Mozart. Brahms. Ysaÿe. Saint-Saëns

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in B Flat Major was composed in 1784 for a concert in Vienna featuring the twenty-year-old Italian violinist Regina Strinasacchi. The violinist received her sheet music on time. Accompanying, Mozart had before him a blank sheet of paper – he had been unable to find the time to write out the piano music, a fact noticed by Emperor Joseph II who was using his theatre binoculars. All of this is surprising: the sonata is extremely complex, with the piano and the violin entering an intense dialogue. How did the musicians rehearse prior to the concert without the music? It is also remarkable that both Mozart himself and his father lavished praise on Strinasacchi’s musicianship, first and foremost for its sensitiveness and touching character. These features are not, however, to be found anywhere in the music of the sonata. It is serious, virtuoso in character and extremely bold in terms of its language. It is a work in the grand style, one intended not for chamber performance but rather for public concerts.

Johannes Brahms’ Sonata for Violin and Piano in D Minor (1888) was composed in a similar key. The third and last of his violin sonatas, it is dedicated not to a famous violinist but to the conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow. It is a real symphony in miniature intended to be performed on just two instruments.

Eugène Ysaÿe’s Six Sonatas for Solo Violin (1924) emerged as a response to Johann Sebastian Bach’s highly complex sonatas and partitas for solo violin. They are all dedicated to young violinists one or two generations younger that that of the Belgian maestro himself, and they differ greatly in both style and form. The Second Sonata was written for Jacques Thibaud. Here the dialogue that Ysaÿe held with Bach over the distance of two centuries is at its most objective. The first movement – Obsession – opens with a theme from Bach’s Third Partita. The continuation comes in Ysaÿe’s own style, while at the end we hear the melody of the medieval sequenza Dies irae. An almost postmodernist work! The second movement – Malinconia – was written in the spirit of a sicilienne. Here the music contains something of Ravel. At the end of this movement one again hears the  Dies irae theme. Danse des ombres is a refined neo-baroque stylisation in the genres of a sarabande and a musette. In Les Furies, the final movement, the  Dies irae theme returns in order to fill almost the entire musical canvas.

Camille Saint-Saëns was among those who at various times heavily influenced Ysaÿe’s style as a composer. He wrote a great many concert works for violin, among them his Introduction et rondo capriccioso (1863) and Havanaise (1887). Both of these works have a Spanish flavour. In Saint-Saëns’ time, French composers had to – however paradoxical it may sound – choose some model to imitate in order to acquire an independent reputation. Saint-Saëns turned to Breton, African, Danish and Russian themes, although more often than not he would select Spanish ones. And he was not alone. At a time when Spanish composers had not yet succeeded in making a name for themselves internationally, their country was being glorified by Bizet in  Carmen and Risky-Korsakov in  Capriccio espagnol.
For the Introduction et rondo capriccioso Saint-Saëns borrowed the form of the dazzling concert pieces that had been popular in his early youth. It is the capricious and whimsical character of the rondo that provide the markedly Spanish rhythms. Havanaise means “Havana dance,” and here Saint-Saëns was inspired by the music of the Spanish colonies. The character of the work is revealed in the unique indication of the tempo: Allegretto lusinghiero, meaning a flattering or affectionate Allegretto. The piece does indeed with a playful habanera which has very little in common at all with the habanera in Carmen.
Anna Bulycheva