No composer ever demonstrated more convincingly the value of a good, long wait than Brahms. He wrote and discarded at least four works in the venerable violin sonata genre, or so we are told. Recounting the sessions at which the young Brahms played his music for the eager Robert Schumann, the older composer reports hearing “sonatas, veiled symphonies rather, songs, the poetry of which would be understood even without words...sonatas for violin and piano, string quartets, every work so different that it seemed to flow from its own individual source...”
Even before his encounter with Schumann in 1853, the young pianist had served as accompanist to the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi; he had also made the acquaintance of the great Joseph Joachim, whose Hamburg performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto had impressed Brahms five years earlier. Clearly Brahms knew how to write for the violin, but he waited to write a full-fledged sonata. He did make a one-movement contribution to the so-called F-A-E Sonata composed in 1853 for Joachim by Brahms, Schumann, and Albert Dietrich. The Scherzo, which was not published until 1906, offers a fascinating example of the aggressive, almost Beethoven-like style that dominates the earliest works by Brahms.
In the three Piano Sonatas, his Opp. 1, 2, and 5, we can discern the genius that so overwhelmed Schumann (Op. 5, especially, overflows with rich, rewarding music; five movements are needed to contain it all). After these three, however, Brahms published no more sonatas of any sort until he was 33 years old. The first of his Cello Sonatas appeared in 1866, as the culmination of what Donald Francis Tovey described as the composer’s “first maturity.” Three String Quartets finally saw the light of day in the 1870s; the first Violin Sonata had to wait until 1879. It was during this same decade that Brahms finally overcame his long-time fear of producing a symphony, turning out two in quick succession.
For guidance in the composition of his Violin Concerto - completed in 1878 and introduced on New Year’s Day of 1879 - Brahms turned to the great Joachim, and the result (although not universally acclaimed at the time) was soon accepted as perhaps the greatest work in the form since those by Beethoven and Mendelssohn. (Brahms, ever the self-critical composer, made revisions over the following six month-period before the score was published.) The Concerto (Op. 77) was followed, at last, by his Op. 78, the first of the three Violin Sonatas Brahms would write for Joachim.
Summers were especially pleasant for Brahms, and many of his most congenial works date from a series of holiday visits to one lake or another. The summer of 1879 found him in Pörtschach, where he completed the G-major Violin Sonata he had begun the previous year. It was in this small village on the Wörthersee in Austria that Brahms had been inspired to write his Second Symphony in 1877, and the same lyrical effusiveness that pervades that work is clearly evident in the Sonata. In the first movement (deceptively marked Vivace ma non troppo), a seemingly unending melody is introduced rhapsodically by the violin over gentle chords from the piano. Soon the roles are exchanged and the violin accompanies the piano, but the two parts are always complementary. The violin supports its partner with gently strummed chords, before the agitated development section leads to moments of intense drama, but these are soon laid to rest as the main theme returns. The coda reintroduces a defiant mood that seems a bit at odds with the gentle tone of so much of this miraculous music. The second movement (Adagio) brings a different sort of lyricism, more intense in a distinctively probing and mystifying way. When the first theme returns, it offers consolation after some unspoken tragedy. The final movement (Allegro molto moderato) employs quotations from a Brahms song (“Regenlied,” Op. 59, No. 3), although the imagery of the unheard text of the song (“...rain, pour down,/Awaken the old songs/That we used to sing in the doorway/As the raindrops pattered outside!”) is not directly apparent in the music itself. The mood of nostalgia is unmistakable, however, and the Sonata ends gently and wistfully. Clara Schumann wrote to Brahms of this Sonata, “I wish the last movement could accompany me in my journey from here to the next world.”
A span of seven years separates the Second Sonata (Op. 100 in A major) from the First. Brahms had completed his Piano Trio in C and the first of two String Quintets, as well as his Third and Fourth Symphonies. Even more than the first, this Sonata speaks with a lyrical and reposeful voice. Once again, it was a summer retreat (this time in Switzerland, in a town called Thun, near Berne) that produced such sunny music; it should be noted that the stormier Third Sonata was also sketched during the summer of 1886, but it was set aside and not completed until 1888. The opening movement of Op. 100, engagingly marked Allegro amabile, begins with a sweetly singing theme, followed by a melting melody introduced by the piano. (Brahms lovers will be reminded of the bittersweet piano pieces from the composer’s very last years - his Opp. 116-119.) In quick order, however, the tension is increased and dramatic outbursts temporarily interrupt the flow of lyricism. The second movement compresses together the elements of slow movement (Andante tranquillo) and scherzo (Vivace) in a compact structure that helps to keep this Sonata to just about 20 minutes, versus the 30 minutes it takes to play Op. 78. The sections alternate until the very end, when the dreamy slow theme is capped by a coda variant of the brisker music. The final movement (Allegretto grazioso) continues the general atmosphere of radiant humanity that fills this Sonata. Double-stopped passages near the conclusion reinforce the A-major tonality.
The Third Violin Sonata, Op. 108 in D minor, is the most serious of the trilogy, not so surprising when we recall that the composer’s powerful First Piano Concerto was also set in D minor, the key of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The Concerto, of course, was the product of youth (dating from 1854-1859), and the 50-minute duration of that work contrasts remarkably with the 20-minute Sonata written three decades later. Unlike its two companions, the last of the Violin Sonatas is structured in four movements, beginning with an urgent Allegro. As Orrin Howard succinctly describes it, “The dominant elements of the movement are very nearly all contained within the first four measures: three ideas in the violin - an ascending fourth, a falling eighth-note figure, and a long-held note followed by a quick note - and, the fourth, the piano’s accompanying line in staggered (thus restless) single notes an octave apart. It is these highly concentrated motifs, so mysterious in their first appearances, which are put through a huge variety of compositional and emotional transformations.” The concise Adagio that follows shares the same rapt quality that marked the slow movement of the D-minor Piano Concerto; this is a song that manages to express a great deal without any need for words. The third movement (Un poco presto e con sentimento) is an example of Brahms steadfastly refusing to write a real scherzo when an intermezzo will do. The middle section is more emphatic, but the requested sentiment soon returns us to a lyrical mood reminiscent of the earlier Violin Sonatas. The climax of this work, though, is clearly the finale. The stormy Presto agitato gallops relentlessly, occasionally yielding to reflective interludes offering welcome but only temporary contrast. Brahms is quite clearly unwilling to go gently. And so, good night.
