Six Sonatas for Solo Violin

"Everything about Ysaÿe was romantic. The little boy practicing in the cellar at Liège being overheard by Vieuxtemps, the young man throwing his boots into the fire as he undresses after hearing Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, the bridegroom playing the Franck Sonata at his own wedding… his compositions, his thoughts, his language, his appearance, his very death…” from; Ysaÿe, his Life, Work and Influence by Antoine Ysaÿe and Bertram Ratcliffe.

Eugène Ysaÿe (1858-1931) was a colossus, a generous and heroic spirit. To hear him play was to be blessed with an experience that remained in the memory almost like a living thing. “Surely no more complete a man has ever been known to make a career of violin playing,” wrote Yehudi Menuhin. Likewise, when Artur Rubinstein was considering all the great performers he had played with over his long career, he placed Ysaÿe in a league of his own. Next to Ysaÿe, he commented, “all the others were like little children.”

When these Sonatas were sketched out, Ysaÿe’s best playing days were behind him. The effects of a childhood wrist injury and the onset of diabetes had given him problems with his hands for many years. At least a decade earlier he had confessed that he could now only hope for occasional good days. He turned his energies increasingly to composition.

In the summer of 1923 Ysaÿe heard Joseph Szigeti give a performance of Bach’s G minor solo Sonata. It made a deep impression. Post-concert, the two discussed the absence of meaningful music for solo violin since Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas. Ysaÿe perceived that he might write a tribute to Bach and Szigeti, but further, that a set of works – each a portrait of an admired younger colleague – might complete a wider homage to Bach’s magnum opus. Back home he disappeared into his study, emerging 24 hours later to proclaim that six sonatas had been sketched out.

These Sonatas would be an encapsulation of Ysaÿe’s art. One senses that he found much consolation in conjuring the qualities of the younger players he so greatly admired. (Perhaps there is even a parallel here with Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Ysaÿe had given a visionary rendition of Elgar’s concerto in Berlin in 1913 and would have played it more had not a badly handled dispute over hire fees upset him; Elgar was furious.)

The writing in the Sonatas is astonishingly exact for the recreation of such free-sounding music. Ysaÿe actually makes clear that he expects those playing the pieces to follow his instructions to the letter. This was a “modern” attitude and a quality he found admirable in Szigeti’s approach. (Ysaÿe would have grown up at a time when printed text was merely the starting point for arbitrary elaboration.) There is, I feel, in these sonatas a confluence of all that was eternal in his world, with elements of the radical and modern thrown in. There are quarter tones, multiple stoppings, effects of bow and pizzicato as well as pure counterpoint and forms that Bach would have recognized.

As well as treating the text as faithfully as Ysaÿe asks, I have on this recording tried to align my approach with other less tangible elements of Ysaÿe’s playing – in particular that “higher and rarer quality of an almost mystical nature, combined of faith, generosity, and instinctive feeling for beauty and a sensitivity that never erred” as described by Antoine Ysaÿe and Bertram Ratcliffe. These more Dionysian qualities are by their nature apparently at odds with a more Apollonian attitude. Not so with Ysaÿe my instinct tells me. I have also placed the Sonatas in a somewhat unusual order, but one to which I find concert audiences respond well when hearing the whole set.

In SONATA 6 Ysaÿe is surely revisiting the vigor of his early career with this irresistibly jubilant Spanish Caprice. The dedicatee, Manuel Quiroga (1892-1961), was a brilliant violinist whose abilities must have been truly prodigious to inspire this athletic romp. Quiroga’s own playing career was cut short by being hit by a truck in New York’s Times Square though he continued to compose and to paint and draw – exhibiting several portraits in collections in Spain. The work is cast in one movement and has a central Habanera episode before the opening music returns with redoubled energy and exuberance.

SONATA 1 is the largest of the set and a tribute to Joseph Szigeti’s (1892-1973) seriousness as an artist. It follows the form of the Bach G minor Sonata that inspired the idea of the whole opus. The first movement rages, the second finds comfort in counterpoint and culminates in organ-like grandeur. The third movement is tenderly nostalgic and the fourth a synthesis of the virtuosic and the serious.

Dedicated to Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962) SONATA 4 pays tribute to this most celebrated style-poacher with a work of deep nobility, pathos and elan. Ysaÿe evokes Kreisler’s ability to compose music in antique style with two titles straight from the 18th century while the finale pays tribute to Kreisler’s insouciant virtuosity. This Sonata was the last music Ysaÿe heard. His young pupil Philip Newman played it to the master outside his bedroom as he lay dying. Afterwards Newman removed the strings from his violin, using them to bind Ysaÿe’s funeral wreath; they would never sound again.

SONATA 3 is dedicated to the Romanian violinist, composer and conductor Georges Enesco (1881-1955). It is the shortest of the Sonatas – a shatteringly compact slab of intensity. After recitative-like formations, a supremely heroic motif emerges to propel the music forward with thrilling inevitability toward an explosive conclusion. Ysaÿe gives the most original composer amongst his friends the central masterpiece of the set.

SONATA 2 is dedicated to the French violinist Jacques Thibaud (1880-1953), Ysaÿe’s closest friend amongst the six. He seems to be teasing the hypochondriacal Thibaud with this death-obsessed work. The opening movement’s “Obsession” is Bach’s Preludio to his E major Partita, Thibaud’s constant warm-up piece and apparently played by Thibaud with annoying regularity. This most deft virtuoso is then exhorted to play “brutalement” as the ancient “Dies Irae” is intoned – it appears repeatedly throughout the rest of the work. “Jacques, we’re all going to die!” Ysaÿe seems to be saying as ‘Melancholy’, a ‘Dance of Shadows’ and finally ‘The Furies’ take the stage yelling and shrieking. Thibaud would die in an air crash, aged 73.

SONATA 5 shows Ysaÿe’s deep longing for a simple bucolic life, a lifestyle that he was only able to touch fleetingly during his long years of touring. The opening movement is a miraculous evocation of the dawn and the following movement is earthed in rustic contentment. The dedicatee is Mathieu Crickboom (1871-1947), a pupil of Ysaÿe and a fellow lover of nature. He was also the second violin in Ysaÿe’s string quartet. When asked to name his finest pupil, Ysaÿe is said to have replied, “Crickboom – he never does what I suggest.”