Violin Sonata in A Major

One of the truly great violin sonatas of all time, César Franck’s sole effort in the genre took him the best part of a lifetime to write—he was 63—but is a mature masterpiece: self-evidently the product of long experience and settled wisdom. Confident, assured, it’s the ultimate statement of the cyclic technique that he championed in composition, using musical material that recurs across the movements of the piece, sometimes adapted or transformed, but always there and holding everything together. It also comes with an uncommonly challenging piano part—which may have been a conscious decision, to ensure that the pianist wouldn’t be eclipsed by the celebrity violinist for whom the piece was written in 1886. The violinist was Eugène Ysaÿe, one of the most famous of the time, and the occasion was his wedding—for which Franck wrote the piece as a gift. Ysaÿe played it, virtually from sight, to entertain his wedding guests, and it can only have been memorable. But no more so than the first public performance a few months later, which took place as dusk fell in an art gallery where no artificial light was permitted—forcing Ysaÿe and his pianist to play in pitch dark. From memory. The Sonata comes in four movements, the gentle first almost an introduction to the turbulent second, which has the feel of being where the piece really starts. A free, improvisatory third movement leads to a finale where the melodies swing back and forth between the players in canon. A mark of the piece's stature is that it’s often heard in arrangements for other instruments—from cello, oboe, clarinet and flute through to the otherworldly theremin.