Violin Sonata in E Minor

The Violin Sonata is one of a group of chamber-music works written by Elgar in the months before and after the end of the First World War. In the summer of 1918, a period of illness and depression had stopped him from composing. His wife Alice then located and rented a country cottage, “Brinkwells,” in the Sussex Downs, which offered a temporary escape from life in wartime London. The cottage and its beautifully situated woodland setting lifted Elgar’s spirits. As soon as his Steinway upright piano had been delivered on a local farmer’s pony cart, he settled down to compose the Violin Sonata, completing it in mid-September after just over three weeks of work. The first of the three movements explores a wide range of moods, from the opening section’s weighty intensity to a flickering wistfulness relating to Elgar’s response to his rural surroundings. A similar atmosphere of “wood magic” (as Elgar liked to describe it) is present in the outer sections of the “Romance” second movement; placed between these is an expansive lyrical episode relating to the Sonata’s dedicatee, Marie Joshua, a long-standing family friend. Elgar was close to completing the finale when he heard that Marie had unexpectedly died, and at that point in the movement he reintroduced the music of the “Romance” as a quiet and poignant memorial to her.