Classical Music | Violin Music

César Franck

Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major, M. 8  Play

Yevgeny Kutik Violin
Timothy Bozarth Piano

Recorded on 01/06/2010, uploaded on 04/06/2010

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

The Sonata for Violin and Piano in A major was César Franck’s only sonata for the instrument. It has become a staple of the violin repertoire and stands alongside the Symphony in D minor as one of the composer’s finest and most beloved compositions. Though composed in 1886, the sonata’s genesis may have actually taken place nearly three decades earlier in 1858. Franck had promised a violin sonata for Cosima von Bülow, the daughter of Franz Liszt and later the wife of Richard Wagner. The proposed sonata never materialized but it is possible that whatever shards remained, if any, from Franck’s work may have become the basis of the present work. Franck presented the A major sonata to the Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe as a wedding present on September 26, 1886. After a hurried rehearsal, Ysaÿe and pianist Léontine Bordes-Pène performed the sonata for the other wedding guests during Ysaÿe’s nuptial day. Its official premiere public performance was given by Ysaÿe and Bordes-Pène a few months later on December 16 at the Musée Moderne de Peinture at Brussels. The sonata was the last item on a rather lengthy program that had begun at 3pm. The setting sun and the gallery authorities’ refusal to allow artificial light threatened to leave Franck’s masterpiece unperformed. Yet, according to Vincent d’Indy, who was present at the performance, as the light continued to fade, Ysaÿe and Bordes-Pène performed the last three movements of the sonata from memory. The Violin Sonata has since appeared in transcriptions for many instruments, but only that for cello earned Franck’s official endorsement.

Adhering to both the Classical Viennese tradition Franck gravitated towards in his final years and his luscious Romantic harmonic language, the Violin Sonata spans a four-movement design of dramatic proportions. A lyrical Allegretto opens the sonata, supplanting the usual quick-paced first movement, but by no means diminished in intensity or profundity. Turbulence arrives, however, in the Allegro second movement, opening with a furious introduction from the piano, followed by a passionate melody from the violin. The length of this movement and the weightiness of his principal ideas give it the impression of an opening sonata-allegro movement, leaving one to wonder if the preceding Allegretto was not but a protracted introduction. Serving as the sonata’s slow movement is the Recitativo-Fantasia. Certainly the most striking movement, it is a piece of great depth and emotion and the darkening gloam in which it received its first performance could only have enhanced its gloomy and ghostly quality. The twilight of the third movement, however, is gloriously dispelled in the bright opening theme of the finale. Yet, even with this cheerful introduction, the last movement is not without its intense and passionate moments brought on by the intermingling of ideas from the previous movements. In radiant glory, the sonata comes to a brilliant and triumphant close.         Joseph DuBose

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Violin Sonata in A Major       César  Franck 

I. Allegretto moderato; II. Allegro; III. Recitative - Fantasia: Moderato; IV.   Allegretto poco mosso

Franck's one violin sonata, written in 1886, is united by a cyclic use of thematic material that connects the movements, and offers highly original use of traditional forms. It was described by Franck's composition pupil Vincent d'Indy as "the first and purest model of the cyclic treatment of themes in the form of an instrumental sonata". The sonata was given to the Belgian violinist Eugéne Ysaÿe at the latter's wedding in September 1886 and was first performed by Ysaÿe in Brussels.

The first movement serves as little more than an introduction to the weightier second movement, which offers impassioned intensity, followed by a brief interruption of a recitative section then a return to the earlier mood. 

The third movement, with the unusual title Recitative - Fantasia, recalls in its initial piano chords the opening of the sonata, with rhetorical statements from the violin. There is an imaginative development of this motive against a chromatically descending bass, before the appearance of the main theme of the movement.

A canon between the piano and violin opens the finale in almost pastoral style. The theme appears in various tonalities, with consequent variations in intensity, in a movement that provides a fitting climax to a sonata that makes considerable demands on both violinist and pianist.    Evgeny Kutik