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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.