Sonata in E minor for solo violin, Op.27, No.4

After Ysaÿe had heard Joseph Szigeti give a particularly moving performance of an unaccompanied Bach sonata one day, the two violinists got to talking about the problems of writing for solo violin. “Bach’s genius intimidates anyone tempted do something in the same line,” they apparently agreed. “We know that he reached a summit difficult for anyone else to achieve. How do you escape an influence so dominant that, fatally, if you want to write for solo violin, you’ll be composing some kind of pastiche?” But if anyone could solve the problem it was Eugène Ysaÿe, who was not only one of the greatest violinists of his time but also a highly accomplished all-round musician, conductor and composer.

How long he had been thinking about it we don’t know but, amazingly, when he did risk an attempt on the summit represented by Bach’s unaccompanied violin sonatas and partitas - at his summer villa at Le Zoute on the Belgian coast in 1923 - he sketched a series of six such works in a mere twenty-four hours. They were ready for publication a few days later and they duly appeared in 1924 as Six Sonatas for Solo Violin, Op.27, each one bearing a dedication to an admired violinist colleague. The first in G minor, much the longest and most difficult in the set - appropriately dedicated to Szigeti - is Ysaÿe’s direct and unintimidated reply to the Bach challenge, not least in an ambitious Fugato movement. After that, assuming he wrote them in the published order, he relaxed and gave as much thought to the character of the dedicatee as to the baroque model. Sonata No.6 in E major, dedicated to the Spanish violinist Manuel Quiroga goes so far as to allude to the habanera.

Of the other four dedicatees - Jacques Thibaud, George Enescu, Fritz Kreisler and Mathieu Crickboom - Kreisler inspired Ysaÿe’s answer to the Bach partita rather than sonata. Beginning, like Bach’s Partitas in B minor and D minor, with an Allemanda, the Sonata No.4 in E minor was written, according to the composer, with Kreisler’s robust style and full sonority in mind. There was more to Kreisler than that of course. The three multi-stopped passages in heavily articulated dotted rhythms, the first of them occurring after the much-arpeggiated introduction and the last in the final bars, are certainly robust. At the same time, and above all in the chromatic episode between the second and third appearances of the main theme, the composer acknowledges the sweet expressivity of Kreisler’s playing.

Again like the Partitas in B minor and D minor, the Sonata No.4 in E minor includes a sarabande. Ysaÿe’s Sarabande is like neither of Bach’s however - not so much because of its extensive use of pizzicato as because it is constructed like a passacaglia on a recurring theme. In some performances (according to a tradition deriving apparently from Ysaÿe himself) the passacaglia theme is introduced unadorned in a short additional passage at the beginning, before the entry of the other lines in the complex pizzicato texture. If it isn’t, its first unmissably clear entry is made with the first use of the bow. After that it continues to appear in the same shape and at the same pitch, though with some metrical displacement in the middle and with octave transpositions near the end, throughout the piece.

Unlike any of Bach partitas, Ysaÿe’s Sonata in E minor ends with a brilliant Presto. This, it seems, is a tribute to the Kreisler who enjoyed writing violin pieces in fake eighteenth-century style and publishing them as arrangements of music by minor composers of the period like Pugnani or Padre Martini. The truth about Kreisler’s little hoax didn’t come out until 1935 but there is something about the writing here, particularly in the slower and romantic-sounding middle section - significantly marked Giocosamente (jokingly) - which suggests that Ysaÿe was aware of it already.