Inspired by Friendship Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)

Violin Sonata No. 2 in A major, Op. 100 ‘Thun’

Allegro amabile

Andante tranquillo – Vivace

Allegretto grazioso (quasi Andante)

The idea of relationship permeates Brahms’s chamber music, and nowhere is it more apparent than in the three wonderful violin sonatas. In fact, like the Classical-era masters Mozart and Beethoven, Brahms didn’t call these ‘violin sonatas’, but ‘sonatas for piano and violin’. This is highly significant: the violin isn’t the star, or even ‘first among equals’. He or she is definitely one side of a partnership – a partnership that can be tender, playful, even fractious, but never diva-like. To some extent this may reflect Brahms’s relationship with the individual who above all personified the violin for him: the composer and outstanding virtuoso Joseph Joachim. Joachim was a close friend and valued collaborator, until the two men fell out spectacularly in 1884 – Brahms had taken sides with Joachim’s wife Amalie when her husband had accused her (almost certainly wrongly) of having an affair. The breach was to last three years.

Brahms’s Second Violin Sonata was written quickly during the summer of 1886, the year before his reconciliation with Joachim. It was composed in a flower-bedecked chalet beside the Swiss resort of Lake Thun, the inspiration for so many German Romantic artists and thinkers, and famously the place where the restless poet and playwright Heinrich von Kleist had found temporary peace. While there is nothing about the Sonata that suggests spectacular Alpine scenery or energetic mountain hiking, the spirit of the place does seem to have had a profound effect on Brahms’s own spirits. The Second is the sunniest of the three violin sonatas, and it’s the most closely connected with the private world of his Lieder. As Brahms himself admitted, two songs in particular ‘go with the sonata’: ‘Wie Melodien’ (‘Like Melodies’) and ‘Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer’ (‘My sleep grows ever softer’), both of which were sung for Brahms by the contralto and Lieder specialist Hermine Spies when she visited him at Thun that summer – Brahms had written several of his finest songs with her specifically in mind. Did Hermine’s singing awaken something in this strangely enigmatic composer: so susceptible to women, yet apparently incapable of forming any kind of enduring amorous relationships with them?

Whatever the nature of his relationship with Spies, Brahms clearly found rich inspiration in her company during that summer holiday in 1886, and there are several quite specific clues in the Second Sonata. The first movement’s second theme is closely related to ‘Wie Melodien’, while the finale’s opening phrase, deep down on the violin’s grainy G string, recalls the climactic ‘Come, o come soon’ from ‘Immer leiser’… Clearly, love was very much on Brahms’s mind, even if it was only a form of idealized love.

Brahms wasn’t the first composer to attempt a fusion of slow movement and scherzo, but the Second Violin Sonata’s central movement achieves this triple-decker-sandwich effect with unusual skill. Brahms found the example of Beethoven’s elemental, thrillingly rhythmic scherzos an especially hard act to follow and he was always looking for different ways to incorporate alternative scherzo- or minuet-like dance music in his large-scale works. Here a warm, deliciously lyrical Andante tranquillo alternates with a spooky, fleeting Vivace in a way that recalls the ghostly ‘Fürchtenmachen’ (‘Frightening’) from Kinderszenen (‘Scenes from Childhood’) by Brahms’s youthful mentor and, all too briefly, father-figure Robert Schumann. The last tiny return of the Vivace (almost an afterthought) is a reminder that Brahms can also be delightfully playful – he is never less the ‘beer and beard’ Brahms of legend than in music like this. After this comes the Allegretto grazioso finale: easy-going at first and outwardly joyous in its ending, but allowing a momentary vista of glamorous romantic turbulence in its minor-key second theme: perhaps here, just for a moment, Brahms’s feelings for the magnificent mountain scenery of Thun also find expression in the music.

Béla Bartók (1881–1945)

Violin Rhapsody No. 1

Prima parte (lassú) –

Seconda parte (friss)

When it came to making friends with violinists, the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók was particularly well-favored. His relationship with Jelly d’Arányi resulted in the composition of the two sonatas for violin and piano, whilst his close collaboration and friendship with two other Hungarian virtuosi, Jósef Szigeti and Zoltán Székely, bore fine fruit in the two rhapsodies, also for violin and piano. Szigeti, for whom Bartók wrote the First Rhapsody in 1928, turned out to be a particularly valuable friend in his final, painful years of exile during the Second World War. Ill at ease in New York, shocked by the death of his mother and the fate of his native country, and increasingly feeling the effects of the leukemia that was to kill him in 1945, Bartók was also desperately short of money. It was Szigeti who – without telling his friend – secured for him two very important commissions: Contrasts, for the clarinetist Benny Goodman, and the magnificent Concerto for Orchestra, for the conductor Serge Koussevitzky. Working with Szigeti (the two often played together in concert) was important too: Bartók was a superb pianist, but he didn’t play a string instrument. Consulting Szigeti, or just looking over his shoulder as he played, left a powerful imprint on his violin writing, which is one reason why it is so treasured by violinists today.

Bartók claimed that his two violin rhapsodies were essentially folk-music arrangements, but it’s never quite as simple as that. No one knew the folk music of Hungary better than Bartók, who had been a diligent collector of its rich musical treasures in his earlier years. The tunes we hear are more or less ‘original’, but the composer adds stylistic embellishments of his own, while the piano writing, which is often harmonically complex, ingeniously conveys something of the rough but vibrant spirit of Hungarian rural music-making – and also that of the ethnically Hungarian regions of Transylvania, in what is now Romania. The two sections echo the typical gypsy csárdás formal pattern of a slowish dance (lassú) followed by a more energetic faster section (friss), but the overall character is more fluid than this might suggest. As often in Bartók’s larger-scale works, there is a reflective, more melancholic moment not long before the ending; but ultimately it is the dance of life that triumphs.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)

Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major, Op. 47 ‘Kreutzer’

Adagio sostenuto – Presto

Andante con Variazioni

Presto

Most of Beethoven’s violin sonatas are relatively early and firmly ‘Classical’ in style: the expression may be intense, the humor tigerish, and there are definitely a few Beethoven surprises along the way, but the feeling one gets in many of the middle-period masterpieces – that Beethoven is prepared to stretch and bend conventional musical forms almost until they break – is largely lacking. The great leap forward comes in the so-called ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata of 1802–3. One has to say ‘so-called’, because the dedication to Rodolphe Kreutzer, considered by many at the time to be the finest violinist of his day, was a last-minute decision, and in any case Kreutzer hated it and refused to play it – apparently he described it as ‘outrageously unintelligible’. More importantly, calling the Sonata ‘Kreutzer’ conceals an important fact. The work was actually written for George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, a British violinist of African descent, whom Beethoven not only respected as a musician but liked immensely – until, that is, the two men fell out irrevocably when Bridgetower insulted a woman Beethoven admired. Unfortunately it seems a great deal of drink had also been taken, and the explosiveness of the row that followed was fatal to the friendship.

Before that, however, the two men seem to have had a fine time together, as is reflected in Beethoven’s unofficial early dedication of the Sonata to Bridgetower: ‘Sonata mulattica composta per il mulatto Brischdauer, gran pazzo e compositore mulattico’ (‘Mixed-race sonata composed for the mixed-race Bridgetower, great fool and mixed-race composer’). Beethoven had barely finished the Sonata when the two men gave it its first performance in Vienna’s Augarten on 24 May 1803 (Bridgetower had to read the second movement from Beethoven’s own piano part), yet it seems the event was a great success. Beethoven even endorsed an amendment Bridgetower made to the violin part on the spot, jumping up from the piano stool to shout, ‘Noch einmal, mein lieber Bursch!’ – ‘Once again, dear lad!’ Around the same time he also gave Bridgetower his tuning fork, which the latter kept even after the two men had parted company.

Musically, the effects of this relationship were enduring. Bridgetower’s energetic, passionate character may well have left its mark on the Sonata’s stormy, darkly expressive first movement – the movement that later inspired Tolstoy to write his disturbing novella The Kreutzer Sonata. And it isn’t stretching things too far to see more than a passing joke in Beethoven’s description of it as a ‘mixed-race sonata’. Musicologists still argue about whether the work is ‘really’ in A major or A minor. There’s more to this than scholarly pedantry: in fact the ambiguity runs deep. The violin seems to start clearly in the bright major key, but when the piano enters, it turns the violin theme firmly into the darker minor – in which mode the Presto explodes. But if the first movement seems thoroughly Romantic in spirit, the variation-form second movement and the lively gig-like finale seem to dance back and forth between Romantic moodiness and Classical poise. Glorious as it is, it can seem to be a sonata caught between two worlds – like Bridgetower himself, perhaps?

INSPIRED BY FRIENDSHIP

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR MAILING LIST