Download McCarter Theater Presents Christian Tetzlaff, Violin Lars Vogt, Piano

McCarter Theater Presents
Christian Tetzlaff, Violin
Lars Vogt, Piano
October 25, 2011
Schumann
Sonata No. 3 in A Minor for Violin and Piano
Ziemlich langsam; Lebhaft (Moderately slow; Lively)
Scherzo: Lebhaft (Scherzo: Lively)
Intermezzo
Finale
Brahms
Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Major, Opus 100
Allegro amabile
Andante tranquillo; Vivace (in alternation)
Allegretto grazioso (quasi Andante)
Intermission
Bartók
Violin Sonata No. 1
Allegro appassionato
Adagio
Allegro
PROGRAM NOTES
Sonata No. 3 in A Minor for Violin and Piano
Robert Schumann
(b. Zwickau, Germany, 1810; d. Endenich, near Bonn, 1856)
The last of Robert Schumann’s three sonatas for violin and piano came into being
through an unusual creative process. In the early autumn of 1853 Schumann received a visitor at
his home in Düsseldorf, a pianist and fledgling composer named Johannes Brahms. Just 20 years
old, Brahms bore an introduction from his friend Joseph Joachim, an outstanding violinist who
had already made Schumann’s acquaintance.
Brahms and Joachim had established a friendship based on common musical interests.
They also shared certain Romantic ideals and affectations. Brahms referred to himself as "young
Kreisler," after E. T. A. Hoffmann's fictional musician Johannes Kreisler, the personification of
misunderstood Romantic genius. Joachim, for his part, adopted as his personal motto the phrase
frei aber einsam, "free but lonely." If this seems pretentious (as well as ironic, in view of the
violinist's subsequent marriage and active career as a performer), we should not judge it too
harshly. Joachim and Brahms were both young, and Romanticism was very near its crest in
Germany at the middle of the nineteenth century.
Schumann received Brahms generously, praising the younger man’s compositions and
proclaiming Brahms's talent in the pages of a journal he edited, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.
He also instigated an unusual collaboration by proposing that he, Brahms, and another young
composer named Albert Dietrich jointly write a violin sonata for Joachim, who was due to play a
concert in Düsseldorf several weeks later. Schumann further stipulated that the work use as a
motif the pitches F, A, and E, thereby enshrining Joachim's frei aber einsam motto.
Thus was born the "F-A-E Sonata," for which Dietrich composed the opening movement,
Schumann an intermezzo and finale, and Brahms a scherzo. Joachim played the work, with
Schumann’s wife, Clara, at the piano, on October 26, 1853. Almost immediately thereafter,
Schumann set about composing two further movements in place of those contributed by Brahms
and Dietrich, thereby creating a four-movement sonata entirely from his own invention.
Schumann prefaces the first movement proper with an introduction in slow tempo. Here
the violin broaches the start of a melody based loosely on the F-A-E motif, a melody that reveals
itself fully once the music accelerates into the main portion of the movement. The sonata’s
signature motif sounds more explicitly in the brief second movement, where it forms the first
three notes of the broad melody presented by the violin in the opening moments.
F-A-E does not appear unambiguously in the ensuing scherzo, though the shape of
Schumann’s lyrical second theme vaguely alludes to the three-note motto. But Schumann reestablishes the motif in the opening moments of the sonata’s finale, and the many variants of the
three chords heard at the outset keep reminders of the figure continually in our ears. Schumann
was never one to indulge performers with bravura displays of instrumental prowess. But while
not overtly virtuosic, this last movement of his last sonata for violin and piano poses not
inconsiderable challenges to the players of both instruments.
Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Major, Opus 100
Johannes Brahms
(b. Hamburg, 1833; d. Vienna, 1897)
The scherzo Brahms wrote for Schumann’s “F-A-E Sonata” helped prepare him
eventually to compose three full sonatas for violin and piano. The second of those works dates
from the summer of 1886, which Brahms spent in the Swiss village of Hofstetten, on Lake Thun.
This piece, the Violin Sonata in A Major, Opus 100, soon circulated among the circle of
admirers that now surrounded the composer. Not surprisingly, it elicited high enthusiasm. Clara
Schumann, who grew close to Brahms after the death of her husband, commended it to her diary
as “a beautiful, noble work.” Elizabet von Herzogenberg, one of Brahms’s most sympathetic
friends, likened it to a caress. “The first movement is so clear and sunny,” she wrote to the
composer, “the pastorale in the second so lovely ... and the third will end by becoming my
favorite.” Theodore Billroth, an intelligent and musical surgeon whose opinions Brahms valued
highly, declared it a work “of unending grace, charm and tender feeling.”
The composer’s friends also noted the several song quotations in the work. Brahms wrote
songs consistently over the course of his career, and in a number of his chamber works he used
melodic ideas taken from these songs, much as Franz Schubert had done in his “Trout Quintet”
and “Death of the Maiden” String Quartet. The Second Violin Sonata employs, most notably, the
melody of the song “Wie Melodien zieht es mir” (soon published as the first of the composer’s
Five Lieder, Opus 105) as the second subject of its opening movement.
The sonata begins, however, with a theme whose first several notes resemble those of a
song of quite different provenance: the “Prize Song” in Richard Wagner’s opera Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Wagnerians, who long regarded Brahms with enmity, once
delighted in pointing out his supposed debt to their hero. It seems hardly worthwhile to note the
irrelevance of that claim. Brahms treats the figure in question very differently than Wagner does,
extending it to form tender melodic phrases for the piano, with the violin echoing the final
measures. The instruments then trade places, as the melody is repeated by the violin. A short,
energetic transition passage now leads to the song-derived second subject. Out of its final phrase
emerges a third idea, surprisingly heroic in character and marked by pairs of repeated notes and
brief triplet runs. Brahms proceeds to develop his initial subject and the heroic third theme
during the central part of the movement, the latter idea receiving particularly extensive treatment.
Brahms’s chamber works generally have two inner movements, one slow, the other a
scherzo. The A Major Violin Sonata combines these in a single intermezzo. We hear first a
lyrical melody — in spirit, if not in fact, that of a song — presented by the violin over a flowing
accompaniment. Presently, however, this gives way to dance-like music in faster tempo. These
contrasting ideas alternate with each other over the course of the movement, the scherzo music
having the brief, and witty, final word.
The principal theme of the finale is a stirring melody stated in the opening moments. This
idea seems so complete and self-contained that little in the way of musical drama might be
expected from it, yet Brahms effects a good deal of tension by countering its various appearances
with material that is generally less stable: rippling keyboard figures, a restless melody colored
with somber harmonies, and several tense outbursts. In the end, of course, the confident opening
theme prevails, thereby preserving the character of not only the movement but the sonata as a
whole.
Violin Sonata No. 1
Béla Bartók
(b. Nagyszentmiklos, Hungary, 1881; d. New York City, 1945)
Béla Bartók wrote his two acknowledged sonatas for violin and piano in 1921 and 1922.
(An earlier work of this type, dating from 1903, remains without number and outside the
accepted canon of the composer’s work, as do two juvenile violin sonatas dating from the
1890s.) Bartók composed these works with the Hungarian violinist Jelli d’Aranyi in mind. Miss
d’Aranyi was an outstanding performer, a virtuosa with a fiery playing style. Ravel wrote for her
his paean to gypsy fiddling, Tzigane, a work whose brilliance and unbridled manner clearly
reflected his sense of her musical personality. Bartók had also come to admire Miss d’Aranyi’s
playing, and he accompanied her in performances of his two sonatas on both sides of the
Atlantic. Later he played them with Joseph Szigeti and other violinists. Clearly he valued these
pieces and felt it worth the effort to keep them before the public.
The sonatas required advocacy, for they were among the most challenging works the
composer had yet written. Having been cut off from larger musical developments by the First
World War, Bartók rushed to absorb the advances achieved by Western composers during the
second decade of the century. The result of his effort is apparent in the compositions Bartók
wrote during the early 1920s: an advanced harmonic language now enriched Bartók’s folkloric
melodic ideas, producing a kind of strange tonal twilight. We find this quality especially in the
two violin sonatas. While they hardly sound radical today, both of these works show the
composer’s style moving in a decidedly modernist direction.
Bartók cast his First Violin Sonata in a traditional three-movement design, though little
else about it suggests anything of tradition or convention. The initial movement is marked
“Allegro appassionato,” and while that designation is not inappropriate to the music, it hardly
suggests the wide range of expression we encounter here. Impassioned this movement surely is,
but it sounds contemplative, dream-like, and even buoyant at different times. Its opening
moments present shimmering, Impressionistic keyboard sonorities redolent of Debussy, and
these appear again at key points in the movement. Elsewhere, the piano resorts to dense,
percussive dissonances that would become all but Bartók’s signature. Hints of gypsy violin
styling further enriches the music.
In contrast to the complex first movement, the second unfolds in a broad and relatively
simple A-B-A design. Bartók gives the initial section largely to the violin, which sings a quietly
ecstatic soliloquy, the piano contributing only a series chords of austere, almost medieval
character. By contrast, the central section insinuates a Hungarian gypsy rhapsody. The reprise of
the initial material finds many details altered; throughout his career, Bartók tended to avoid
literal repetition.
As often in Bartók’s music, the finale takes Hungarian folk dance as its point of
departure. But the folkloric element is only a point of departure, since the composer transforms
the rhythmic character, instrumental textures, and general spirit of the village music he knew so
well in a highly imaginative manner. Here the harmonies are dissonant and dense, the rhythmic
asymmetries bracing, the music enlivened by unusual sonorities from both instruments. The
movement unfolds sectionally, with abrupt changes of tempo and figuration defining the
different episodes. Still, the use of a few recurring thematic ideas imparts a coherent structure to
the proceedings.