Richard Strauss   (1865 - 1949)

In Munich, Strauss met the violinist and sometime composer Alexander Ritter, who introduced him to the revolutionary works of Wagner and Liszt, music that Strauss’ reactionary father had forbidden him to hear. Strauss became convinced by Ritter, and the musical examples he provided, that an instrumental piece could spring from the inspiration of what Strauss later called “a poetic idea,” and need not be restricted to the abstract expression of the Classical masterworks that had served as the models for his earlier compositions.

The Sonata for Violin and Piano of 1887–1888, the last work of Strauss’ youthful Classicism, Strauss’ Violin Sonata is firmly rooted in the Classical models that he mastered as a youth, but it also shows the breadth of gesture and the sharpening of artistic profile that he had gained through the contemporaneous work on his first three symphonic poems, Aus Italien, Macbeth, and Don Juan. Indeed, the heroic proclamation from the piano that serves as the main theme of the work’s opening movement could well have been chiseled for Don Juan. The violin responds with a tender reflection of the piano’s phrase without losing the music’s impetuous rhythmic drive and sense of urgency. The subsidiary subject, floated high in the violin’s compass, provides lyrical contrast. The center of the movement is devoted to a loquacious development of the principal motives before a full recapitulation of the earlier themes provides balance and formal closure. Though Strauss titled the second movement Improvisation, there is nothing extemporaneous about the work’s precisely delineated form nor about its richly textured instrumental lines. An arching violin melody, a wordless product of Strauss’ skill as a song writer, occupies the Andante’s first section before the movement moves onto more animated and chromatically inflected music in its center region. The opening melody, considerably elaborated, returns to round out the movement. The main theme of the sonata-form finale, previewed in a shadowy piano introduction, revives the bold, quasi-symphonic style of the first movement. A delicately playful transition leads to the second theme, a broad melody introduced by the violin over sweeping piano arpeggios. The development section is brief, little more than a few iterations of the main subject at various tonal levels. The recapitulation is announced by the piano’s bold theme. A dashing coda, based on the principal theme, closes this final work of Richard Strauss’ apprenticeship.