Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas

Beethoven’s artistic triumphs accompanied him wherever he went – in noble salons, at friends’ houses and later at the so-called “academies” – concerts open to the general public. Through his powerful temperament, Beethoven the pianist broke down established performing canons, and Beethoven the creator staggered his audiences’ minds with his stormy and fiery improvisations... “This man will compensate us for Mozart’s death,” said one of Beethoven’s contemporaries. Somewhat earlier, a friend of the composer seeing him off to Vienna foretold in a letter the brilliant future that awaited the young man: “You will receive uninterrupted diligence in Mozart’s genius from Haydn’s hands.” In addition to a tribute to Beethoven’s talent, these words brilliantly convey his “lineage.”
It was not by chance that Beethoven dedicated his first Vienna opuses to his pupils: the first three Vienna piano sonatas to Joseph Haydn and the first three violin and piano sonatas, Op. 12, to Antonio Salieri. Neither was it by chance that the sonata genre was again refracted in Beethoven’s music: the revolutionary era impinged on inviolable rules. The sonata form itself embraces the idea of an oppositional dialogue of musical themes – a living mould of the dialectics of life. Alongside Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas form a “bible” for musicians. An outstanding pianist, Beethoven was also a fairly good violinist and for some five years he played the viola with an orchestra at a theatre in Bonn. Later, in Vienna, he kept up his violin studies – it was one of his favourite instruments. As a young man he wrote Variations on a Theme from “Le nozze di Figaro” for violin and piano and – three decades later – his final Sonata for Piano and Violin in G Major, Op. 96. One thing is worthy of mention: the composer (like Mozart before him) and his contemporaries gave prominence to the piano; it is not uncommon to read in reviews the phrase “sonatas with violin” !
Beethoven’s violin sonatas did not immediately win acclaim. The first responses all accused the composer of “academicism”, insufficient sincerity and “extreme refinement”... But, very soon, these reviewers changed their tune: they spoke of the “inventive nature, seriousness and bold style.”
Beethoven’s glory never fails but to increase with the passing of time, and by the dawn of the 19^th century he was crowned king of the famous Viennese trio of Haydn – Mozart – Beethoven.
Already in his first sonatas Beethoven broke with the established tradition of the divertissement-suite: his sonata allegros are focussed, filled with active movement, and the slow sections are deep and songfully Schubertian. It comes as no surprise that the songful adagios and andantes acquire a voice and are sung in concerti (just as they are in later instrumental works by Chopin, Liszt and Rubinstein). The composer made frequent use of his beloved variation form. In the finales – as a rule in the form of a rondo – genre scenes come to life and the element of dance reigns supreme.
Beethoven’s violin sonatas are as varied in mood as his symphonies and piano sonatas. The impassioned pathetique of the first movement of the Sonata in A Minor, Op. 23, naturally resembles the Pathetique for piano. The stormy and passionate character of the violin and the piano seething in fury – everything in the Sonata in C Minor, Op. 30, No 2 foretells the Appassionata, which appeared just over two years later. And aren’t the light that the Sonata in F Major, Op. 24, radiates (not by chance is it known as the “Spring” sonata) and the staggering beauty of the melody which opens the first movement the finest witness to the fact that Beethoven had taken the baton from Mozart’s hands? The “Spring” sonata is tied, in terms of mood, to the composer’s final (Tenth) Sonata in G Major, Op. 96, which, like the Pastorale symphony, is a hymn to the nature that Beethoven loved so much.
One of the peaks of instrumental drama in chamber music is Sonata in A Major, Op. 47, known as the "Kreutzer" sonata. Beethoven said it was composed "in the concerto style", meaning he considered it a chamber concerto for violin and piano. Dedicated to the virtuoso violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer (who, apropos, did not have a very high opinion of the work), it ranks alongside the symphony Die Heroische, Aurora and Appassionata for piano and the opera Fidelio.
Iosif Raiskin