Eugène Ysaÿe

Eugène Ysaÿe

Eugène Ysaÿe was a Belgian violinist, composer and conductor born in Liège. He was regarded as "The King of the Violin", or, as Nathan Milstein put it, the "tzar"...

's Six sonatas for solo violin, Op. 27, is a set of sonata

Sonata

Sonata , in music, literally means a piece played as opposed to a cantata , a piece sung. The term, being vague, naturally evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms prior to the Classical era...

s for unaccompanied violin

Violin

The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....

 written in July 1923. Each sonata was dedicated to one of Ysaÿe’s contemporary violinists: Joseph Szigeti

Joseph Szigeti

Joseph Szigeti was a Hungarian violinist.Born into a musical family, he spent his early childhood in a small town in Transylvania. He quickly proved himself to be a child prodigy on the violin, and moved to Budapest with his father to study with the renowned pedagogue Jenő Hubay...

 (No. 1), Jacques Thibaud

Jacques Thibaud

Jacques Thibaud was a French violinist.Thibaud was born in Bordeaux and studied the violin with his father before entering the Paris Conservatoire at the age of thirteen. In 1896 he jointly won the conservatory's violin prize with Pierre Monteux...

 (No. 2), George Enescu

George Enescu

George Enescu was a Romanian composer, violinist, pianist, conductor and teacher.-Biography:Enescu was born in the village of Liveni , Dorohoi County at the time, today Botoşani County. He showed musical talent from early in his childhood. A child prodigy, Enescu created his first musical...

 (No. 3), Fritz Kreisler

Fritz Kreisler

Friedrich "Fritz" Kreisler was an Austrian-born violinist and composer. One of the most famous violin masters of his or any other day, he was known for his sweet tone and expressive phrasing. Like many great violinists of his generation, he produced a characteristic sound which was immediately...

 (No. 4), Mathieu Crickboom

Mathieu Crickboom

Mathieu Crickboom was a Belgian violinist, who was born in Verviers and died in Brussels.Crickboom was the principal disciple of Eugène Ysaÿe, who dedicated to him his Sonata for Violin Alone No. 5...

 (No. 5), and Manuel Quiroga

Manuel Quiroga

Manuel López-Quiroga Miquel better known as Maestro Quiroga, was a pianist, composer and author of couplets and coplas, one of the authors Quintero, León and Quiroga....

 (No. 6).

General background

After having heard Joseph Szigeti perform Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach

Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...

's sonata for solo violin in G minor, Ysaÿe was inspired to compose violin works that represent the evolution of musical techniques and expressions of his time. As Ysaÿe claimed, "I have played everything from Bach to Debussy

Claude Debussy

Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

, for real art should be international." In this set of sonatas, he used prominent characteristics of early 20th century music, such as whole tone scale

Whole tone scale

In music, a whole tone scale is a scale in which each note is separated from its neighbors by the interval of a whole step. There are only two complementary whole tone scales, both six-note or hexatonic scales:...

s, dissonance

Consonance and dissonance

In music, a consonance is a harmony, chord, or interval considered stable, as opposed to a dissonance , which is considered to be unstable...

s, and quarter tone

Quarter tone

A quarter tone , is a pitch halfway between the usual notes of a chromatic scale, an interval about half as wide as a semitone, which is half a whole tone....

s. Ysaÿe also employed virtuoso bow

Bow (music)

In music, a bow is moved across some part of a musical instrument, causing vibration which the instrument emits as sound. The vast majority of bows are used with string instruments, although some bows are used with musical saws and other bowed idiophones....

 and left hand techniques throughout, for he believed that "at the present day the tools of violin mastery, of expression, technique, mechanism, are far more than necessary than in days gone by. In fact they are indispensable, if the spirit is to express itself without restraint." Thus, this set of sonatas places high technical demands on its performers. Yet Ysaÿe recurrently warns violinists that they should never forget to sing instead of becoming preoccupied with technical elements; a violin master "must be a violinist, a thinker, a poet, a human being, he must have known hope, love, passion and despair, he must have run the gamut of the emotions in order to express them all in his playing."

Sonata No. 1, G minor, "Joseph Szigeti

Joseph Szigeti

Joseph Szigeti was a Hungarian violinist.Born into a musical family, he spent his early childhood in a small town in Transylvania. He quickly proved himself to be a child prodigy on the violin, and moved to Budapest with his father to study with the renowned pedagogue Jenő Hubay...

"

Sonata No. 1, in four movements, was dedicated to Joseph Szigeti.

1. Grave
2. Fugato
3. Allegretto poco scherzoso
4. Finale; Con brio

Sonata No. 2

Sonata for Solo Violin, op. 27, no. 2 (Ysaÿe)

The Sonata for Solo Violin, Op. 27, No. 2 "Jacques Thibaud" is a sonata in four movements from Six sonatas for solo violin, each one dedicated to one of Ysaÿe's contemporary violinists. - Characteristics of the "Thibaud" sonata :...

, A minor, "Jacques Thibaud

Jacques Thibaud

Jacques Thibaud was a French violinist.Thibaud was born in Bordeaux and studied the violin with his father before entering the Paris Conservatoire at the age of thirteen. In 1896 he jointly won the conservatory's violin prize with Pierre Monteux...

"

Sonata No. 2, in four movements, was dedicated to Jacques Thibaud, a friend of Ysaÿe's.

1. Obsession; Prelude
2. Malinconia
3. Danse des Ombres; Sarabande
4. Les furies

Sonata No. 3, D minor, "Georges Enesco"

This sonata is a ballade in two sections entitled:

• Ballades; Lento molto sostenuto
• Allegro in tempo giusto e con bravura

The first performance of this sonata was given by Josef Gingold

Josef Gingold

Josef Gingold was a Russian-Jewish-born classical violinist and teacher, who lived most of his life in the United States...

.

Sonata No. 6, E major, "Manuel Quiroga"

The dedicatee never actually played this sonata. It is written in the style of a Spanish habanera

Habanera

Habanera may refer to:*"Habanera" , an aria from Bizet's Carmen*Habanera , a 1984 Cuban film*La Habanera , a 1937 German movie...

, with a turbulent middle section, and notable for rich texture and chromaticism and scale passages. It is a one movement work.