In September 1850, Schumann moved with his wife and six children to Düsseldorf on the Rhine River to take up the post of municipal music director. Initially, Robert and Clara were in high spirits over this prestigious position; but year by year, Robert’s mood became more clouded until in the winter of 1854, he attempted suicide by jumping into the Rhine. The composer was not a naturally gifted leader of musical forces, though his first season leading the city’s orchestra and choral ensemble went well enough. However, by late summer 1851, Clara wrote, “The choral society is falling apart, there’s no enthusiasm, no love for the thing, and the orchestra is not even fully manned. … The people here respect neither art nor conductors!” On September 6, Schumann had a “stormy confrontation” with Wilhelm Wortmann, the city’s deputy mayor, over the selection of repertoire and artists for the winter season.

Six days later, the composer began writing his First Violin Sonata in what he described as a mood of “strong anger against certain persons.” That anger fueled ferocious creative activity, and the Sonata was essentially finished in just four days, to be followed immediately by the Piano Trio in G Minor and the Second Violin Sonata in D Minor. The First Sonata was apparently intended for Schumann’s concertmaster at Düsseldorf, Wilhelm Joseph von Wasielewski, who later became Schumann’s first biographer. However, the famed concertmaster of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Ferdinand David, gave the first public performance in that city with Clara Schumann at the piano on March 21, 1852.

Movement one: Musical commentators have often criticized this sonata for its relative lack of showy writing for the violin and specifically for its concentration on the violin’s somber low register at the expense of its brilliant top. But in fact, the violin’s lower range suits the mood of this rather troubled music, whose expressive marking is “with passionate expression”—Schumann was clearly not trying to write a piece of virtuoso entertainment here. This sonata-form movement in A Minor is driven by an obsessively circling, anguished theme rocking on a 6/8 meter; its chromatic twists are intensified by a piano part in constant restless motion. The exposition section, which lacks a sharply contrasted second theme, is repeated before the development section amplifies the passion and finally allows the violin a few higher-flying virtuoso figurations. In the recapitulation, the music seems to be attempting a more positive A-Major conclusion when, in the movement’s most striking passage, the bottom abruptly falls out, and we are hurled back into the chill of the minor mode with the violin moaning forlornly in its deepest register. Though an intense virtuosic ending is finally conjured-up, this emotional collapse cannot be forgotten.

In F Major, movement two is a much lighter intermezzo-style movement which incorporates elements of a merrily pattering scherzo as well as a pensive slow-movement fragment in F Minor. It is tied together by a recurring refrain with a little questioning ending that Schumann keeps playing with.

Marked Lebhaft (“lively”), the final movement is a perpetual-motion whirlwind in which the violin chases the piano part only a measure behind. Sharp chordal accents occasionally interrupt the flow. The development section brings a little easing with the introduction of a lyrical new theme for the violin in a slightly slower tempo. The rush to the finish line is temporarily stopped by an interjection of the first movement’s mournful theme in A Minor, which ensures that this unsettling work will end not in the expected major but vehemently in the minor mode.

Notes by Janet E. Bedell copyright 2011

Like Schumann, Bartók wrote his two published violin sonatas very close together—the First Sonata in 1921 and the Second in 1922. For Bartók, the inspiration was the young Anglo-Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Aranyi (1895–1966), the grand-niece of the revered violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim who’d worked so closely with Brahms. Strikingly attractive, d’Aranyi was a player known for her passionate expression and Gypsy fire; Ravel paid tribute to these characteristics with his famous Tzigane, written expressly for her. Bartók had known the very musical d’Aranyi family (Jelly’s older sister Adila was also an accomplished violinist) since he was a student in Budapest and Jelly was only a child. After World War I, he met d’Aranyi again, now grown-up and already enjoying a successful career based in London. Reportedly, the composer fell in love with her but was rebuffed.

However, their musical partnership blossomed, and Bartók created his two remarkable violin sonatas for them to play together—works that stand at the summit of 20th-century music for violin and piano. The 1920s was the most experimental period in the composer’s career, the period when he flirted with the ideas of Schoenberg and came closest to leaving tonality behind. Though they are much easier on the ears, the two violin sonatas have much in common with his radical Third and the Fourth string quartets composed just a few years later.

The First Violin Sonata, which Bartók and d’Aranyi premiered together in London on March 24, 1922, is by far the longer and more emotionally varied of the two. Many commentators have remarked that the work sounds very improvisatory—perhaps inspired by d’Aranyi’s rhapsodic playing style—although in fact it is formally very carefully worked-out, as are all of Bartók’s scores. Though Bartók asserted that the Sonata has a tonal center of C-sharp, any sense of traditional tonality is blurred in a work that often embraces bitonality and some of the twelve-tone practices of Schoenberg. The other daring characteristic of this music is how completely independently the violin and piano parts are treated, each pursuing its own separate agenda. As Bartók biographer Halsey Stevens writes, “It is as if the players were engaged upon different works simultaneously: works which correspond in length and structure and complement each other at every point, but share no themes or motives.”

Given its radical methods and the fact that it is marked Allegro appassionato, the first movement surprises us with its prevailing lyricism and soft, delicately colored music. It opens with shimmering fast figures in the piano that suggest the bell-like Indonesian gamelan that Debussy and Ravel loved so much. The violin provides the passion with a theme of spacious, wide-arcing lines. As free as this music sounds, it does follow a sonata-form shape. The development section begins as the tempo slows and the violin drops to a low muttering over glistening punctuations in the piano; here, instead of storming working-out, we experience some of the movement’s most fragile and exquisitely wistful music, somewhat reminiscent of Bartók’s famous “night music” sounds. The onset of the recapitulation is another moment of ethereal beauty as the violin reprises its opening theme slowly in its highest register while the piano again mimicks the gamelan.

In a three-part ABA form, the Adagio second movement opens with a a highly expressive, metrically free solo for the violin whose poignant melody initially drifts downward but culminates on a fragile high trill. The piano enters with pensive chords that suggest Debussy in their parallel motion. The violin then sings a more fragmented variant of its solo song, followed by a variant of the Debussian chords with a keening violin obbligato. Tolling deep in its bass register, the piano introduces a central B section of very different character, with the violin declaiming fiercely in double stops a raucously dissonant theme with strong Hungarian folk flavor. The piano responds with a more expansive and lyrical idea marked cantabile. The A section returns with the violin’s opening solo elaborately decorated and now modestly reinforced by the piano. Like the first movement, the music gently fades into the ether.

If much of the preceding music was subtle and introverted, the finale is brazen, extroverted, and uninhibited in its virtuosity. Like many of Bartók’s final movements, this one is in Romanian folk-dance style. The piano’s jagged, savagely dissonant opening chords introduce the element of bitonality (simultaneous use of two or more keys). The violin attacks a wild repetitive dance, which will recur as a refrain throughout this rondo form. Only in a slower-tempo central episode does the music temporarily ease and become more lyrical. The concluding moments accelerate to a break-neck Presto, and this exhilaratingly barbaric folk dance closes with a boldly ambiguous chord suggesting not one but three keys: C-sharp Minor in the pianist’s left hand, C-sharp Major in the right hand, and E Major in the violin.

Notes by Janet E. Bedell, Copyright 2011

Often in the music of Brahms, we hear the deeply melancholy strain that darkened even this composer’s happier musical moods. But in his Second Violin Sonata, written on holiday in Switzerland during the summer of 1886, every trace of this congenital sorrow has melted away. Here is a lyrical, totally optimistic work in which both violin and piano transform themselves into singers, expressing the romantic mood of the lieder Brahms was also composing that summer in his cottage in Hostetten near Lake Thun in the scenic heart of the Swiss Alps.

Aside from the beauty of his surroundings, why did the fifty-three-year-old composer feel so happy that summer? And why was he so busy writing songs alongside instrumental chamber works (the Third Violin Sonata and Second Cello Sonata also were born during this same holiday)? The answer was a charming, immensely gifted twenty-nine-year-old mezzo-soprano named Hermine Spies, who was about to visit Brahms in Switzerland. She was the latest in a string of attractive female singers, all possessing rich contralto or mezzo voices, with whom the bachelor composer had fallen in love. Serving as his muse during the late 1880s, she sang Brahms’ songs magnificently in the recitals they gave together.

Throughout his life, Brahms had a complicated relationship with women. On the one hand, ever since his tormented infatuation with Clara Schumann when he was in his early twenties, he was attracted to a series of women musicians, including a brief early engagement to the singer Agathe Siebold. On the other hand, he prized his independence and always placed music higher than any romantic relationship. And so whenever a romance threatened to become serious and the lady began asking for some kind of commitment, Brahms backed-off. This same situation eventually developed with Spies.

But during the summer of 1886, this romance was at its zenith, and the happiness and contentment Brahms was feeling pervades this lovely sonata, in which themes resemble the melodies of several of his contemporary songs. Even the first movement’s expressive marking —Allegro amabile (“Sweet Allegro”)—reveals the mood. This sonata-form music not only sings: it dances to a romantic 3/4-waltz beat. Throughout, the piano is always the melodic leader. It first offers a gracious undulating melody that rises to a peak, inviting an echo from the violin. The second theme the piano proposes is lovelier still: a swaying, curving melody that Brahms admitted was inspired by the ardent song “Wie Melodien zieht es mir” he had just written for Hermine. This theme also contains two more forceful elements—a strong dotted-rhythm motive and pairs of repeated notes.

Both these elements become important components of the ensuing development section, and eventually the piano spins them into a new lyrical theme, with a touch of virile passion. As this theme concludes, the recapitulation, which functions like a second development section, abruptly appears, without any harmonic preparation.

The beguiling second movement combines two interior-movement types—a slow movement and a spirited scherzo—into one: first, an Andante tranquillo section in F Major that is all sweetness and gentle yearning and then a Vivace dance in D Minor and a contrasting meter. On its return, this dance becomes even more piquant, as Brahms intensifies its rhythms with cross accents and pizzicato pops from the violin.

The finale is an unusually relaxed rondo whose mellow theme rises from the violin’s warm low register. Later, after a mildly passionate central episode, this refrain slips back in the piano under the violin’s rhapsody. The sonata closes in a mood of mature rapture.

Now old and ailing, Clara Schumann, Brahms’ first love, responded to this sonata with warm appreciation. “No other work of Johannes has delighted me so completely,” she wrote. “It made me happier than I’ve been for a long, long time.”

Notes by Janet E. Bedell, copyright 2011