Juilliard Sonatenabend: Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann

On Thursday, Juilliard's collaborative piano program staged its first Sonatenabend of the season at Paul Hall.  The event was a wonderful opportunity to hear exceptional pianists performing beside talented student musicians.  The early evening recital, about an hour and a half in length with no intermission, on this occasion consisted entirely of violin sonatas.  Written by Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann, these represented some of the best known works in the chamber repertoire.

The program opened with Beethoven's Sonata for Violin and Piano in C minor, Op. 30, No. 2 (1801-1802) performed by Anastasia Dolak, violin, and William Kelley, piano.  The date of composition is significant.  Beethoven set to work on the piece shortly before he wrote the famous Heiligenstadt Testament, a never-sent letter to his brothers in which he agonized over his approaching deafness and expressed suicidal thoughts.  The episode marked a turning point in Beethoven's creative life as he moved away from the classical training he had been given by Haydn and sought instead to produce radically new forms of music that would be entirely his own and that would allow him to overcome the tragedy he was now facing.  This sonata, in its power and complexity, clearly anticipates the revolutionary works Beethoven would compose during his middle period.  The prominence given the piano part here is no accident.  (The Op. 30 pieces were in fact entitled upon their publication "Three Sonatas for the Pianoforte with the Accompaniment of Violin.")   In seeking out a new path, Beethoven was well acquainted with the possibilities the piano offered and used them here to full advantage.  In the end, the sonata is fascinating not for what it is but for what it presages.

The next work was Brahms's Sonata for Piano and Violin in G major, Op. 78 (1878-1879) performed by Amos Fayette, violin, and Katy Felt, piano.  Although the Program Notes for Thursday's recital listed this work as "for Violin and Piano," I believe the correct title as shown on the published score is "for Piano and Violin."  This would seem more appropriate considering the large role the piano is given; it is most definitely not used simply as accompaniment.  Brahms was already age 46 when the work was written, and one may wonder why the composer had not completed a work in the violin sonata genre before this (although he may have made several earlier attempts which he, a fanatical perfectionist, then subsequently destroyed).  It's possible that the impetus was finally provided by the untimely death of his godson Felix Schumann, the youngest child of Robert and Clara, at only age 24.  Brahms had been closely involved in Felix's artistic endeavors and had even set several of the young man's poems to music.  How deeply he was affected by the loss can easily be heard throughout the work's three movements (it lacks the customary scherzo) but most especially in the final two.  Here he made reference to two songs, Regenlied and Nachklang, he had written to texts by Klaus Groth in his 1873 Op. 59, and in so doing gave the sonata itself the nickname Regensonate.  It is the repetitive allusion to falling raindrops that largely imparts to the music its nostalgic and melancholy mood.

The final work was Schumann's Sonata for Violin and Piano in A minor, Op. 105 (1851) performed by Hahnsol Kim, violin, and Ho Jae Lee, piano.  After having seen Schumann's two violin sonatas performed many years ago at Carnegie Hall by Gidon Kremer and Martha Argerich, I gained a new appreciation of these pieces and have since come to consider them among the most underrated of the composer's chamber works.  One reason they may not be held in greater esteem is that they were written in a period of turmoil in Schumann's life as he began to experience the first symptoms of the mental breakdown that would lead him to attempt suicide in 1854.  At the time the sonata was written, Schumann was music director of the Düsseldorf Orchestra.  This proved to be one of the most frustrating episodes of his career.  No matter how skilled a composer he may have been, he was utterly lacking in ability as a conductor.  As a result, he retreated as much as possible from his orchestral duties and concentrated instead on forming chamber ensembles with the best of his musicians.  He himself did not care very much for the A-minor sonata and claimed: "I did not like the first Sonata for Violin and Piano; so I wrote a second one [the Op. 121], which I hope has turned out better."  Musicologists took him at his word and paid little attention to the piece, seeing in it only evidence of Schumann's mental collapse.  But it is actually an extremely absorbing and innovative work that deserves to be heard more often.