Cello Sonata No. 1 in E Minor

The Cello Sonata No. 1 was composed between 1862 and 1865 and dedicated to Josef Gänsbacher, an accomplished cellist and teacher of singing who helped Brahms secure the post of choral director at the Singakademie in Vienna. Brahms had intended to write a sonata in four movements, but he jettisoned the original “Adagio”, opting instead for a three-movement structure which places the greatest emotional weight on the opening “Allegro non troppo”. The cello announces the introspective main theme of the first movement in its lowest register, accompanied by gentle off-beat chords in the piano. As cello and piano engage in increasingly intricate dialogue, the music becomes more impassioned, particularly in the dramatic middle section, where the cello plays powerful double-stopped chords against a full-blooded piano texture. Yet the movement ends in a mood of mesmerising serenity. Brahms pays homage to the graceful style of an 18th-century Austrian dance in the outer sections of the second movement, and in the rhythmically propulsive finale, he looks even further back, drawing inspiration from Bach’s Art of the Fugue.