Violin Sonata (Franck)

The Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano by César Franck is one of his best-known compositions, and is considered one of the finest sonatas for violin and piano ever written. It is an amalgam of his rich native harmonic language with the Classical traditions he valued highly, held together in a cyclic framework.

The Violin Sonata in A was written in 1886, when César Franck was 63, as a wedding present for the 31-year-old violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. Twenty-eight years earlier, in 1858, Franck had promised a violin sonata for Cosima von Bülow. This never appeared; it has been speculated that whatever work Franck had done on that piece was put aside, and eventually ended up in the sonata he wrote for Ysaÿe in 1886.

Franck presented the work to Ysaÿe on the morning of his wedding on 26 September 1886. After a hurried rehearsal, Ysaÿe and the pianist Léontine Bordes-Pène, a wedding guest, played the Sonata to the other wedding guests.

The Sonata was given its first public concert performance on 16 December of that year, at the Musée Moderne de Peinture (Museum of Modern Painting) in Brussels. Ysaÿe and Bordes-Pène were again the performers. The Sonata was the final item in a long program that started at 3 pm. When the time arrived for the Sonata, dusk had fallen and the gallery was bathed in gloom, but the gallery authorities permitted no artificial light whatsoever. Initially, it seemed the Sonata would have to be abandoned, but Ysaÿe and Bordes-Pène decided to continue regardless. They had to play the last three movements from memory in virtual darkness. Vincent d'Indy, who was present, recorded these details of the event.

Ysaÿe kept the Violin Sonata in his repertoire for the next 40 years of his life. His championing of the Sonata contributed to the public recognition of Franck as a major composer. This recognition was quite belated; Franck died within four years of the Sonata's public première, and did not have his first unqualified public success until the last year of his life (on 19 April 1890, at the Salle Pleyel, where his String Quartet in D was premiered).

The Sonata in A regularly appears on concert programs and on recordings, and is in the core repertoire of all major violinists. Jascha Heifetz played it at his final recital in 1972.

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