Au Rouet Op.14 (c1900)

Of the virtuoso violinists who also flourished as composers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - Joachim, Sarasate, Ysaÿe, Kreisler, Enescu… Ysaÿe and Enescu wrote the best music. If Ysaÿe couldn’t compete with Enescu outside the string repertoire, he out-composed all his colleagues by producing the greatest unaccompanied violin sonatas since those of J.S. Bach. In Au Rouet, the second of his Poèmes for violin and orchestra, he faced a less formidable challenge than comparison with Bach, but he was none the less successful in completing a score worthy to set alongside other classics of the spinning-wheel genre like Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade, Saint-Saëns’s Le Rouet d’Omphale, and Dvorák’s Golden Spinning Wheel.

In Ysaye’s own duo version of Au Rouet the motion of the spinning wheel is clearly perceptible in the piano part in the opening bars, just before the first entry of the violin with the lyrical main theme. If the contours of this melody suggest an allegiance with Gabriel Fauré, which a piano counterpoint seems to confirm, the rest of the work undeviatingly follows Ysaÿe’s own entirely spontaneous, even wilful impulse. Far from the ordered thinking of a Fauré, Au Rouet is a rhapsodic improvisation on that main theme. It first transforms itself into a fantastic scherzo brilliantly illuminated by violin pyrotechnics. Then, as the spinning wheel comes to a stop, it extends itself in an expressive central slow section poetically coloured by speculative harmonies and leading into a massively passionate piano cadenza. Without repeating anything literally, the last third of the piece resumes the scherzo delirium and, in a passage of particularly fanciful virtuoso-violin figuration, sets the the spinning wheel in motion again before the whole thing evaporates into Mendelssohnian thin air.