier’s progressive chord formations and Delius’s chromaticism - which is particularly unlikely in the last case - they must have seemed extravagant in the extreme. It is, however, a highly accomplished work, idiomatically written for the violin and effectively shaped in a rhapsodic kind of sonata-form construction. When the sonata was discovered among the composer’s papers and published for the first time on the centenary of his birth in 1975, those who knew his later works were intrigued to find a clear anticipation of the first theme of the Piano Trio; better still, for those keen to defend Ravel from the then common charge of congenital dryness, the Violin Sonata in A minor offered incontrovertible evidence of a fervently romantic temperament.