Saturday
25
june
Frank Huang, violin
Gilles Vonsattel, piano
8 PM
Pre-concert talk with Dr. Andrew Shryock, 7 PM
VIOLIN SONATA NO. 5 IN F MAJOR, OP. 24, “SPRING”
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Allegro
Adagio molto espressivo
Scherzo: Allegro molto—Trio
Rondo: Allegro ma non troppo
VIOLIN SONATA NO.1 IN F MINOR, OP. 80
Sergey Prokofiev (1891-1953)
Andante assai
Allegro brusco
Andante
Allegrissimo—Andante assai, come primo
:: intermission ::
VIOLIN SONATA NO. 9 IN A MAJOR, OP. 47, “KREUTZER”
Ludwig van Beethoven
Adagio sostenuto—Presto
Andante con variazioni
Finale: Presto
This concert is made possible in part through the generosity of Mary and Harry Hintlian.
35TH SEASON | ROCKPORT MUSIC :: 57
WEEK 4
the program
VIOLIN SONATA NO. 5 IN F MAJOR, OP. 24, “SPRING”
Ludwig van Beethoven (b. Bonn, December 16, 1770; d. Vienna, March 26, 1827)
Notes
on the
program
by
Sandra Hyslop
Composed 1800-01; 24 minutes
During one four-year period (1798-1802), Beethoven composed eight of his lifetime total of
ten violin sonatas. It was a time of intense exploration in the composer’s life, when he created
his first string trios and string quartets and was beginning to find a voice that set him apart
from his predecessors Mozart and Haydn. As he turned to violin sonatas, Beethoven quickly
found his own way in the creation of forward-thinking duos for violin and piano.
As a group the Beethoven sonatas represent a real departure from the Mozart and Haydn
sonatas for violin and keyboard that had been the gold standard for the genre. Now pushing
the limits of those models, Beethoven (a renowned pianist himself) gave weight to the keyboard
part, and with his advanced knowledge of the violin he was able to integrate its specific
strengths into the whole, not as an obbligato instrument, but as a full-fledged partner.
With only two exceptions (the four-movement sonatas Op. 24 and Op. 30, No. 2), Beethoven
cast his violin-piano sonatas in the traditional fast-slow-fast movement patterns of his
predecessors. Within that observance of tradition, Beethoven extended the expressive
range, the sonorities, and the dynamic flow of the duo of violin and piano as sonata partners.
A miniature portrait on
ivory of Beethoven by
Christian Hornemann,
1802
In the Allegro opening of the Sonata No. 5 in F major, the violin introduces the principal
theme, which is then echoed by the piano. Its genial air earned the Sonata its sobriquet,
“Spring Sonata,” applied by a German publisher after Beethoven’s death.
The Adagio molto espressivo reveals Beethoven’s heartfelt ways with melodic material. In
his operas and other vocal repertoire, Beethoven often struggled to release his lyrical voice,
which would emerge more freely in his instrumental compositions. Here, in this song in
B-flat major, Beethoven gives first the violin, and then the piano, ample room for expressive
cantilena.
The humorous Scherzo is a bouncing romp that evokes amusement from the performers as
they rise to Beethoven’s challenging and witty maneuvers. Starting in F major, and switching
abruptly to A major, and thence to C minor for the Trio, Beethoven delighted in creating the
surprises of unprepared key changes.
Beethoven's first violin
teacher in Vienna was Ignaz
Schuppanzigh, the city's
most prominent violinist.
Schuppanzigh and
Beethoven became friends
for life. This pastel of
Schuppanzigh as a young
man is in the collection of
the Beethoven-Haus, Bonn.
The Finale is Beethoven’s original shaping of a traditional Rondo form. Within the four
repetitions of the main refrain, and in the interstices, he introduces idiosyncratic materials
of real delight and concludes the sonata with a quick, cheerful coda.
Beethoven dedicated the four-movement Violin Sonata No. 5, composed in 1800-01, to Count
Moritz von Fries (dedicatee, as well, of the A-minor Violin Sonata, Op. 23, and the Symphony
No. 7). The Sonata was issued by the Viennese publisher Tranquillo Mollo in 1801.
VIOLIN SONATA NO.1 IN F MINOR, OP. 80
Sergei Prokofiev (b. Krasne, Ukraine, April 23, 1891;
d. Moscow, USSR, March 5, 1953)
Begun 1938, completed 1946; 28 minutes
Sergei Prokofiev wrote relatively few works for the solo violin. In addition to the two concertos
for violin and orchestra (1916-17 and 1935), he composed a sonata for two violins (1932), two
58 :: NOTES ON THE PROGRAM
sonatas for violin and piano (1938-46 and 1944), and a 1947 sonata for
unaccompanied solo violin.
The second sonata for violin and piano was essentially a transcription.
It grew out of the violinist David Oistrakh’s admiration for the Sonata in
D Major for flute and piano, Op. 94, which Prokofiev wrote in 1943 during
his World War II exile from Moscow. In his relatively peaceful country
retreat in the Urals, Prokofiev had composed a sonata that radiated
sunshine and optimism. The following year, urged and assisted by
Oistrakh, Prokofiev adapted the D-Major flute sonata as a violin-piano
work, which he dedicated to Oistrakh and published as Sonata for Violin
and Piano, Op. 94b.
Prokofiev had begun composition of his first violin-piano sonata in 1938,
in the aftermath of Joseph Stalin’s “Great Terror,” which had taken many
of the composer’s friends and colleagues. Arrested and never seen
again, these “dissidents,” among whom were leading artists, writers,
and musicians of the USSR, were shot to death in the massive pogrom.
Prokofiev set aside the unfinished F-minor Violin Sonata during World
War II, when he worked on other compositions.
BEETHOVEN’S VIOLIN TEACHERS
As a young man in his birth city,
Beethoven had played viola in the
Bonn court orchestra, in which his
violin/viola teacher, Franz Anton Ries,
was a violinist. After moving to Vienna
in 1792 he had lessons with the city’s
leading violinist, Ignaz Schuppanzigh,
who would become a life-long friend
and significant colleague. In Vienna
Beethoven also studied violin with
Wenzel Krumpholz (1750-1817), not
only a fine violinist and a virtuoso
mandolinist, but also an astute musician
with whom Beethoven frequently
discussed the finer points of composition.
Beethoven had a warm relationship
with Krumpholz, who took with good
humor Beethoven’s referring to him
as “mein Narr” [my fool]. This “fool”
provided Beethoven with sound advice
about composing for the violin.
With his return from the countryside in late 1943, Prokofiev experienced
the remainder of the war with his fellow Muscovites, sharing their
war-time depravations, their anxieties, and their profound fear of Stalin’s assaults on his own
citizens. By the end of the war, when Prokofiev took up his unfinished violin sonata—the one in
F minor—he was fully aware of the brutality and human loss that the years at war had inflicted.
He completed the sonata in 1946. David Oistrakh, to whom Prokofiev dedicated the work,
gave the premiere performance with the pianist Lev Oborin in Moscow on October 23, 1946.
The F-minor sonata exudes fearful anguish, frustration, and despondency. The opening theme,
played slowly and steadily by the piano in low-octave unisons, is a deliberate statement that
prominently features the interval of a descending fifth. As the piano continues its plodding
theme, the violin adds its own punctuation, out of which it attempts a lyrical break from the
piano’s insistence. The mood is dominated by the piano’s dark octaves until, magically, a
chorale theme emerges high in the treble of the keyboard, while the violin plays rapid scales
that range up and down over the strings. Prokofiev advised Oistrakh and Oborin that this
passage should sound like “wind in a graveyard.”* The movement ends with low Fs in the
piano, and the violin’s gently plucked F/C.
Sergei Prokofiev and David
Oistrakh were avid chess
players. Looking on is
Elizaveta Gilels, the talented
violinist sister and concert
partner of the great Russian
pianist Emil Gilels.
In the second movement, Allegro brusco, the piano takes up new means of insistence:
pounding unisons, brash chords, and scorching dissonance, which inspire the violin to join
in the angry protest. But for two sections of respite from the shouting, both instruments
utilize to the fullest their capacity to express outrage.
The sweet, airy Andante is particularly poignant in contrast to the preceding storm. Cast in
a straightforward ABA form, with a coda, the movement expresses unremitting longing. The
piano’s lacy filigrees and the violin’s nostalgic aria unite in a melancholy reverie.
Jolted back to the present, the instruments join in a wild, angry chase in alternating bars of
5/8, 7/8, and 8/8 measure. A brief lyrical respite is followed by even more agitation in both
instruments, which seem almost to lose control. Suddenly they cool off, the wind in the
35TH SEASON | ROCKPORT MUSIC :: 59
Notes
on the
program
by
Sandra Hyslop
graveyard returns, the piano plays its subdued chorale, and the work closes with a kind of
benediction. Not “And they lived happily ever after,” but, perhaps, “And they lived.”
The irony that Prokofiev and Stalin died on the same day, March 5, 1953, gripped the
community of artists and musicians in the USSR. The pompous and prolonged public funeral
services for Stalin eclipsed the meager attentions paid to the composer’s passing. All but
unremarked was the fact that Oistrakh, with the pianist Samuil Feinberg, performed the
first and third movements of the F-minor Violin Sonata at Prokofiev’s funeral.
* Whether or not Prokofiev did so knowingly, he was echoing the pianist Anton Rubinstein’s well-known description of the
Presto finale of Chopin’s B-flat minor Piano Sonata, that it sounded like “a wind sweeping over graves in a cemetery.”
VIOLIN SONATA NO. 9 IN A MAJOR, OP. 47, “KREUTZER”
Ludwig van Beethoven
Composed 1802-04; 44 minutes
Published Simrock, 1805
Beethoven expressed his disdain for composing works for the violin that served merely to
show off the violinist’s technique. He lived in an age when violinists preferred to compose
their own concert materials, and, capturing the audiences’ hunger for spectacular feats of
virtuosity, such performers garnered enormous success for their compositions.
The great Hungarian violinist Joseph Szigeti (1892-1973) once explained:
Every one of the thirty-three movements [of Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas] shows his
preoccupation with the potentialities of the violin. We find in them challenges even
now…These challenges are technical ones only in the sense that musical and
expressive demands like Beethoven’s are more difficult to realize than the mere
stunts of Paganini, Wieniawski, Vieuxtemps, et al. A Beethoven expression mark may
look deceptively simple until one tries to bring it to life. Violin chords that are played
softly and short and are a reply to the identical soft and short chords of the piano can
be a bigger technical problem than anything in Ravel’s Tzigane!...Beethoven gives the
violinist the hardest nut to crack when he is at his simplest.
Rodolphe Kreutzer
Szigeti’s remarks explain why the subtleties of Beethoven’s compositional art were frequently
lost on his contemporaries.
To Beethoven’s pleasure, the
violinist George Bridgetower
introduced the “Kreutzer”
Sonata to the public when
its dedicatee, Rodolphe
Kreutzer, rejected it as
“outrageously
unintelligible.”
The dedicatee of the Violin Sonata No. 9, Rodolphe Kreutzer (1766-1831), refused to play this
sonata, calling it “outrageously unintelligible!” Instead, and to Beethoven’s great pleasure,
the “Kreutzer” Sonata was introduced by the violinist George Bridgetower (1778-1860),
who has gone into history as one of the earliest concert artists of African heritage. Born in
Galicia as the son of an African father and a German mother, he earned a prominent career
throughout Europe as a virtuoso violinist. Bridgetower certainly understood Beethoven’s
notation in one of his sketchbooks that he had composed this Sonata No. 9 in “a very
concertante style, in the manner of a concerto.”
The familiarity of the “Kreutzer” Sonata has not diminished its pleasures. Always exciting
is the shift from the A-major Adagio sostenuto opening to the dramatic character of the
Presto, in minor. The intense beauties of the Andante theme, and its four variations, with
coda, cause the modern listener to wonder at Kreutzer’s hearing, or the depth of his musical
understanding. Beethoven caps this energy-charged duo with a Presto Finale of brilliance,
as it charges to a thrilling conclusion.
60 :: NOTES ON THE PROGRAM