Johannes Brahms - Titanic Records

JOHANNES BRAHMS
THE VIOLIN SONATAS
ANASTASIA KHITRUK VIOLIN DAVID KOREVAAR PIANO
Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Major, Op. 78
11.
I: Vivace ma non troppo
22.
II: Adagio
33.
III: Allegro molto moderato
Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Major, Op. 100
44.
I: Allegro amabile
55.
II: Andante tranquillo – Vivace
66.
III: Allegretto grazioso (quasi Andante)
Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor, Op. 108
77.
I: Allegro
88.
II: Adagio
99.
III: Un poco presto e con sentimento
10. 10 IV: Presto agitato
11:03
7:27
8:16
(27:03)
8:06
6:03
5:13
(19:38)
8:18
4:41
2:54
5:20
(21:32)
Total Time: 68:39
TITANIC

Johannes Brahms, Mastersinger and Chamber Musician
Unlike most violin sonatas in the modern concert repertoire, Johannes Brahms’s transcend the realm of “absolute” or nonprogram
music. Indeed, his sonatas allude to Romantic poetry and Wagnerian opera, thus embodying the tension between word and
tone basic to German Romantic music. For Brahms and Wagner alike, the word-tone dialectic was key. Their respective positions on
this issue, considered antagonistic during the nineteenth century, are deemed complementary by many music historians today. Before
exploring how this idea relates to the sonatas themselves, however, some additional words of introduction.
Except for Richard Strauss’s 1888 work, Brahms’s violin sonatas are the sole exemplars of the genre composed in Germanspeaking
Europe from 1875 to 1900. One must venture outside the region to find comparable works (Fauré, Franck, Grieg) routinely
performed today. Why? German composers between 1850 and 1900 strove less to cultivate the Classical sonata priniciple than to
transform it into Wagner’s “music of the future,” namely opera or program music. There arose at this time a feud waged by the Wagner-
Liszt partisans (“New German School”) against those of the Schumann-Mendelssohn persuasion, the latter of whom divined in Brahms
a powerful nemesis to Wagner. Brahms, while inimical towards Liszt’s music, was clearly no Wagner nemesis. His unwillingness to play
this role helps one better understand, among other works, the Second Violin Sonata.
A ruthless self-critic who burnt two-thirds of his music, Brahms essayed several violin sonatas before publishing his First Violin
Sonata. The Brahms works catalog lists three such lost compositions, excluding the “Scherzo” of the “F-A-E” Sonata co-written with
Robert Schumann and Albert Dietrich. Despite their modest dimensions, the three extant sonatas make a good introduction to Brahms’s
music as a whole. Not only do they integrate his vocal and instrumental works, they illuminate his art of transition, the linking of one
theme to the next. His transitions are so finely wrought that they can be (and have been) mistaken for actual themes. Such technique,
above all, undergirds the music’s delicate balance of “passion and precision,” which John Daverio (citing Robert Musil) calls “the essence
of German Romanticism.”
With respect to the word-tone dialectic mentioned above, Brahms, in his first two violin sonatas at least, transplanted poetry and
music drama to the wordless domain of absolute music. In so doing, he realized (paradoxically) the Hegelian ideal of musical
Romanticism, namely that music had the “maximum possiblity of liberating itself from any real text as well as the expression of any
definite content” (Aesthetics). The premier Lieder composer of the post-Schumann generation, Brahms viewed himself quintessentially as
song writer, even when composing for instruments. From this standpoint, he is more Schubert’s heir than Beethoven’s or Schumann’s.
Brahms’s (in)famous remarks that “any jackass” could relate the finale of his First Symphony to that of Beethoven’s Ninth and that
Schumann taught him only “to play chess” are revealing.
On at least one occasion, however, he averred, “Even the tiniest Schubert song has something valuable to teach us.” Taking his
cue from Lied-flavored instrumental works such as the “Trout” Quintet (D. 667) and “Wanderer” Fantasia (D. 760), Brahms transmuted
song into a repertoire of “absolute” works, including the First Piano Sonata and the First Violin Sonata. This achievement is fruitfully
contrasted with that of another Schubert aficionado, Franz Liszt. A gifted song writer himself, he rendered his own or others’ vocal music
either as virtuoso piano transcriptions or as concert paraphrases but never fashioned them into sonatas or formal variation sets.
In Brahms’s violin sonatas, his genius as a Lieder and chamber music composer is reincarnated in the dynamic repartee between
the performers. Listeners enjoy the sheer variety of instrumental role-playing in these works, how the themes are variously introduced
and developed by violin and piano. In order to track the themes, the listener is advised to consult the following table.
Formal Outlines of the Three Brahms Violin Sonatas
“Subject” denotes here either a single theme or group of themes subordinated to that “subject.” The abbreviations “S” symbolize “subject” and “T” theme, so that “S1/T2,” for example, means “Subject 1, Theme 2,”
.
(that is, the second component of “Subject 1”). The themes are further tagged by measure numbers as found in the score. (Various musical examples are found throughout the text.)
TABLE 1A — Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Major, Op. 78
I. Vivace ma non troppo (Sonata form): FIRST SUBJECT (1-21) TRANSITION (21-35) SECOND SUBJECT (36-60) THIRD SUBJECT (60-81) DEVELOPMENT (82-147) RETRANSITION (148-155) RECAPITULATION (156-222) CODA (223-243)
Theme 1 (S1/T1, 1-10) Theme 1 (S3/T1, 60-69)
Theme 2 (S1/T2, 11-19) Theme 2 (S3/T2, 70-81)
II. Adagio (ABA form): A (1-24) BRIDGE (Più andante, 24-39) B (30-56) BRIDGE (57-67) A (67-91) CODA (91-122)
III. Allegro molto moderato (Rondo form): A (Refrain, 1-28) B (29-52) BRIDGE (based on A, 53-60) A (61-83) C (84-112) BRIDGE (based on A, 113-123) A (124-139) CODA (links A and C, 140-163)
Theme 1 (S1/T1, 1-9) Theme 1 (29-36) Adagio
Theme 2 (S1/T2, 10-13) Theme 2 (37-40)
TABLE 1B — Violin Sonata No. 2 in A Major, Op. 100
I. Allegro amabile (Sonata form): FIRST SUBJECT (1-30) TRANSITION (39-50) SECOND SUBJECT (50-78) THIRD SUBJECT (79-87) DEVELOPMENT (89-149) RETRANSITION (150-157) RECAPITULATION (158-218) CODA (219-280)
II. [A] Andante tranquillo (1-15) [B] Vivace (16-71) [A] Andante tranquillo (72-93) [B] Vivace di più (94-149) [A] Andante (150-61) [B] Vivace (162-68)
III. Allegretto grazioso (quasi Andante) (Sonata rondo form):
Rondo form: A (Refrain, 1-31) B (31-62) A (63-89) C (89-111) A (112-122) B (123-136) CODA (137-158)
Sonata form: FIRST SUBJECT/FIRST THEME (1-12) [then varied 21-31] SECOND SUBJECT (31-62) S1 (63-89) DEVELOPMENT (?) (89-111) RECAP, S1 (112-122) S2 (123-136) CODA (links A and C, 137-158)
TABLE 1C — Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor, Op. 108
I. Allegro (Sonata form): FIRST SUBJECT (1-23) TRANSITION (23-46) SECOND SUBJECT (48-73) THIRD SUBJECT (74-83) DEVELOPMENT (84-119) RETRANSITION (120-28) RECAPITULATION (130-208) CODA (219-64)
II. Adagio (free strophic form): A (1-36) A' (37-73)
Theme 1 (1-19)
Theme 2 (19-36)
III. Un poco presto e con sentimento (modified scherzo): A (1-110) B (Bridge, 111-19) A (119-34) CODA (155-81)
Theme 1 (1-53) Theme 1
Theme 2 (53-110)
IV. Presto agitato (Sonata rondo form):
Rondo form: A (Refrain, 1-16) B (39-72) C (73-113) A (114-129) D (130-193) B (213-251) C (252-292) A (293-310)
Sonata form: FIRST SUBJECT (1-16) TRANSITION (17-38) SECOND SUBJECT (39-72) THIRD SUBJECT (73-113) S1 (114-129) DEVELOPMENT (130-193) RETRANSITION (194-217) RECAP: S2, S3, S1 (218-310) CODA (links A and D, 311-337)

First Violin Sonata, Op. 78
Translation of Brahms’s Regenlied (“Rain Song”), Op. 59, No. 3
Plash down, rain, plash down,
Awaken in me those dreams,
That I dreamt in childhood,
When the wetness foamed in the sand!
When the weary summer sultriness
fought lazily against the fresh coolness,
And the pale leaves dripped dew,
and the fruitful fields took on a deeper blue.
What joy to stand in the downpour
at such times with bare feet,
To dance in the grass,
And to grab with one’s hands the foam.
Or else to catch on one’s burning cheeks the cool drops,
To open one’s childhood heart
to the newly awakened scents!
Like the flower’s chalices,
That were dripping there,
So stood the soul wide open and breathing,
Like the flowers drunk with fragrances,
Engulfed in the heavenly dew.
Quaking with pleasure, each drop
Cooled you down to your very heartbeat,
And the holy web of Creation
Penetrated your innermost being.
Plash down, rain plash down,
Awaken my old songs
That we sang in the doorway
When the drops tapped outside!
I would gladly hear them again,
to their sweet moist rustling,
My soul, tenderly bedewed
With that holy, childlike awe.
— poem by Klaus Groth
The above poem inspired a song of the same title written by Brahms in 1873 (Ex. 1) and conveys what the German Romantics
called Heimweh, a feeling straddling homesickness and nostalgia. That Brahms used Regenlied as the thematic basis of his First Violin
Sonata led Clara Schumann to dub the work “Regensonate.” Composed during the summers of 1878 and 1879 in the Austrian village of
Pörtschach, the sonata was premiered in Bonn, November 1879, by violinist Robert Heckmann and pianist Marie Heckmann-Hertig.
Like Schubert’s treatment of his song Der Wanderer (D. 489) in the Wanderer Fantasia, Brahms’s song permeates his entire sonata
structure. In the first movement of Op. 78, one readily hears how the song’s long-short-long-short motif (“Wal-le re-gen”) colors all the
movement’s themes, but here within a more fluid 6/4 meter (compare Ex. 1 and Ex. 2). The witty pianist and former Brahms pupil,
Elisabet von Herzogenberg, observed, “And then there is that dear ‘ ’ which almost deludes one into thinking that Brahms
‘discovered’ the dotted eighth-note.”
Each of the Vivace ma non troppo’s themes permutes the long-short-long-short idea, unifying the movement’s thematic content.
Timothy McKinney has noted, moreover, that the opening bass figure of Brahms’s Lied inspired other thematic elements of the sonata,
such as the descending series D-C-B-G-D of S1/ T1 (Ex. 2). For present purposes, we need only mark the long-short-long-short idea as
EXAMPLE 1
EXAMPLE 2
q. q q

it traverses the sonata. Both S1/T1 and S1/T2 (Ex. 3) follow this pattern, though the second reworks it as a “3/2" cross-rhythm [2+2+2
half-note beats] played against the piano’s 6/4 [3+3 dotted half-note beats]. S2 turns the original rhythmic motif inside out into a shortlong-short-long
figure (Ex. 4). S3/T1 (Ex. 5) once more uses the original pattern but in a chorale-like way, and S3/T2 (Ex. 6) playfully
inverts the rhythm into a waltzing short-long-short-long. Brahms’s array of themes, spanning the wistful S1 to the exhuberant S2 to the
dreamy S3, is couched in pluvial rhythms, the most suggestive being the accompanimental eighth-notes of S3/T2. And one can easily
hear how other poetic images speak through the themes: “streaming rain” (S1/T2, piano part), “old songs” (S2) and “holy awe of
childhood” (S3/T1).
EXAMPLE 3
EXAMPLE 4
EXAMPLE 5
EXAMPLE 6
The Adagio revisits the poem’s “old songs” and “pattering rain” in the opening piano cantilena, S1 (Ex. 7). Thereafter, the piano
subsides into a distant murmur as the furtively entering violin broods on the opening theme. The più andante (Ex. 8), bridge to the “B”
EXAMPLE 7
EXAMPLE 8

(middle) section, leads us by way of the long-short-long-short idea to S2 (Ex. 9), whose drama recounts similar moments in the Violin
Concerto, Op. 77. (For Brahms scholar Michael Struck, the compositional chronology of this funeral-march segment suggests that
Brahms may have been contemplating the impending death of Clara Schumann’s son, Felix.) In the reprise following, the violin plays S1
in double stops, thereby thinning the triadic fullness of the piano’s opening statement. The resulting succession of fifths and sixths
evokes distant horn calls, a symbol of Heimweh prefigured in works such as Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” Sonata (same key) and Schubert’s
song Der Lindenbaum. In the last seven measures, Brahms imbues the horn calls with a sonorous majesty that brings the movement to a
peaceful close (Ex. 10).
EXAMPLE 9
EXAMPLE 10
The finale Allegro molto moderato quotes Regenlied most literally of all the movements (compare Ex. 1 and Ex. 11). The quotation
informs the refrain of a rondo form (see below) and is then answered by a second idea (Ex. 12), absent in the Lied version. In the Lied,
we note, Brahms sets the poem musically as an ABCA form, where C sprouts a new theme in a new meter (3/2) — perhaps he was
moved by this “digression” to cast his finale in rondo form. The rondo, a common way to close instrumental works after 1780,
comprises a recurrent subject or “refrain” (marked “A” on TABLE 1) alternating with digressions called “episodes.” The spry first
episode (“B,” Ex. 13a/Ex. 13b) engages Groth’s “To dance in the grass . . . .” And the dramatic second episode (“C,” Ex. 14) is
sufficiently complex to mimic the development of a first-movement form. Two significant developments indeed occur. First, the violin
EXAMPLE 11
EXAMPLE 12
EXAMPLE 13a
EXAMPLE 14
EXAMPLE 13b

quotes the Adagio’s A subject in its original E b major (compare Ex. 7), now supported by an accompaniment recycling the horn calls of
that movement’s coda. Second, these horn calls are themselves spun out over a complex modulation from E b back to G minor. More
than a mere déjà vu, the episode transforms Heimweh into both a compositional tour-de-force and into an autobiographical confession,
namely Brahms’s well-documented yearning for the past.
In the coda, all thematic elements “A” and “C” are reconciled in G major, key of the first movement. This peroration brings to life
the poem’s “thrill and quiver,” culminating in a radiant pentatonic frisson. Brahms fashions not a cyclical form à la Franck, but rather a
double retrospective (or Rückblick, as Brahms titled a prescient moment in his Piano Sonata, Op. 5): an allusion to an earlier movement and
to an earlier composition, a chapter of his past. A more lucid demonstration of “Brahms the Classical Romantic” would be hard to find.
Second Violin Sonata, Op. 100
Walther’s “Prize Song” (in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Act III, Scene 2)
Walther von Stolzing:
“Shining in the sunlight of the dawning day, the air full of blossoms and scent with beauties beyond imagination a garden bade
me enter.”
Hans Sachs:
That was a Stollen [“stanza”]. Now, make sure that one just like it follows . . .
Walther von Stolzing:
“Joyfully towering from that holy spot offering the healing abundance of rich golden fruit a glorious tree, its fragant branches at
their very tips awaking my desire.”
Hans Sachs:
You did not end in the same key: that insults the Mastersingers; but Hans Sachs has learned something from this, for this is what
Spring’s all about. Now compose an Abgesang [“aftersong”].
Walther von Stolzing:
What does that mean?
Hans Sachs:
If you’ve succeeded in finding the right pair, their offspring will show it. Like the Stollen but not the same, it [the Abgesang] is
rich in its own rhymes and tunes . . . it will close your Stollen so that nothing will fall out of place.
Walther von Stolzing (continuing his song):
“Listen to the radiant wonder that befell me: a woman stood by my side, so fair and beautiful as I had never seen; she gently
entwined me like a bride; with gleaming eyes she pointed her hand towards what I so fervently desired, the precious fruit of the
Tree of Life.”
Hans Sachs:
Now that’s an Abgesang. See how well the whole piece has come off! But you are a bit free with the melody, though I would not
deem that a fault; only it is hard to follow, and that ruffles our old curmudgeons.
***
Translation of Brahms’s song Wie Melodien zieht es mir
(“Like a Melody It Roams”), Op. 105, No. 1
Like a melody it roams
softly through my mind,
Like a flower in spring it blossoms
and hovers like a fragrance.
Yet the Word comes and seizes it
and brings it before my eyes;
Like a gray mist it pales
and then fades like a breath.
And yet concealed in rhymes
is a fragrance well hidden,
that from the quiet bud
can a moist eye awaken.
— poem by Klaus Groth
During the summer of 1886, Brahms wrote the Second Violin Sonata in Thun, Switzerland, while visiting a writer friend, J.V.
Widmann. The composer and violinist Joseph Hellmesberger premiered this sunny work in Vienna in December the same year. Far
outreaching Op. 78 in its literary associations, Op. 100 incorporates both Wagnerian opera (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg) and
Brahmsian Lied. Brahms’s stance towards the “New German School,” remember, was trickier than many of his followers wished (or were
savvy enough) to admit. Though he decried Liszt’s music, he glorified Wagner’s. He confided to a friend, Rudolf von der Leyen: “I am a far
older Wagnerite than all the rest of you put together. When Richard Wagner died, my first impulse was to send a fine wreath to Bayreuth
for his grave. Only think, even that was misinterpreted as scorn . . . . It was wonderful to see what lengths men’s tactlessness and blindness
are capable of going . . . .” He pored over Wagner’s scores and musical essays as well; one even finds a quotation from Wagner’s operatic
manifesto, Oper und Drama, in Brahms’s literary diary. And despite Wagner’s stingy praise for his younger contemporary’s variation works
(“He’s no joker”), Brahms volunteered to copy orchestra parts for a concert of Wagner opera excerpts given in Vienna, 26 December 1862.
The Brahms-Wagner connection runs still deeper. As this writer has shown in a 1986 article, Wagner’s Tristan and Brahms’s
contemporaneous song Liebe und Frühling II were affined in procedures of text, setting and harmony. And in an essay of 1990, David
Brodbeck identified harmonic structures in Tannhäuser reinterpreted by Brahms in his Third Symphony.
Similarly, Brahms scholarship over the last hundred years has discussed the thematic relationship between Die Meistersinger and
Brahms’s Second Violin Sonata. Richard Specht, one of his early biographers, recorded a comment he made thereto pertaining: “Do you
think me so narrow that I, too, cannot be enchanted by the gaiety and grandeur of Die Meistersinger? Or so dishonest as to conceal my

opinion that I consider a few bars of this work worth more than all the operas that have been composed since?” Disarming in their
sincerity, Brahms’s words are also autobiographically significant: he never fulfilled the lifelong dream of writing an opera.
Apart from the love story involving Walther von Stolzing and Eva Pogner, Meistersinger’s plot centers on the art of setting words
to music, a topic near and dear to Brahms. The libretto’s ancillary ideas — tradition versus innovation, craft versus fantasy, past versus
present — also struck responsive chords in Brahms, literally and figuratively. Like the Mastersingers of old Nürnberg, he prized
craftsmanship, musical and otherwise. And he surely recognized aspects of his own persona as refracted through Wagner’s characters: the
pedantic Sixtus Beckmesser, the sagacious Hans Sachs, the individualistic Walther. If this were not enough, Brahms anticipated
Walther’s reference to the Minnesinger, Walther von der Vogelweide, in the Minnelied quotation of the Op. 5 Piano Sonata and
“answered” it in his 1877 setting of Minnelied (text by L. Hölty), same key and meter as Walther’s “Prize Song.”
The Second Violin Sonata begins by quoting the opening motive of the “Prize Song” with a harmonization similar to Wagner’s
(Ex. 15a/Ex. 15b). Brahms, whose adulation for Wagner stopped at emulation, warned of his senior’s potential for overwhelming
impressionable young composers (a common ill in those days). So Brahms may have viewed the “Prize Song” (which Beckmesser does
emulate at his own peril) as being a formidably original music that better inspires than instructs. Brahms, very much his own man,
distilled the essence of Meistersinger in an instrumental work that might have well earned Sachs’s praise as heilige deutsche Kunst (“holy
German art”). This is manifest in the opening twenty measures (Ex. 15b) where Brahms (Walther?) transmutes Sachs’s precepts into the
opening paragraph of a sonata exposition.
Ex. 15b shows that S1 consists of three sentences, the first two similar, the second different — an AAB design comparable to the
“two Stollen and Abgesang” favored by the old Mastersingers (see above). Brahms further marries the “Prize Song” to his sonata by
transposing his second Stollen (mm. 6-10) “to another key,” thereby transgressing the laws of the guild (see above). He further
“transgresses” by declaiming his theme in five-measure sentences where each “Stollen” ends with a one-measure interjection by the violin,
not unlike Sachs’s verbal glosses in Act III, Scene 2. On a more abstract plane, S1 fuses the two composers’ technical procedures.
Wagner’s sequential phrasing and chromaticism is enmeshed with Brahms’s asymmetrical sentences and motivic parsimony (see the
“Abgesang” mm. 11-20). One cannot stress enough that this marriage plays out in a sonata form, which Wagner rejected as out of step
with his “Music of the Future.” Both our Mastersingers inherited Walther’s legacy, to be sure, but it was Brahms who (quoting Hegel)
“liberated it from its text.”
EXAMPLE 15a
EXAMPLE 15b

Not until the entry of S2 (Ex. 16a) do the earlier five-measure sentences relax into symmetrical four-measure units, festooned
with a mellifluous counterpoint typically encountered in the composer’s late music. But the spirit of Meistersinger prevails. Brahms uses a
rhythmic motive of the “Prize Song” ( ) as the medium to graft the melodic germ of his 1886 song, Wie Melodien zieht es mir,
originally in duple meter, onto the second subject of his triple-meter sonata movement (Ex. 16b). Is it mere chance that the text of Wie
Melodien concerns the wondrous affinity (poetic inspiration itself?) between melody and the word that “seizes” it? Brahms may as well
have been ruminating here on Sachs’s charge to Walther upon having completed his “Prize Song”: “Then deed and word in their proper
place! / Therefore I beg you, remember well the melody; / lovingly it makes of itself an inner poetry; / And when you sing it for others, /
then hold fast to the dream that inspired it.”
EXAMPLE 16a
EXAMPLE 16b
q. q q q
Events of the exposition culminate in S3 (Ex. 17) where a symphonic fanfare of four measures melts into a lyrical
counterstatement of five recalling S1, a sort of Abgesang for S1 and S2. Brahms’s final tribute to Meistersinger resounds in his canonic
treatment of the “Prize Song” motive throughout the development. Though the opera fairly bristles with learned counterpoint of an
almost Brahmsian stamp, Wagner leaves the “Prize Song” untouched in this domain. Brahms’s canonic virtuosity here articulates a
“classical” development section and also bridges “chronologically” the Renaissance and Romantic accents of the opera.
In the second movement, the friendly duel between our two Mastersingers gives way to a dialog between Brahms the Classicist and
the Romanticist. True to sonata protocol, the Classicist proffers material for the two conventional inner movements, a pastoral Andante and
a playful Vivace (Ex. 18 and Ex. 19). But the Romanticist juxtaposes them within a single movement, thereby concocting a tortoise-and-
EXAMPLE 17
EXAMPLE 18
EXAMPLE 19

hare scenario, where the tortoise races at the last moment to the finish line. Until the very end, the listener waffles over whether he is hearing
a slow movement with fast interludes or a topsy-turvy scherzo with multiple trios (a formula used by Schumann, DvoÍák, and elsewhere by
Brahms). Either way, Brahms joins the two revolving sections by way of simple melodic links (interval of a fourth, Ex. 20a) and tempo
proportions (rhythmic augmentation, Ex. 20b). This moment of comic relief has a precedent in the humorous intermezzi staged between the
acts of eighteenth-century operas, a fact probably known to the musicologically-minded Brahms.
EXAMPLE 20a
EXAMPLE 20b
The concluding Allegretto grazioso (quasi Andante) softens Brahms’s terse compositional diction with Viennese gemütlichkeit. Unlike
the First Violin Sonata, the finale is a sonata rondo containing two themes in its first subject-as-rondo (see Ex. 21). The violin introduces
S1/T1 (the Refrain “A”), comprising a twelve-measure sentence (4 measures antecedent + 8 measures consequent) whose asymmetrical
consequent might have awed a Schoenberg (or a Charlie Parker) with its meandering elongation. S1/T2, in contrast, smacks of Schubert
with its luminous piano chords and rolling accompaniment figures (Ex. 22). Typical of Romantic-era rondos, the refrain never recurs as it
first appears. Accompanimental texture, rhythm, harmony, and even melody itself change during its circuitous journey.
EXAMPLE 21
EXAMPLE 22
In the first episode (“B,” Ex. 23) the violin intones a throaty chant accompanied by ominous piano arpeggios. (The diminishedseventh
harmonies bring to mind Schubert’s song Die Stadt.) The second episode (“C,” Ex. 24), a heated conversation that develops S1/
T2, dissolves magically into a restatement of S1/T1 in the “wrong” key (subdominant D major) followed by the reprise of “B” in the
“right” key, more or less (i.e., as a chromatic progression from a B-diminished harmony to E, the dominant of A). As in the finale of Op.
78, Brahms devises a restive second episode, which works here as a reduced development for the movement’s sonata component. An
exuberant coda joining “A” and “C” ends the work. Elisabet von Herzogenberg must again be quoted: “But what a charming, happy
inspiration of yours it is! The whole piece is one caress.” The Second Violin Sonata, more than just a caress, is a ménage à trois for opera,
song, and chamber music.

EXAMPLE 23
EXAMPLE 24
Third Violin Sonata, Op. 108
Composed in Thun 1886-1888, the Third Violin Sonata was premiered by the violinist Jenö Hubay and Brahms in Budapest,
December 1888. Brahms dedicated this work to the fiery pianist-conductor Hans von Bülow. The Sturm und Drang of this music
foreshadows the late violin sonatas of Max Reger (1873-1916), near-expressionistic works contiguous with those of the budding Second
Viennese School. In his Op. 108, Brahms assigns S1 to the violin, S2 to the piano and S3 to both, with transitions so explosive as to
upstage the themes themselves. In S1, a bittersweet violin melody glides over an austere piano accompaniment, featuring syncopated
unisons between the hands (Ex. 25). The restlessness one senses here stems also from the fact that both instruments start and end S1 on
the dominant pitch A, the note that will literally dominate the entire sonata. The pitch A not only postpones definitive (cadential)
resolution to the tonic D, it resolves for the first time at the reprise of S2 (m. 186) almost three-fourths of the way through the
movement! In the Exposition, S1 “resolves” on A, thence bursting into a harmonic avalanche that reluctantly subsides to the plaintive S2
in the relative F major (Ex. 26), a piano cantilena supported by cascading arpeggios. This blissful interlude abruptly vanishes with the
arrival of the fleet S3 (Ex. 27). Here the newly established F major is beclouded by its own minor subdominant (B b –D b –F) and
diminished seventh (B b –D b –E–G) chords. Students of the Third Violin Sonata’s harmony will have noted the enharmonic pun of D b /
C # , the third of the A major triad.
EXAMPLE 25
EXAMPLE 26
EXAMPLE 27

Other students will have noted that all three subjects start with the note A, irrespective of local key areas. This idea blossoms in
the development, forty-six measures of throbbing music grounded on an A pedal point, above which violin and piano right hand trade
compound lines (two melodic lines nested in one), a poignant homage to J. S. Bach (Ex. 28). Herzogenberg, who keenly admired the
development, wrote Brahms: “At the opening of the development we quite caught our breath. How new it is, with that exquisite pedalnote
absorbing everything! How our surprise and delight grew and grew as the A showed no sign of giving way, but held its own through
all the glorious tissue woven above it! How my left thumb revelled in the pressure it had to exert!” Brahms’s obsessive A permeates the
recapitulation (Ex. 29), where the Bachian figures continue in the piano (in both hands), and withholds resolution to the tonic until the
reprise of S2, now in D major (balancing the analogous F major). After a reprise of S3 in D minor and fully harmonized restatement of
S1 in the same key, the movement ends with a calm recollection of the development again in D major, the key of the ensuing Adagio.
EXAMPLE 28
EXAMPLE 29
The Adagio, a modified two-stanza song without words, comprises two thematic elements, one reflective, the other passionate
(Ex. 30a/Ex. 30b). This relationship is mirrored in the movement’s larger structure, a prayerful first stanza and an aria-like second. In the
second, the violin’s phrases are strategically dispersed over its full range, the piano right hand playing the melody legato over a harp-like
staccato bass. (The piano’s “orchestral” articulation is idiomatic to the registrally disjunct Viennese instrument Brahms himself owned.)
Once again, Herzogenberg’s appreciation of the music deserves quotation: “I rejoiced to find the Adagio undisturbed by any middle part,
for, as I have often admitted, however nice the middle parts are, I am never enthusiastic about them. That kind of contrast almost always
strikes me as artificial, and my chief pleasure in an Adagio is its continuity of emotion. For that reason this compact movement, so expressive
in its contracted form, pleases me particularly.” Brahms aspired all his life to compactness of expression and certainly achieved his goal here.
The scherzo movement, marked Un poco presto e con sentimento, left its first listeners bemused, even Herzogenberg. She felt that the
bowed violin chords opening the movement stifled the piano’s nimble gait and even induced Brahms to change the violin’s articulation to
pizzicato (in the reprise at least). Typical of many nineteenth-century scherzos, this one has a single subject with two themes (Exx. 31a/b).
The first has a Fauré-like daintiness, the second a defiant exhuberance. Brahms creates here a sister movement to the Adagio. He squeezes
what “classically” would have been a compound ternary form (A B [Trio] A 1 , each nesting smaller binary forms) into a large external binary
form (A A 1 ). This he does by modulating the second of two internal binary segments of a vestigial A section (starting m. 53) — normally
driving towards the tonic F # minor — to the distant key of F major, as would befit an equally vestigial trio. Then, he shrinks a still more
vestigial trio to a tiny bridge passage played by the piano alone (m. 111). The bridge modulates back to an abbreviated A 1 section (F #
minor), the second of whose two binary segments, now shrunk to a coda, foregoes reprise of the second theme.
EXAMPLE 30a EXAMPLE 30b
EXAMPLE 31a
EXAMPLE 31b

The sonata-rondo form finale, a Presto agitato Robert Haven Schauffler called a “tarantellish” answer to Beethoven’s “Kreutzer”
Sonata finale, picks up the dominating A of the first movement and also links it to the third movement. While the Presto’s opening A
major chord is the dominant of D minor, it is also the relative major of the scherzo’s F # minor, so the “clash” between both third-related
keys to D minor is all the more searing (Ex. 32). From the start, one hears that each can work as melody or accompaniment. As in the
first movement, resolution of A is postponed, though only until the onset of the transition, a tiff between the two instruments (Ex. 33),
EXAMPLE 32
EXAMPLE 33
26
leading to S2-as-“B” (Ex. 34). This first episode of the rondo structure (“B”) starts a hymn droned by the piano, gradually unhinged
metrically and harmonically when the violin enters. Immediately thereafter enters S3-as-“C” (Ex. 35), a febrile tarentella as much akin to
the first movement of Beethoven’s early Violin Sonata, Op. 23, as to the “Kreutzer.”
EXAMPLE 34
EXAMPLE 35
Next follows a restatement of “A,” after which “D,” a real development (based on “A” and “C”), unfolds. One hears in this
section a vertiginous complexity that bests developments in other Brahms works such as the First Symphony and Third Piano Quartet. A
pedal point on A (m. 194) extricates us from the labyrinth, a move normally signaling the retransition (bridge to the recapitulation) in a
D-tonality sonata but recalling here the actual transition of the finale’s sonata structure (mm. 17-38). Thanks to the ubiquitous A and its
“resolution” (locally and globally) to F major, however, this recap starts not with S1 (“A”) but with S2 (“B”), followed by S3 (“C”).

Finally S1 returns to herald the agitato coda where, twelve measures from the end, a fragment of the same theme is heard solidly (for the
first and last time) in the tonic D minor (Ex. 36). After a momentary Luftpause, the movement thunders to its conclusion.
EXAMPLE 36
Brahms’s violin sonatas are milestones in the history of chamber music. They revisit the achievements of his predecessors with an
unmatched concision of motive, harmony, and form. They brilliantly demonstrate Brahms’s hard-won quest for economy of expression
and so challenge a widely held view that his style never evolved. Moreover, the source-historical background of these sonatas, especially
of the second, decisively quashes the obsolete “Brahms versus Wagner” feud. Both Mastersingers drew from the same musical culture but
used complementary idioms to grapple creatively with the word-tone dialectic of German Romanticism.
— Ira Braus, The Hartt School
LITERATURE
Bozarth, George. “Brahms’s Lieder ohne Worte: The ‘Poetic’ Andantes of the Piano Studies.” In Brahms Studies, ed. George Bozarth.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
Brahms, Johannes. The Herzogenberg Correspondence, ed. Max Kalbeck and transl. Hannah Bryant. New York: Dutton and Co., 1909.
Braus, Ira. “Brahms’s Liebe und Frühling II. Op. 3, No. 3: A New Path to the Artwork of the Future?” 19th-Century Music X/2, Fall 1986
Brodbeck, David. “Brahms, the Third Symphony, and the New German School.” In Brahms and his World, ed. Walter Frisch. Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Daverio, John. “Against the Grain: Brahms’s Conception of the Virtuoso Violin Idiom.” Lecture given at Brahms Festival: Perspectives
on Performance, Boston University, April 5-7, 2001.
McCorkle, Donald and Margit L., Hsg. Johannes Brahms Thematisches-Bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis. München: G. Henle Verlag,
1984.
McKinney, Timothy R. “Beyond the ‘Rain-Drop’ Motif: Motivic and Thematic Relationships in Brahms’s opera 59 and 78.” The Music
Review 52, 1991.
Struck, Michael. “New Evidence on the Genesis of Brahms’s G Major Violin Sonata, Op. 78.” American Brahms Society Newsletter,
Spring 1991.
Schauffler, Daniel Haven. The Unknown Brahms. New York: Crown Publishers, 1940.
Schoenberg, Arnold. “Brahms the Progressive.” In Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, with
translations by Leo Black. 1975 Rev. ed. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.
Swafford, Jan. Johannes Brahms. A Biography. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1997.

THE ARTISTS
Russian-born violinist ANASTASIA KHITRUK began her musical studies at Moscow’s Central
Music School and, after emigrating to the United States, made her orchestral debut at the age of
eight. Based in New York, she appears regularly in recital and as a soloist with orchestras in Europe,
North and South America, and Australia. In addition to the sonatas on this recording, she has
received acclaim for her performances of the Bach Sonatas (“she caught lightening in a bottle”), the
Shostakovich Violin Concerto (“masterful”), and the Paganini Caprices (“dazzling”).
DAVID KOREVAAR, professor of piano at the University of Colorado at Boulder, received his
bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from The Juilliard School, where his teachers included Earl
Wild and Abbey Simon. Mr. Korevaar has formerly served as a member of the faculty of the
Westport (Connecticut) School of Music and as head of piano studies at the University of
Bridgeport. He has performed as soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States, as
well as in Japan, Korea, and Europe. Recordings include CDs of Dohnányi (Ivory Classics), Liszt
(Helicon), and Bach’s complete Well-Tempered Clavier (Musicians Showcase).
THE CLISBEE STRADIVARI
For this recording, Machold Rare Violins — with offices in New York, Zürich, Bremen, and
Tokyo — generously lent Anastasia Khitruk the Stradivari believed made in 1669 and known as the
Clisbee Stradivari, after one Miss Clisbee, who had purchased it about 1890. See Hill, William
Henry, Antonio Stradivari: His Life and Work (1644–1737) (W. F. Hill & Sons, England). In the
words of Ms. Khitruk, “The dark, powerful poetry of the Clisbee Stradivari seemed perfectly suited
to the Brahms Sonatas.”
ANASTASIA KHITRUK
(photo credit: Michael Pochna)
DAVID KOREVAAR
(photo credit: Casey Cass)
THE “CLISBEE” STRADIVARI (c. 1669)

RECORDING
Recorded in March of 2001
in The Recital Hall, Purchase College, Purchase, New York
VIOLIN
“Clisbee” Stradivari (c. 1669),
courtesy of Machold Rare Violins, Ltd., New York, Zürich, Bremen, Tokyo
LIBRETTO AND VERSE TRANSLATIONS
Ira Braus
DESIGN AND TYPOGRAPHY
Design by Jack, Inc.
Glen Cortese (Musical Notation)
PHOTOGRAPHY
Page 33 — Anastasia Khitruk: Michael Pochna, C
8 New Estis-Terrace, Inc.
Page 33 — David Korevaar: Casey Cass, C 8 University of Colorado
Page 35 — Ms. Khitruk and David Korevaar: Michael Pochna, 8 C New Estis-Terrace, Inc.
Back Cover — “Clisbee” Stradivari: C 8 Machold Rare Violins, Ltd.
FRONT COVER ART
“Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi” (1794)
by Philipp Friedrich von Hetsch (Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany),
C 8 Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER (TITANIC)
Charles G. Thomas
Ph
2002 New Estis-Terrace, Inc.
C 2002 New Estis-Terrace, Inc.
TITANIC is a registered trademark of New Estis-Terrace, Inc.
TITANIC RECORDS is a trademark of New Estis-Terrace, Inc.
www.titanicrecords.com
ANASTASIA KHITRUK AND DAVID KOREVAAR
(photo credit: Michael Pochna)