THE CONCERT
Brahms, one of the most self-critical of all composers, destroyed at least three sonatas for violin and piano before he wrote the three that have come down to us. These are mature works that show Brahms at the height of his powers as a composer of chamber music. Beginning with the lovely Allegro amabile of the Second Violin Sonata in sunny A Major and ending with the turbulent Presto agitato of the Third Violin Sonata in stormy D Minor, tonight’s program promises to be a journey of intense emotions and moods, filled with some of the most lyrical melodies ever written for the violin and piano.
By Walter Frisch
JOHANNES BRAHMS Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Major, Op. 100
Born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, in Vienna.
Composed in 1886, the Sonata in A Major was first performed in Vienna on December 2 of that year; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere in Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on November 22, 1892, with Adolph Brodsky, violin, and Walter Damrosch, piano.
Brahms’s Second Violin Sonata, like the First, came into existence in a pastoral setting, in this case the Swiss town of Hofstetten on Lake Thun, during the summer of 1886. Once again the setting seems to have affected the tone of the work, and, as in the First Sonata, there is a connection with song. Brahms himself acknowledged the indebtedness of the second theme of the first movement of the A-Major Sonata to his own song “Wie Melodien zieht es mir,” Op. 105, No. 1, composed in the same summer. Commentators have claimed to detect echoes of at least three other Brahms lieder in this sonata. It has also been called the “Meistersinger” Sonata because the shape of its opening melody (as well as its harmony) resembles the “Prize Song” of Walther von Stolzing in Wagner’s opera.
The Op. 100 Sonata forms part of a group of chamber works (including the Second Cello Sonata, Op. 99; the Third Piano Trio, Op. 101; and the Third Violin Sonata, Op. 108) that display a new trend in Brahms’s style. There is a tauter, more compressed musical language, with no loss of lyrical intensity. Brahms’s friend Elisabet von Herzogenberg aptly described the sonata as being “constructed in the plainest possible way from ideas at once striking and simple, fresh and young in their emotional qualities, ripe and wise in their incredible compactness.”
As in several of Brahms’s mature works, such as the Fourth Symphony, the exposition of the sonata form is not repeated in the first movement, and the development begins with the main theme appearing in the principal key. The form seems to proceed without a sense of struggle. Normally, the beginning of a recapitulation is the result of a dynamic, goal-oriented process and constitutes a release of tension. Here, however, the moment arrives in a calm, understated manner, without any harmonic preparation, almost as if to say, “What’s all the fuss? Let’s begin!” There is no moment in the sonata more characteristic of Brahms’s “late” style, in which the lion is able to tread as lightly as a lamb.
The middle movement of the Second Violin Sonata is an ingenious fusion of a slow movement and a scherzo in a single form. An
Andante tranquillo in F major and in duple meter, almost Baroque in its intricate weaving of different lines, appears in alternation with an impetuous
Vivace in D minor and in triple meter. This movement, literally a two-for-one, is a perfect example of the “compactness” that Elisabet von Herzogenberg admired.
Somewhat unusually, Brahms marks the finale of the sonata
Allegretto grazioso, an indication he tended to use for interior movements. This heading suggests a mood that is gentle, not driving. Indeed, the main theme has a quality of self-assurance; it treads with confidence and carries this great sonata to a conclusion that is affirmative without being jubilant.
Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Major, Op. 78
Composed in 1878–79, The Sonata in G Major was first performed in Bonn on November 8, 1879; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere on February 7, 1909, with Clara Damrosch Mannes, violin, and David Mannes, piano.
The First Sonata, in G major, was composed in the summers of 1878 and 1879 in the Austrian village of Pörtschach on Lake Worth. It was in these idyllic surroundings that Brahms created some of his sunniest and most serene works, including the Second Symphony (1877) and the Violin Concerto (1878). The smaller-scale G-Major Sonata represents a kind of expressive and technical overflow from those two gentle orchestral giants. There is a similar lyricism and intensity, as well as an efflorescence of melody.
The G-Major Sonata was early on dubbed the “Regenlied” (“Rain Song”) Sonata by Brahms’s friends because the main melody of its first and last movements are based on a song by that title that Brahms had composed in 1873 (Op. 59, No. 3). The finale of the sonata actually quotes the song directly, while the first movement takes over the main rhythmic motive: three D’s in a long–short–long pattern. The same pattern is also evoked in the middle section of the slow movement.
The first movement of the sonata is especially notable for its profusion of themes, each seeming to grow effortlessly out of the previous one. In fact, the melodies are all related by a careful process of what the 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg would call developing variation: a small motivic figure becomes transformed into something that sounds new but is linked to what has gone before. This principle gives Brahms’s music its powerful logic and unity.
The middle movement of the G-Major Sonata has an expanded ternary form (ABABA). The A segments are based on a melody in E-flat that is typical of Brahms—broadly tuneful but also complex and off-center in its rhythms. The B section, a dark funeral march in E-flat minor, is a musical commemoration of Felix Schumann, one of Clara and Robert’s sons, who in 1879 died of tuberculosis at the age of 24. Brahms sent a copy of this movement to Clara, confessing that he had written it to tell her “how sincerely I think of you and Felix.”
Despite the emerging “Regenlied,” the memory of the
Adagio continues to haunt the finale, where the main theme of the Adagio
reappears quite suddenly, about half way through, in its original key of E-flat. The finale itself begins, like the “Regenlied” song, in the minor key, here G minor. All its themes are in minor until the reappearance of the slow movement theme. Only in the coda, marked Più moderato, does Brahms at last shift the main key from G minor to G major. It is here that the sunshine at last peeks through the clouds—not as a blast of radiance, but as a comforting, warming beam of light.
Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor, Op. 108
Composed in 1886–88, the Sonata in D Minor was first performed in Budapest on December 21, 1888; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere on November 12, 1912, with Efrem Zimbalist, violin, and Eugene Lutsky, piano.
Brahms began his Third Violin Sonata in the summer of 1886, at the same time as the Second, but completed it only two years later, in 1888. It was published in April 1889 with a dedication to Brahms’s close friend and champion, the conductor Hans von Bülow. Unlike the two other violin sonatas, the Third, in D minor, has four movements corresponding to the traditional types. Yet the work still displays a miraculous economy of expression: even with the expanded form, it lasts just over 20 minutes in performance. The mood of this Sonata is darker and more turbulent than the other two. The same controlled intensity of expression now gives the impression of a coiled spring.
The most astonishing aspect of the first movement is the development section, where time seems to hold still during a pedal point that sounds for 46 measures. Over the sustained A, the piano weaves arpeggios, and the violin takes up fragments of the first theme. The coda shifts the key, over an ominous pedal point, to the tonic, D, and the movement ends with a brightening to the major mode.
The D-major set up in the coda of the first movement carries over into the
Adagio, which is one of Brahms’s most condensed slow movements. It consists of a broad melody that is repeated in varied form, with no intervening or contrasting episode. As the great critic Donald F. Tovey observed, “Such simplicity comes of the concentration of a life’s experience; it cannot be imitated by merely writing a tune and refusing to develop it.”
The delicate scherzo might be the briefest instrumental movement in all of Brahms, lasting just three minutes. It is also one of Brahms’s most original in terms of form, harmony, and phrase design. There are moments in the movement that sound, because of the way the harmonic progressions refuse to follow Classical precedent, as if they might be from an impressionist work by Ravel or Fauré.
The finale of the Third Sonata is a powerful sonata rondo in which the pent-up energies of the preceding movements are fully unleashed. It begins on the run, in what Malcolm MacDonald has characterized as Brahms’s “galloping scherzo style” in a 6/8 meter. The opening also unfolds over an unstable dominant harmony; the tonic does not appear until the 17th measure. The chorale-like second theme in the unusual key of C major puts the brakes on the forward motion, but the headlong pace resumes with the third theme in A minor. The coda of the movement ups the energy level still further. Marked Agitato, it takes still bolder harmonic detours, including an especially wrenching turn to E-flat minor, perhaps the most remote chord possible in the universe of D minor.
Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation Walter
Walter Frisch’s writings include Brahms: The Four Symphonies
(Yale University Press, 2003) and Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation
(University of California Press).