In his three Op. 1 Piano Trios of 1795, Beethoven sought to establish himself with the Viennese public as an up-and-comer determined to distinguish himself from his esteemed mentor, Haydn. A year later the 26-year-old composer embarked on a concert tour to Prague and Berlin, where he presented his first two cello sonatas as a calling card to the cello-playing Prussian monarch, Friedrich Wilhelm II. It was in the German capital that he met the eminent French cellist Jean Louis Duport, for whom he composed the two Op. 5 Sonatas, as well as a charming set of variations on Handel’s “See the conqu’ring hero comes” from Judas Maccabeus. The latter’s commercial success inspired Beethoven (or his publisher) to follow up with two more works based on popular operatic themes, this time from Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Beethoven freely acknowledged the debt he owed to his predecessor—his first teacher in Bonn famously predicted that he would grow up to be “a second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” —and the two composers may even have crossed paths when Beethoven visited Vienna in 1787. In any case, the dozen variations on Papageno’s aria “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” can only have been a labor of love. Beethoven allots the first variation to his own instrument, the piano, before shining the spotlight on the cellist in a sparkling elaboration of Mozart’s F-major tune. Variation 3 sets tremulous 32nd notes in the piano against the cello’s long-breathed line, and each of the ensuing variations highlights a different aspect of the theme. Variations 10 and 11 venture into the tragic realm of F minor, but Beethoven returns to the home key in the bravura finale, which unexpectedly ends not with a bang, but with a tender caress.

© Harry Haskell, 2025

The dictionary defines fantasy as “the free play of creative imagination.” Few composers have given freer rein to their imagination than Schumann. It’s no accident that he repeatedly used the term fantasie (or phantasie) to describe works that didn’t conform to any of the standard musical forms and genres. Written at the beginning of 1849, the year Schumann considered the most fruitful of his life, the Op. 73 Fantasiestücke (Fantasy Pieces) were part of an outpouring of instrumental miniatures and other “minor” works intended in large part for amateur music makers. Hoping to earn greater fame (and no doubt a bit of real money), Schumann aimed to capture the widest possible market by designating the score for clarinet or violin or cello and piano. Horn players have taken the work up enthusiastically as well.

The three short pieces are unified in both tempo and character, being predominantly fast-paced and charged with youthful Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress). Beyond these surface similarities, all are laid out in modified ABA form, allowing for maximal contrast within their highly compressed time spans. Harmonically, too, the Fantasiestücke are tightly constructed, hewing close to the A-minor/A-major axis, with only a single excursion, in the midsection of the second piece, to the not-very-distantly related key of F major. Schumann specifies that the three pieces are to be played without breaks, thus emphasizing the organic nature of their conception.

© Harry Haskell, 2025

A close contemporary of Shostakovich, Dmitri Kabalevsky came of age in the 1920s, during the brief halcyon period of the Bolshevik workers’ state. Unlike Shostakovich, however, he remained in the good graces of the Soviet regime to the end of his life. While Shostakovich courted official censure with the trenchant social commentary of his early opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Kabalevsky stuck to less controversial fare in his popular folk-based opera Colas Breugnon and incidental music for the children’s play The Comedians. Stylistically, too, he plied a more conservative path than either Shostakovich or Prokofiev, following in the footsteps of Nikolai Myaskovsky, his teacher at the Moscow Conservatory. Throughout his long and much-decorated career, he devoted significant time and energy to writing music for young people; like Britten, he featured a children’s chorus in his 1962 Requiem for the victims of World War II.

Kabalevsky’s Cello Sonata, written in that same year for Mstislav Rostropovich, showcases the cellist’s virtuoso technique as well as his outsized temperament. At the same time, the music’s softly radiant lyricism is infused with melancholic introspection. “From the threateningly funereal bells of the piano’s opening, it is clear that the sonata is set to make a major personal statement,” Steven Isserlis writes in a note to his recording of the work. “The first movement traverses a roller-coaster of emotions: intense gloom is violently contrasted with outbursts of manic energy. The second movement—‘the waltz that never was,’ as Rostropovich used to describe it (according to his student  and biographer Elizabeth Wilson)—is a ghostly ‘danse macabre,’ full of skeletally grotesque effects. The finale is an electrifying perpetuum mobile, returning only in the coda to the shadows of the sonata’s opening.”

© Harry Haskell, 2025

Born into a musical family in Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic, composer and conductor Vítĕzslava Kaprálová left a distinguished, though sadly little-known, body of work ranging from art songs and chamber music to concertos. After moving to Paris at age 22 to pursue her studies, she began an intense affair with the older composer Bohuslav Martinů; the two compatriots memorialized their love in covert symbols encoded in their musical works. Kaprálová’s star rose quickly: at a major new-music festival in London in 1938, where she conducted her Military Sinfonietta, she shared billing with the likes of Bartók, Hindemith, Webern, and Messiaen. Undaunted by gender bias—one reporter referred to her dismissively as a “good looking Czechoslovakian girl”—she continued to compose and conduct until her premature death of tuberculosis during the evacuation of Paris in June 1940

Among Kaprálová’s last works were two Ritournelles for cello and piano, of which only one survives. (The partial score was fortuitously saved by the pianist slated to give the aborted premiere, who fled the city ahead of the Nazi advance.) Despite its brevity, the piece packs a hefty punch in its vigorous, incisive rhythms, folk-tinged melodies, and mildly dissonant harmonies. According to the pianist Rudolf Firkušný, one of her foremost champions, Kaprálová’s music mirrored the “unpredictable” nature of her personality: “We never knew how she would be: sometimes very happy, funny, and full of life, and sometimes, on the contrary, quite serious. She was well aware of the world situation and the unfolding events. Her personality was charming and her work irresistible, just like she was. We can see many signs of a great talent in her work and the towering heights it might have reached.”

© Harry Haskell, 2025

To listeners steeped in the genial Classicism of Mozart and Haydn, the muscular Romanticism of Beethoven’s so-called middle period seemed a strange and wondrously allusive language, almost, indeed, the “air of another planet” that bewildered audiences a century later in the work of another musical revolutionary, Arnold Schoenberg. In an essay published in 1813, the critic and novelist E.T.A. Hoffmann described Beethoven’s instrumental music in quasi-mystical terms: “Strange forms begin a joyous dance, as they gently fade toward a luminous point, then separate from each other flashing and sparkling, and hunt and pursue each other in myriad groupings. In the midst of the spirit kingdom thus revealed, the enraptured soul listens to the unknown language and understands all  the most secret allusions by which it has been aroused.”

Beethoven’s five sonatas for cello and piano span the two decades in which he evolved from a young tyro to a mature master. The two Op. 5 Sonatas are notable for their exuberant but understated brilliance, while the two Op. 102 Sonatas of 1815 stand on the threshold between the “heroic” style of his middle period and the more introspective, convoluted language of his later works. The Op. 69 Sonata, composed in 1808, falls squarely in the middle of this period of dynamic stylistic development. Roughly contemporary with such works as the “Pastoral” Symphony, the Violin Concerto, and the two Op. 70 Piano Trios, it shows the composer testing the limits of both cello technique and the duo sonata form. Although Beethoven had already composed nine of his ten violin-piano sonatas, the relatively novel combination of cello and piano posed new challenges of ensemble and balance.

The fact that only one of Beethoven’s cello sonatas, Op. 102, No. 2, features a full-scale slow movement suggests that he had reservations about the cello’s ability to hold its own alongside the piano as a lyrical solo instrument. Indeed, the autograph score of the A-major Sonata shows that he was still experimenting with various ways of allocating thematic material between the two instruments. In this case, his solution was to exploit the full range of the cello’s sonority. The Allegro ma non tanto opens with a richly baritonal cello solo, but quickly climbs high as the music picks up momentum. Similar contrasts of register and tempo are explored in the sparkling A-minor Scherzo, with its halting, syncopated theme bandied back and forth between the two players. A meltingly beautiful but oddly truncated Adagio cantabile serves as a preamble to the finale, in which the piano and cello share equally in the bravura figurations.

© Harry Haskell, 2025