Agains The Tide Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

César Franck

(1822–1890)

Violin Sonata in A major

(arr. Jules Delsart)

Allegretto ben moderato

Allegro

Recitativo-Fantasia: Ben moderato

Allegretto poco mosso

Few of us are lucky enough to receive a musical masterpiece as a wedding present, as violinist Eugène Ysaÿe did when he received this unique gift from César Franck. The composer had begun work on his Violin Sonata twenty-eight years before he had it conveyed to the Belgian virtuoso on his wedding day in September 1886. He’d originally intended it for Cosima von Bülow, the beautiful and remarkable daughter of Liszt, and later the co-founder of the Bayreuth Festival with her husband Richard Wagner. But nothing came of that (we don’t know how far Franck actually got with it), and the ideas remained in his desk drawer until the news came from teacher and composer Charles Bordes that their mutual friend Ysaÿe was getting married. Franck wasn’t at the wedding himself, so it was left to Bordes to present the new Violin Sonata to Ysaÿe. The groom was so moved that he sight-read it almost straightaway, accompanied by another of the guests, Bordes’s pianist sister-in-law Léontine-Marie Bordes-Pène.

The same duo gave the work’s public premiere later that year, at the Musée Moderne de Peinture in Brussels, and in challenging circumstances. The Violin Sonata is technically and emotionally challenging for both violinist and pianist, and was the last item in a long and demanding recital which took place in the late afternoon. By the time Ysaÿe and Bordes-Pène came to the sonata the room was virtually in darkness, and as no artificial light was permitted by the museum authoritites, they had to play almost the whole piece from memory. Far from being put off by this experience, Ysaÿe programmed the work many times thereafter in the concert hall and championed it across the world for the rest of his long career. His advocacy completely transformed Franck’s reputation. Up to this point he’d been regarded as a fine organist and pedagogue who also composed – composed, many would have said, music that was forbiddingly complex and far too indebted to dubious German models. Now young French composers began to turn to him as an inspiring example of how both German progressive and Classical thinking could be adapted to the higher varieties of Gallic taste. Debussy, Fauré, Ravel and many other talented, if not quite so well-known French composers learned from Franck, and from this sonata.

On one level, what Franck did was quite conservative. Unlike the two leading progressives of the German-speaking world, Liszt and Wagner, he didn’t strive to create new forms, but turned to Mozart, Haydn and Bach for demonstrations of how strong emotions could be combined with an equally strong feeling for abstract form. The Violin Sonata is in four movements, instead of the traditional Classical three, and the first, second and fourth are lucidly, securely structured – the finale even makes significant play of an old Bachian device, the ‘canon’, in which two voices (in this case violin and piano right hand) imitate each other exactly for substantial stretches of the movement. Was Franck thinking of the young newly-weds similarly intertwining? If so, he embodies this idea in music with considerable delicacy.

But the third movement is something quite different: a free, quasi-improvisatory Recitativo-Fantasia, which begins with a kind of dreamlike echo of the preceding turbulent Allegro and slowly, falteringly – almost like the process of unpicking painful memories in a psychotherapy session – builds to a cathartic climax. In fact, this use of musical memory, like a flashback in a film, affects the character of the whole sonata – as, for instance, when the third movement’s ‘cathartic’ climax returns, melodically intensified, towards the end of the finale. Such thinking, not only underlying the unity of the work but enhancing its power of psychological suggestion, made a huge impression on one of the leading figures in the new generation of French composers, Vincent d’Indy. Franck’s Violin Sonata, d’Indy said, was ‘the first and purest model of the cyclical use of themes in sonata form’, and it remained for him a ‘true musical monument.’

French cellist Jules Delsart’s transcription of the work for his own instrument was authorised by Franck himself and published as early as January 1888. Captivated by a performance of the sonata in Paris the previous month, Delsart had approached Franck for permission to arrange it for cello – this having been granted, he left the piano part unchanged and made as few alterations as possible to the violin part, primarily simply transposing it into a lower octave where necessary.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

(1873–1943)

Cello Sonata in G minor, Op. 19

Lento – Allegro moderato

Allegro scherzando

Andante

Allegro mosso

In 1897, the 24-year-old Sergei Rachmaninoff experienced one of the most catastrophic humiliations ever suffered by a composer of genius. The premiere of his audacious First Symphony in St Petersburg went badly enough in itself (according to some reports, the conductor, Alexander Glazunov, was drunk), but then to cap it all the critics were merciless. Shattered by the experience, Rachmaninoff was plunged into a state of deep depression and creative paralysis that lasted three years: ‘I was like a man who had suffered a stroke and for a long time had lost the use of his head and hands’, he recalled. Fortunately, his aunt, and stalwart supporter, Varvara Satina, had the inspired idea of sending him to a noted and very musical hypnotherapist, Dr Nikolai Dahl, who was a friend of hers. The treatment worked: by the summer of 1901 Rachmaninoff was able to complete what was soon to be his first real popular success, the Second Piano Concerto. Soon afterwards, he was at work on another major piece, his Cello Sonata. The former was such a hit that it completely eclipsed the latter (so often the fate of chamber works), but the sonata is a wonderful work in its own right, recalling the concerto in the sweep of its melodies and in the brilliance of its writing – particularly for Rachmaninoff’s own instrument, the piano.

That said, this is very much a duo sonata, which partly reflects Rachmaninoff’s own close relationship with the cellist for whom he wrote it, the outstandingly gifted Anatoly Brandukov. Although Brandukov was significantly older than the composer, the two became close friends (they often gave concerts together). It’s clear from the Cello Sonata that Rachmaninoff paid close attention when Brandukov was playing. Throughout the four movements the piano often presents the themes first, with the cello picking them up and elaborating on them, and yet the cello always changes the character of the music when it takes up the leading ideas, and there’s no question of the pianist being the ‘star’, however virtuosic the writing. After this work, Rachmaninoff wrote no more chamber music. It’s hard to complain when you consider what he did go on to create, yet this Cello Sonata remains a fascinating pointer to a path not taken.

It begins with a short but telling slow introduction: anguished aspiring phrases from the cello are answered by the piano, whose bass line pulls downwards – the first of many instances where the relationship between the two instruments is one of dialogue, not mere imitation, still less simple tune-plus-accompaniment. The Allegro moderato emerges from this suddenly, launching a long impassioned cello theme with richly textured (but never overwhelming) piano backing. But it’s the piano who introduces the second theme, so gorgeous and memorable that it wouldn’t be out of place in the Second Piano Concerto.

After the first movement’s emotional turbulence, the following scherzo is even faster and more urgent, though Rachmaninoff’s wonderful luxurious lyricism is able to bloom here too, especially in the gorgeous central trio section. Just before the end, bell-like piano chords obliquely recall the first movement’s ardent second theme (Rachmaninoff was fond of this kind of ‘half-memory’ connection). The piano leads off the Andante with another long-breathed melody, but this soon becomes an intimately interwoven duet between the two instruments. This almost erotic tenderness continues right to the end of the movement. As for the finale, although Rachmaninoff’s fondness for the dark minor mode marks him out even amongst Russian composers, his final movements are almost always in the major, and this exuberant, affirmative and, of course, wonderfully tuneful movement is no exception. It may be pure coincidence but, soon after finishing the sonata, Rachmaninoff was at last able to marry the woman he loved, Natalia Satina (yes, she was his cousin!), and the cellist Brandukov, dedicatee of this sonata, was his best man.

AGAINST THE TIDE

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