Maier was scarcely an unknown when she performed her newly minted Violin Concerto with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1876. The 22-year-old composer-violinist had been concertizing throughout her native Sweden for several years to mounting acclaim, and her high-profile appearance in Leipzig catapulted her into the select company of internationally prominent women musicians. After her marriage to Dutch composer Julius Röntgen in 1880, the newlyweds took up residence in Amsterdam, where Maier curtailed her performing career and launched a fashionable musical salon that attracted such visiting luminaries as Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Edvard Grieg. When Brahms, who was introduced to Maier by the pianist Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, sent the unpublished score of his D-minor Violin Sonata, the two women read it through with what Elisabeth described as “tumult and delight.” A few months later Maier played the sonata again, this time with Clara Schumann.

Although Maier’s fame dimmed after her untimely death in 1894, the late 20th century saw a renewed interest in her pioneering achievement. Among the recent rediscoveries is the Sonata in B minor, first published in 1878. A remarkably inventive and engaging work, its assurance is all the more impressive for a composer in her early 20s. Maier’s writing for the violin is brilliant but never overtly virtuosic or showy. The opening Allegro, by turns darkly urgent and warmly lyrical, balances a strikingly individual voice and Schumannesque overtones. The slow movement is cast in symmetrical ABA form, with the tenderly lilting G-major melody of the outer sections interrupted by a playful canonic interlude. The finale is a propulsive rondo whose recurring theme is characterized by jittery syncopations that offset the contrasting characters of the intervening episodes.

© Harry Haskell, 2025

One of the greatest pianists and pedagogues of her time, Schumann (née Wieck) didn’t gain wide recognition as a composer until nearly a century after her death in 1896. The product of an artistic household—her mother and father were both professional musicians—she matured rapidly as an artist and made her debut in the Leipzig Gewandhaus at age eleven, playing one of her own compositions. In 1840, she married Robert Schumann, who encouraged her work as a composer with the tacit understanding that his musical career took precedence. As the primary breadwinner for their large family, Clara toured and gave concerts most of her life, commanding an international reputation. She set new performance standards that continue to this day, including performing recitals and concertos from memory. After Robert’s tragic death in a sanatorium in 1856, Clara composed little, leaving just 23 published works.

Dating from the spring of 1853, the Three Romances, Op. 22 are dedicated to the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, Clara’s frequent recital partner. In their fanciful spontaneity of expression, they make a charmingly lightweight sequel to her powerful Piano Trio of 1846. The first Romance, in the warm key of D-flat major, is characterized by a leisurely, rocking rhythm in the piano, which provides supple support for the violin’s soaring, decorously ornate melody. In the Allegretto, the violin’s theme, embellished with grace notes and trills, flits capriciously between G minor and G major; its playfully arching contours echo the first of Robert’s Op. 94 Romances. The long-breathed lyricism of the third Romance is accentuated by the softly rippling arpeggios in the piano part. In the words of a contemporary reviewer, “All three pieces display an individual character conceived in a truly sincere manner and written in a delicate, fragrant hand.” 

© Harry Haskell, 2025

In the fall of 1850, the 40-year-old Schumann moved from Dresden to Düsseldorf to succeed Ferdinand Hiller as municipal music director. Although his new duties at first left little time for composing, he soon hit his stride, and by the middle of the following year one work after another was flowing from his pen, including the Third and Fourth symphonies (both begun earlier), the Cello Concerto, the Piano Trio in G minor, and two sonatas for violin and piano. Schumann seems to have rediscovered the violin in the last half-dozen years of his life. It was while he was at work on his Violin Concerto, in the fall of 1853, that he met the young Johannes Brahms and proposed that they collaborate with a third composer on a sonata honoring the great Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim. Schumann later incorporated his contribution to their  joint effort in a third sonata. (Like the concerto, it was not published until long after his death.) 

Joachim was not Schumann’s only source of inspiration, however; the Sonata No. 1 in A minor was written for William Joseph von Wasielewski, whom Schumann had lured away from Leipzig to serve as concertmaster of the Düsseldorf orchestra. Like much of his music, the sonata plays on the contrasting personas of Schumann’s literary alter egos, the gentle Eusebius and the impassioned Florestan. The first movement, marked “with passionate feeling,” features a warmly urgent theme in the violin’s lower register that gradually rises in pitch and intensity before wandering off, as so often in Schumann, in a kind of lyrical reverie. The middle Allegretto, in F major, is winsome and somewhat capricious in character. But the lively finale, with its dancing 16th notes and fluid shifts from minor to major, is by turns demonic and playful.

© Harry Haskell, 2025

Schumann was on top of the world in the fall of 1849, declaring that “I have never been busier or happier with my work.” The year started off with the publication of his bestselling collection of easy piano pieces titled Album for the Young, followed by a string of chamber works tailored for the amateur Hausmusik market. Among them were the Fantasy Pieces for Clarinet and Piano, the Adagio and Allegro for Horn and Piano, the Five Pieces in Folk Style for Cello and Piano, and the Three Romances, Op. 94, for Oboe and Piano. Schumann composed the latter in early December 1849 and presented the manuscript to Clara for Christmas. She enlisted a violinist to play the oboe part and gave a private reading for family and friends at their home in Dresden on December 27. Not until 1863, long after Robert’s death, were the Romances first performed in public.

Although Schumann designated the work for oboe and piano, he wasn’t finicky about the choice of melody instrument: he published Op. 94 in alternate versions for violin and clarinet, and the score has also been taken up by horn players and other instrumentalists. The three short character pieces are bountifully lyrical and deceptively simple in design. The cascading melody of the first Romance wells up from the piano’s opening octave As; wide leaps punctuate the chains of closely spaced notes in the oboe part, whose turbulence subsides into a shimmering pool of A minor after a brief, cadenza-like flourish. The second Romance, based on a curling motif of four eighth notes, begins and ends placidly, with a more agitated midsection and a delicate coda. Schumann uses the same rounded ABA form in the third Romance, which has a more rhapsodic and slightly mysterious character. 

© Harry Haskell, 2025

Brahms first met Joseph Joachim in the spring of 1853. Although only two years older than the composer, the concertmaster of the Hanover court orchestra was already an international celebrity. Brahms respected Joachim as a composer even more than he admired his virtuosity on the violin. Throughout his life he turned to the Hungarian for advice, especially in the decade between 1878 and 1888, when he was writing his D-major Violin Concerto and three violin sonatas. Sonata No. 3, in the “dark” key of D minor, is weightier and more overtly dramatic than its predecessors in G major and A major. Its dedicatee, Hans von Bülow, cut a notably titanic figure at the keyboard as well as on the podium, and the sonata’s impassioned, virtuosic character bears his stamp as much as that of Joachim. The music may also allude to Brahms’s long-simmering love for Clara Schumann: upon receiving the score, she told him that the third movement reminded her of “a beautiful girl sweetly frolicking with her lover—then suddenly  in the middle of it all, a flash of deep passion, only to make way for sweet dalliance once more.”

Whatever feelings Brahms sought to express, the D-minor Sonata is unquestionably infused with passion. From the first bars of the opening Allegro, the staggered eighth notes and recurrent dynamic swellings bespeak the music’s underlying turbulence. The mood of barely contained wildness is briefly dispelled in the majestic D-major Adagio—despite its brevity, one of Brahms’s most concentratedly intense slow movements. This leads to an ethereal scherzo in F-sharp minor, marked Un poco presto e con sentimento (Moderately fast and with feeling), whose opening theme returns at the end in a deceptively tranquil reminiscence. (Clara likened this delicate and devilishly difficult passage to walking on eggshells.)  In the final Presto agitato, the sonata’s pent-up energy bursts forth in a high-spirited romp in 6/8 meter, charged with stabbing accents and syncopations.

© Harry Haskell, 2025