Ludwig van Beethoven. Violin and Piano Sonata No 1 in D Major, Op. 12
Arriving in Vienna, one of the European musical capitals, at the age of twenty-three the ambitious country bumpkin Ludwig van Beethoven began to bring to life his idea to captivate the musical and aristocratic elite. Soon he won fame as a brilliant improviser on the piano, with all of the Viennese courtiers dreamed of studying under him. But things are rather more complex when it comes to approval of his gift as a composer – even Beethoven’s teacher, the famed Joseph Haydn, did not always understand the “strange” musical ideas of his pupil. Realising the artistic differences between his own self and all other musicians surrounding him, Beethoven kept many of his recently completed scores away from the publishers’ hands: his first official opus – three trios – dates to 1795 (by this point the young composer had spent no less than thirty years single-mindedly pursuing the composition of music). His own view of the tradition of chamber music can also be felt in his first works for violin and piano – three sonatas, Op. 12 – which Beethoven dedicated to his teacher, Antonio Salieri. Puzzled music lovers were unable to find any trace of 18th century chamber music in these sonatas: the gentle heart of the cantilena, reminiscent of the performing traditions of operatic prima donnas and castratos, refined minuets and gavottes and, lastly, the atmosphere itself of social intercourse, transformed into a dialogue between the piano and the solo instrument. Instead of this, from the very first bars of the sonata, Beethoven’s bold temper and uncompromising nature speak for themselves in his view of the instruments’ technical and expressive possibilities.
Sergei Prokofiev. Violin and Piano Sonata No 1 in F Minor
Prokofiev’s Violin and Piano Sonata in F Minor, Op. 80, is only formally considered his first work in this genre. In actual fact, in the time that passed since 1938 when Prokofiev began work on the sonata, he wrote another sonata for the same instruments and the public was introduced to it before the composer completed the idea of his first sonata in 1946. Prokofiev indicates the reasons for the incredibly lengthy work on this opus rather tersely in a letter to his friend Nikolai Myaskovsky: “I started the sonata a long time ago, but am utterly unable to continue with it: it is hard.” Like many other works by Prokofiev of that period, the First Violin Sonata was dedicated to understanding the events of the Second World War, which had shaken the entire nation. He had to compose the cantata Alexander Nevsky (1939), the opera War and Peace (1943) and Ode to the End of the War (1945) for the sonata to end up the way it did: a deeply focussed and even gloomy “epitaph or farewell” in terms of character (I. Martynov), although not devoid of lighter moments (the most beautiful of which is the third section of the work). The epic scale of the narration in the sonata surpasses the confines of the chamber genre and brings this mature work closer to Prokofiev’s symphonic scores of the war and post-war period – his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies.
Marina Iovleva | | Brahms’ only violin concerto was written in the summer of 1878 in Pörtschach, a small town in the south of Austria. The air of the town had a beneficial effect on Brahms, who worked on his Second Symphony in Pörtschach the previous summer, and he was now returning to images and the tonality of the symphony (in D Major) for his violin concerto.
The concerto is dedicated to Joseph Joachim, an outstanding violinist of Hungarian descent. It was Joachim who introduced Brahms to the Schumanns, who played an extremely important role in Brahms’ life, and they remained close friends for many years. While working on the concerto, Brahms asked Joachim numerous questions about violin technique, but he did not always follow his advice. But when writing the first section he did not compose a cadenza for it, instead using Joachim’s cadenza.
Brahms’ concerto is one of the most virtuoso works in the genre. Hans von Bülow, comparing Brahms’ concerto with Bruch’s popular violin concerto, stated that Bruch’s concerto was written “for the violin” while Brahms’ concerto was written “against the violin”. Moreover, the complicated nature of the violin part is connected rather with the structure of the work and the complexity of the idea than with a wish to display the technical abilities of the soloist.
As with the Second Symphony, the concerto is imbued with a typically Brahms-like atmosphere of airy and light triumph which is not darkened by the dramatic moods that invade from time to time. Leading the listener in the first and second sections through a series of lyrical images, in the finale Brahms becomes immersed in the spirit of a Hungarian folk dance. And not just because the concerto is dedicated to Joachim, but also because the very sound of the violin was, for Brahms, indissolubly linked with the expression and passion of Hungarian melodies. Yekaterina Yusupova |
