Sonata No. 2 for Viola da Gamba and Keyboard in D Major, BWV 1028
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

Composed around 1720.

In 1713, the frugal Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia dismissed his household musical establishment in Berlin. The young, cultured Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, north of Leipzig, took the opportunity to engage some of the finest of Friedrich’s musicians, and he provided them with excellent instruments and established a library for their regular court performances. In December 1717, Leopold hired Johann Sebastian Bach, then organist and Kapellmeister at the court of Weimar, as his director of music. Inspired by the high quality of the musicians in his charge and by the Prince’s praise of his creative work, Bach produced much of his greatest instrumental music during the six years of his tenure at Cöthen: the Brandenburg Concertos, the Suites for Orchestra, the Violin Concertos, the Well-Tempered Clavier, many chamber pieces, and the sonatas, suites and partitas for solo strings with and without accompaniment. Bach’s three sonatas for viola da gamba and keyboard, almost certainly dating from the Cöthen years, were apparently written for the virtuoso performer Christian Ferdinand Abel, whose son Carl Friedrich became the partner of Johann Christian, Bach’s youngest son, in an important London concert venture in the 1760s. Prince Leopold, himself a gambist of some accomplishment (Bach wrote one of the gamba parts in the Sixth Brandenburg for him), would have heartily approved of the venture, and may even had tried out his Kapellmeister’s challenging sonatas for himself.

The six-string, slope-shouldered, silver-voiced viola da gamba, a hold-over from the old Renaissance viol family, was losing favor during Bach’s lifetime because of the wide adoption of the cello, first given its modern configuration around 1560 by the Cremonese craftsman Andrea Amati. The instrument gained its name because it was supported between the knees (“gamba” is Italian for “leg”) so as not to touch the floor, and it was used, generally, to carry the bass line in ensemble works, and, occasionally, to act as soloist. Bach was the last important composer to write for the viola da gamba, featuring it in the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, the St. Matthew and St. John Passions and several cantatas. Its music is often played today on the modern cello. Though the gamba is now relegated to the performance of early music, the modern double bass, with its tuning in fourths and its sloping shape — compare its profile with the square shoulders of the other orchestral strings — is a flourishing descendent of the noble viol family.

The D major Sonata for Gamba and Keyboard follows the structure and style of the sonata da chiesa (“church sonata”) — four movements (slow–fast–slow–fast), largely contrapuntal in texture and serious in nature. The Sonata opens with an Adagio whose relative brevity and incomplete harmonic ending make it seem less like an independent movement than a noble introduction to the following Allegro, a lively piece in binary form. The Andante is an expansive song of touching emotion for three entwining voices. The closing Allegro, in whirling 6/8 meter, is brilliant and virtuosic.

Rondo in G Minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 94
Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904)

Composed in 1891. Premièred on Jan. 6, 1892 in Kladno, a town in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic).

In December of 1891, after much negotiation with Mrs. Jeanette Thurber, a wealthy arts philanthropist, Dvořák agreed to become the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. Despite the favorable terms of the agreement, Dvořák found it hard to leave his homeland, not to mention his wife and six children. Before departing for America, Dvořák, joined by his friends and colleagues, violinist Ferdinand Lachner and cellist Hanuš Wihan, went on a five-month farewell concert tour of approximately 40 cities and towns in Moravia and Bohemia. The musical centerpiece of this tour was Dvořák’s famous “Dumky” Trio, Op. 90, written for Lachner and Wihan, but the concerts also included two works for solo cello and piano to showcase Wihan’s talents: the Rondo in G Minor, Op. 94 and an arrangement of Klid, Op. 68, No. 5 for cello and piano. The fact that Dvořák, a devoted family man, sacrificed both his Christmas holiday and Boxing Day to write these two pieces says much about Dvořák’s regard for the man he described as “friend Wihan.”

The Rondo combines Dvořák’s mastery of form with his distinctively Czech sensibilities. The main theme is a prim little number, modest and self-contained, with suggestions of impish humor. In each of the subsequent interludes, Dvořák gives the soloist a chance to shine, with contrasting displays of sparkling virtuosity and sumptuous melodies.

© 2009 Elizabeth Schwartz

Silent Woods (Klid) for Cello and Piano, Op. 68, No. 5
Antonín Dvořák

Composed in 1891 as an arrangement of one of Dvořák’s six piano duets from Op. 68, From the Bohemian Woods, written in 1884. Premièred in 1892.

Dvořák’s greatest strength as a composer was his love for his homeland and its people. Being Czech wasn’t simply a matter of nationality for Dvořák; it was the definining aspect of his musical expression. Dvořák’s ability to evoke Czech geography and sensibilities in music gave his work a unique character unlike that of his German and French peers. The lyricism, underpinnings of melancholy and wide-open expressiveness of a typical Dvořák melody are undeniably Czech.

The Czech word “klid” means “rest” or “quiet;” that quality infuses the central theme of this short, impressionistic interlude. The serene cello melody suggests a late summer’s afternoon walk in the woods. The contrapuntal interplay between cello and piano in the short, rhythmic middle section contrasts with the languid opening theme, which returns to conclude the piece. .

© 2009 Elizabeth Schwartz

Sonata in D Major for Cello and Piano, Op. 102, No. 2
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Composed in 1815.

Count Andreas Kyrillovitch Rasumovsky was appointed Russian ambassador to Vienna in 1792, four years after his marriage to Elizabeth, Countess of Thun and sister of Prince Karl Lichnowsky, one of Beethoven’s most devoted patrons. In the spring of 1806, Rasumovsky took over from Lichnowsky the patronage of the string quartet headed by Ignaz Schuppanzigh, and installed the ensemble as resident musicians in the grand palace that he was building on the Danube Canal near the Prater. Later that year, Beethoven composed the three splendid Quartets comprising his Op. 59 on commission from Rasumovsky; the works have always borne their patron’s name as sobriquet. Rasumovsky and Schuppanzigh remained important professional contacts for Beethoven throughout the next decade. It was with understandable distress, therefore, that Beethoven learned of the terrible fire that nearly destroyed Rasumovsky’s palace in December 1814. The Count, whose health and vision were already beginning to fail, was further strained financially by the tragedy, and forced to dismiss his household quartet. The following spring, the quartet’s cellist, Joseph Linke, was taken into the employ of Countess Marie von Erdödy, another important patron of Beethoven who had frequently acted as his advisor in personal and financial matters. Beethoven was a great respecter of Linke’s talent, and he composed his last two Cello Sonatas for him during the summer of 1815; they were performed soon thereafter at the Erdödy household. The Sonatas were published by N. Simrock of Bonn two years later as Beethoven’s Op. 102.

Though 1814 was one of the most successful years of Beethoven’s life as a public figure — the revival of Fidelio was a resounding success, his occasional pieces for concerts given in association with the Congress of Vienna that year were applauded by some of Europe’s noblest personages, the clangorous Wellington’s Victory became an overnight hit — he produced little in the way of important new compositions during that time. For the year 1815, the composer’s biographer Thayer lists only some vocal settings, a couple of canons, the little-known overture Namensfeier, and the two Op. 102 Sonatas for Cello. Those years of near creative silence marked a turning point in Beethoven’s compositional career, one whose outcome was the incomparable series of towering masterworks written during his last decade. The Cello Sonatas, which formed the gateway to that remarkable period of renewal and discovery, were little understood when they were new. “Eccentric,” “unusual,” and “peculiar” commented the reviewers of the day, and they criticized the works for exactly the qualities that now serve as their greatest distinctions — seriousness of expressive purpose, harmonic originality, absolute equality of piano and cello, lack of virtuosity, and, perhaps above all, richness of contrapuntal texture. The obsession of Beethoven’s later years with the ancient techniques of fugue and imitative counterpoint finds one of its earliest realizations in the D major Cello Sonata, his last work in the form for string instrument and piano. Indeed, the finale in toto is a carefully worked-out and tightly packed fugal Allegro. The opening movement is remarkable for its restraint and introspection, and for the masterly manner in which cello and piano are thoroughly integrated into its sonata-form structure. The rapt central Adagio is music of transcendent peacefulness such as few composers have ever created. John N. Burk felt that Beethoven wrote it “in a sort of trance, as if he were listening to some mystic inner prompting,” while the composer’s amanuensis and biographer, Anton Schindler, believed that this movement and the entire Sonata were “among the richest and most sensitive inspirations in Beethoven’s music.”

Sonata for Piano and Cello in F Major, Op. 99
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Composed in 1886. Premiered on November 14, 1886 in Vienna, with Robert Hausmann as cellist and the composer as pianist.

Brahms spent many happy summers in the hills and lakes of the Salzkammergut, east of Salzburg, but in 1886, his friend Joseph Widmann, a poet and librettist of considerable distinction, convinced Brahms to join him in the ancient Swiss town of Thun, 25 kilometers south of Bern in the foothills of the Bernese Alps. Brahms rented a flower-laden villa on the shore of Lake Thun in the nearby hamlet of Hofstetten, and settled in for a long, comfortable summer. The periods away from Vienna were not merely times of relaxation for Brahms, however, but were really working holidays. Some of his greatest scores (the Violin Concerto; the Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies; the Piano Concerto No. 2; the Haydn Variations; the Tragic Overture and many others) had been largely realized at his various summer retreats in earlier years. The three summers that he spent at Thun (1886-1888) were equally productive: the Violin Sonatas Nos. 2 and 3, the C minor Piano Trio, the Second Cello Sonata, the Gypsy Songs, the Choral Songs (Op. 104), the Lieder of Op. 105-107 and the Double Concerto were all written there. Brahms composed the Second Cello Sonata, Op. 99, in Hofstetten during the summer of 1886; he gave the work an informal reading at Widmann’s house (along with the new Violin Sonata No. 2 and the C minor Trio) before returning to Vienna in the fall. The Sonata’s formal premiere was given on November 14, 1886 in Vienna by Robert Hausmann, cellist in the string quartet led by the composer’s long-time friend and musical ally, violinist Joseph Joachim.

The F major Cello Sonata, like many of the works from Brahms’ fullest maturity, is suffused with an autumnal glow that speaks of the composer’s satisfaction with his life at that time. “That Brahms was very happy in Hofstetten is evident from the works he composed there,” wrote William Murdoch. “He had finished his Fourth Symphony, and had led its premiere [on October 25, 1885 in Meiningen]. He was everywhere acclaimed, and his fame was world-wide. He had no more obstacles to overcome, and his works from now onward give that impression of security and certainty that can only be the outcome of a contented mind and a knowledge of mastery. Sadness and heartfelt emotion we shall find, but no longer that yearning after the unattainable that so often pervaded his earlier works.” The first edition of the F major Sonata, published by Simrock in 1887, noted that the piece is “for Piano and Violoncello,” an indication of the complete integration of the participants that marks Brahms’ greatest instrumental works. The Sonata is in four expansive movements (Robert Schumann, in his 1853 article heralding the arrival of Brahms on the German musical scene, referred to his instrumental compositions as “veiled symphonies”), whose expressive characters Florence May, the English pianist who studied with Brahms in the 1870s and eventually became his biographer, summarized thus: “the first broad and energetic; the second touching; the third passionate; the fourth vivacious.” Three ideas comprise the first movement’s exposition: the cello’s main theme, anticipatory in its leaping motion and snapping rhythms, is supported by the piano’s restless tremolos; the arching second subject is smoother in contour and gentler in expression; the agitated closing motive is urged on by strong repeated figurations. The development section is woven from all three themes, though its character is largely dominated by the restless tremolos that opened the movement. A full recapitulation and a coda based on the main theme provide formal balance for the movement. The second movement, “among the finest of the master’s adagios” according to William Murdoch, follows a leisurely three-part form (A–B–A): the outer sections begin with a broad piano theme buoyed upon resonant pizzicato notes in the cello; the central episode is more animated and somewhat melancholy. The third movement is a scherzo whose impassioned mood is balanced by the sweetly flowing trio at its center. The finale-rondo, generally lightweight in character, is given emotional substance by the darkly colored passage that occupies its middle region.

©2008 Dr. Richard E. Rodda