Coming Full Circle Responses to the Romantic Sonata
Gavin Plumley
Like its G-major predecessor, Brahms’s A-major Violin Sonata, his second, was composed during a summer break away from Vienna. Following successful and prolific sojourns on the Wörthersee in Carinthia, Brahms had moved to the more fashionable Austrian resort of Bad Ischl, then to Pressbaum, much closer to Vienna, and on to Wiesbaden, where in 1883 he wrote his Third Symphony, coinciding with the death of Wagner. But as well as cultural concurrences that year, there were emotional ones too, when Brahms met Hermine Spies, a vivacious contralto who was to become one of his major infatuations. She was also a prominent interpreter of Brahms’s works and one of several visitors to the composer’s 1886 summer retreat, this time in Switzerland. Again, Brahms enjoyed a fertile period of composition, basing himself on the banks of the Thunersee, a place “so full of melodies,” he explained, “that one has to be careful not to step on any.” Consequently, both the Alpine landscape and his friendship with Spies inspired numerous compositions that summer, including a (predictable) clutch of songs, the Second Cello Sonata in F major Op. 99 for Robert Hausmann, a quartet colleague of Joseph Joachim’s, and the A-major Sonata, which Brahms and Joseph Hellmesberger Sr. first performed in Vienna on December 2, 1886.
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