The shadow of death hovers over Debussy’s Violin Sonata
though you would never guess from its generally genial disposition: in
1915, with his creative urges stifled by the slaughter of the Great War
(he wrote barely anything during 1914), Debussy discovered that he had
cancer of the rectum, his mother died on 23 March, and his mother-in-law
six days later. In the summer of 1915 he and his wife rented a house at
Pourville on the Normandy coast and he began to compose again. ‘I want
to work,’ he wrote to his publisher Durand, ‘not so much for myself, as
to provide a proof, however small, that thirty million Boches can’t
destroy French thought...’
Among the works produced in this creative outburst were
the Sonatas for cello and piano and for flute, viola and harp. These
were the first of a planned Six sonates pour instruments divers, par
Claude Debussy – musicien français (as he now signed himself). The
Sonata for violin and piano to which he turned in 1916 was to be the
last of these he completed – and indeed his last major work – before his
death. Debussy found its composition difficult, finishing the final
movement, Très animé, in October 1916, four months before completing the
two preceding movements – Allegro vivo and Intermède (marked Fantasque
et léger). The composer himself with the violinist Gaston Poulet gave
the premiere on 5 May 1917 in the Salle Gaveau in aid of the charity
Foyer du soldat aveugle. He played the Sonata again in September that
year at two concerts in Biarritz, concerts which proved to be his last
public performances.
Debussy died aged just 55 on 5 March 1918. Just two days
earlier in Bologna, Ottorino Respighi with his old violin teacher
Federico Sarti had given the premiere of his new Sonata in B minor.
Completed within months of Debussy’s, it was composed shortly after
Fontane di Roma, the first triptych of Respighi’s great trilogy of Roman
tone poems which shot the composer to international fame, and
contemporary with his most popular work, La Boutique fantasque (the
ballet, based on Rossini’s music, written for Diaghilev’s Ballets
russes).
Respighi had, in fact, written a violin sonata prior to
the B minor masterpiece – the Sonata in D minor completed in 1897. The
influences of Schumann, maybe Franck and certainly Brahms are readily
discernible in this assured student work. Respighi, whose own
instruments were the violin, viola and piano, had then gone on to study
composition with Giuseppe Martucci and afterwards Rimsky-Korsakov. Yet
the B minor Sonata, while naturally more confident and individual, still
retains a Brahmsian flavour. Witness the first movement, Moderato, with
its constantly changing meters and soaring lyrical line which leads to
the Andante espressivo second movement in E major, rising to a
passionate climax. The finale, Allegro moderato ma energico, was
inspired by the last movement of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, a
passacaglia. Interestingly, instead of a conventional eight bar phrase,
the theme is ten bars long. It is repeated eighteen times within the
movement through various modulations before a muscular, intense coda
brings the work to a conclusion with its final bars (Largo) marked ffff.
Some five and a half months after the premiere of
Respighi’s Sonata – on the morning of 20 August 1918 to be precise – Sir
Edward Elgar noted laconically,
‘Wrote some music’. The music was the
preliminary sketch for what was to be his Violin Sonata in E minor
op.82. Having produced virtually nothing in the previous twelve months, a
sudden burst of energy saw Elgar’s three great chamber works – the
Sonata, String Quartet op.83 and Piano Quintet op.84 – composed at
Brinkwells, his Sussex home, between that August morning and early 1919.
Like the violin sonatas by Debussy and Respighi, Elgar’s
has three movements (Allegro, Andante, Allegro non troppo) but here,
while it has an important and busy part, the piano plays the more
traditional role of accompanist than in the French and Italian works.
W.H. Reed, who gave the first public performance with Landon Ronald
(Aeolian Hall, 21 March 1919) thought that the Andante, with its central
section anticipating the third movement of the Cello Concerto, was
‘utterly unlike anything I have ever heard in chamber or other music: it
is most fantastic, and full of subtle touches of great beauty’. Elgar
himself described the finale as ‘very broad and soothing like the last
movement of the 11nd Symphy’ [sic].
There is nothing in the work to hint of the existence of
composers like Bartók and Schoenberg but, as the critic L. Dutton Green
wrote of the Sonata, ‘[it] seems like a protest against the far-fetched
devices of the ultra- moderns – it seems to say: See what can be done
yet with old forms, the old methods of composing, the old scales: if you
only know how to do it your work may yet be new, yet original, yet
beautiful.’
Jean Sibelius gained a comprehensive knowledge of the
violin, having studied the instrument at Helsinki Conservatory in his
youth. The Violin Concerto displays to the full a formidable grasp of
the instrument’s capabilities, and Sibelius toyed with the idea of a
second violin concerto during the period of the sixth and seventh
symphonies. However, like the mystical eighth symphony these plans came
to nothing. What we do have however, is a wonderful collection of
shorter works for violin and piano which unaccountably have remained in
relative obscurity. Opus numbers 78 to 81 date from the years of World
War I. Finland’s communications with the rest of Europe during the
conflict were almost cut off, and for Sibelius this period of isolation
was one of financial and spiritual hardship. The short works for violin
and piano provided a way to make ends meet as Scandinavian publishers
were happy to take less challenging fare during this period. The
charming Berceuse op.79/6, the last of a set of six pieces, is a calm,
melancholy lullaby. (Jeremy Nicholas / October 2015)
