Julia Fischer, violin

Jan Lisiecki, piano

In January 1779, Mozart returned home from the long but fruitless tour that had taken him from Salzburg to Paris and back with stops on the way at important musical centers, where he had hoped to find a better post. His sixteen months away from home had greatly broadened his view of music and the musical world, but he had not earned much money nor found a new position. His mother, who had accompanied him, had died in Paris, too, and when he made his sad return to the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg, whom he hated, he was sure that he would have to move on again before long. It was only a few months later that he wrote the Violin Sonata in B-flat Major, K. 378, possibly for his father and sister to play. 

The inevitable break with the Archbishop came two years later in the spring of 1781. Among the first important works of Mozart’s phenomenal but too brief career in the Imperial capital city of Vienna were more violin sonatas. By combining one or two that he had written during the long tour with the new sonatas, he put together a set of six sonatas that he had published in November 1781, with a dedication to his pupil, Josephine Aurnhammer. She was a young Viennese woman whose musicianship he admired greatly although he found her person repellent. "She is a fright," he said, "but plays enchantingly." The 20th-century musicologist and Mozart scholar, Alfred Einstein, felt that Mozart composed this work for his older sister Marianne (“Nannerl”), a virtuosic pianist, and their father, Leopold Mozart, second violinist and deputy Kapellmeister under Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. 

His publisher entitled these sonatas (in French) Six Sonatas for the Harpsichord or Pianoforte with the Accompaniment of a Violin, according to the convention of the time, but some musicians recognized them to be in a new style that advanced the cause of equality between the violin and the keyboard. One sensitive reviewer wrote with some surprise, “These sonatas are the only ones of their kind, rich in new ideas. The violin accompaniment is so artfully combined with the harpsichord part that both instruments must constantly be on the alert. The sonatas require just as skillful a player on the violin as on the harpsichord, but it is impossible to give a complete description of this original work.” 

The music of this sonata, a work of deep feeling, reflects the emotions of the time in which it was written, and it is one of the finest works in the set. The work has a typical three-movement structure. Its first movement, in sonata-allegro form, Allegro moderato, is original in tone, brilliantly conceived, and as thoroughly developed as a concerto created by a young, but absolute, master. The music begins with a pleasing melody played by the piano’s right hand, while the violin and the pianist’s left hand do the accompanying.  

Next comes a warm and lyrical Andantino sostenuto e cantabile in a three-part form to which is appended a beautiful coda that is derived from the middle section. The last movement is a cheerier Rondo, Allegro. The refrain alternates with a variety of materials, including a Sturm und Drang (‘storm and stress’) passage in a minor tonality and a triplet passage set in a different tempo and meter from the basic rondo theme. The final appearance of the refrain is characterized by a canon between the violin and the piano’s right hand, giving the celebrative feeling another climax.  

© Susan Halpern, 2025

As a public performer, Beethoven’s true domain was the keyboard: he was the greatest pianist of his time, but as a practical musician of his generation, he also knew the violin well and wrote fluently and idiomatically for it. Posterity wishes he had written more for the violin, because, in addition to the ten sonatas he composed for it, there is only the great Violin Concerto of 1806 and some much smaller pieces. Beethoven composed his fourth and fifth sonatas more or less simultaneously during 1800 and 1801 and dedicated them both to Count Moritz von Fries, to whom he also dedicated his Symphony No. 7.  

Beethoven had intended to issue Sonatas nos. 4 and 5 as a pair, under a single opus number, but when the engraver made the mistake of preparing the printing plates for them in different formats, they had to be published separately, as Op. 23 and Op. 24. At some time in the course of its history—no one knows when—the sunny warmth of its melodies and the rustling figuration of its instrumental writing gave this one, No. 5, the nickname “Spring” Sonata.

The Allegro first movement is an exceptional one in which the violin has the opportunity of leading off with the exquisite opening theme. The lengthy movement has a rich texture and is so elegantly harmonized that some of the beautiful bass lines for the pianist’s left hand, sound as though they could be the cello part of a great trio. The thematic subjects are assembled from smaller melodic materials that then become stretched to great length. We hear the violin and the piano sharing them and then repeating them. The two state them very clearly and then later, freely recalling them to refresh the listener’s memory; Beethoven may have felt he needed only to develop them with a brief discussion.   

The second movement, Adagio molto espressivo, a tranquil and romantic song, has an ornamented main theme akin to that of the first movement. After a particularly brief Scherzo and trio with its playful rhythms, Allegro molto, the finale, Allegro ma non troppo, an atypically lyrical and poetic movement, brings forth evocations of Spring even more than the first movement had done. 

 © Susan Halpern, 2025

In 1850, Schumann left his native Saxony to become music director of the Rhineland town of Düsseldorf. The debilitating depression that he struggled with throughout his last years was in a state of remission, and he was able to take great pleasure from his new surroundings. The work as music director was stimulating to him, but it also left him all the time he needed for composition. Early in his stay in Düsseldorf, he wrote his Third Symphony, the “Rhenish,” completed his Fourth Symphony which he had begun long before, and sketched his Cello Concerto. 

During a few weeks in October 1851, late in his career, Schumann composed two violin sonatas that were published in 1853. These were written while he was the music director of Düsseldorf, when he had become unhappy because he was having serious disagreements with the city officials; he was also simultaneously battling his returning and growing mental health problems. He once said that he wrote the second sonata, which took him only eight days, because he was dissatisfied with the first, yet musicians often prefer the earlier one. Some historians have thought that the minor keys and dark character of both these sonatas reflect Schumann’s stress and emotional instability at the time, but others find these sonatas display a great composer in full command of his gifts making quite proper musical choices.  

The dark-toned, agitated, stormy, and introspective Sonata No. 2 is dedicated to the great violinist Ferdinand David to whom Mendelssohn’s E-minor Violin Concerto was also dedicated. Schumann’s wife Clara performed the work’s premiere with Wilhelm Wasielewski, the concertmaster of the Düsseldorf orchestra.   

In four movements rather than the usual three, the sonata has a relatively lengthy opening movement in sonata form, Ziemlich langsam--Lebhaft (“fairly slow and lively”), which is twice as long as the following movement. It begins with a slow introduction. The music of the main theme is energetic while the second subject is longer and more lyrical. The development section deals mostly with the main theme, building to a fast climax and coda.

In the second movement scherzo that follows, a brief Sehr Lebhaft, (“very lively”) there are two trios. In both the beginning section and the final one, chords are prominent; the movement comes to a climax in unison chords.

Critics and historians find that this movement left a lasting impression on Brahms, whose early Scherzo for violin and piano creates a similar feeling. Schumann motivated Brahms, it seems, to compose it when he suggested that the two of them write a joint “greetings sonata” to honor Joachim on his first trip to Düsseldorf in 1853.

In the short third movement, Leise, einfach (“gentle and simple”), Schumann uses the melody of the climax of the second movement as his thematic statement with pizzicato chords on the violin at the brief movement’s opening. The theme is a variation on Bach’s chorale melody “Gelobet seist du, Jesu Christ” (“Praise be to you, Jesus Christ.”), a melody that resembles the narrow-ranged material of the scherzo; the movement also ends with a short reference to the scherzo.

The final movement, massive in length and conception like the first, Bewegt, (“animated”) is often stormy and contains much syncopated rhythm. At its start, the violin and piano share in announcing the melodic material as well as in providing the furious accompaniment to it. Also composed in sonata form, this finale journeys from a dark, minor key to its decisive close in a major tonality.

 © Susan Halpern, 2025