Czech Chamber Music Society • Václav Petr

Ludwig van Beethoven modeled the structure of his two Sonatas for Cello and Piano, Op. 102 after Mozart, but filled it with music that – like most works of his late period – caused embarrassment among his contemporaries. The impulse for both sonatas came from Beethoven’s acquaintance with the cellist Joseph Linke, who as a member of the Schuppanzigh Quartet later also participated in the premieres of Beethoven’s late string quartets. The sonatas were composed in 1815 and Linke first performed them together with Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny. In the Sonata in D major, which is Beethoven’s last ever cello sonata, the composer employed the contrapuntal technique that he had increasingly explored in his last creative phase. The sonata opens with a sixteenth-note figure in the piano, a kind of motto that in combination with the other material goes through the whole movement. A strong contrast is brought about by the slow movement, which in its expression comes close to the epoch of Romanticism in music. The cello and the piano instruments are in dialogue with each other; the movement alternates between major and minor keys; the main and surprising climax of the movement comes its coda. The final movement serves as an example of Beethoven’s humor. The composer deliberately begins in a rather banal way only to come up with a fugal theme and inventive rhythmic transformations of an almost improvisatory nature.

Large-scale works of major forms are considered evidence of compositional mastery. Nevertheless, there are small pieces which are no less perfect. Both Antonín Dvořák and Josef Suk were able to compose on a large scale, while creating a unique miniature. Antonín Dvořák’s composition for cello and piano, Silent Woods, Op. 68 is an arrangement of one of the movements of his cycle for four-hand piano, From the Bohemian Forest, of 1884. This arrangement was written for a concert tour that Dvořák undertook in Bohemia and Moravia before his departure for the United States. The work was first performed on 28 December 1891 in Rakovník by the cellist Hanuš Wihan with the composer at the piano. The next arrangement of the same composition was an instrumentation of the piano accompaniment for small orchestra, created two years later. Rondo, Op. 94, composed for Hanuš Wihan for the same purpose of a farewell tour before going overseas, was first performed by Wihan and Dvořák on 8 January 1892 in Chrudim.

In 1900, two of Josef Suk’s compositions for cello and piano, Ballade and Serenade, were published in Berlin under one opus number. The Ballade, Op. 3, No. 1 was an incidental piece composed for a concert by Karel Stecker’s pupils at the Prague Conservatory and was premiered by Otto Berger, to whom it is dedicated, and Josef Suk on 15 January 1891. Five years later Suk revised the piece. The Serenade, Op. 3, No. 2 was first presented on 28 April 1898 at the Konvikt hall in Prague by the cellist Rudolf Pavlata and the composer himself. After two more performances with different performers, on 27 November of the same year the two works were performed together in the Rudolfinum at the “Concert of the Young Music Generation” by the cellist Jan Burian and the pianist Bedřich Křídlo. Both compositions have been preserved in the estate of the cellist Bedřich Váška, the dedicatee of the Serenade, in copies made by the composer’s father, Josef Suk the Eldest (1827–1913), a teacher in the village of Křečovice.

On 22 January 1934, Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was presented for the first time in Leningrad. Two days later, the Moscow premiere took place at the Nemirovich Danchenko Theater, and it immediately attracted interest abroad. The opera was played for two years, also at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. In January 1935, its performance was attended by Joseph Stalin. As a result, Shostakovich got into the first conflict with the aesthetic line dictated by the state. The Pravda newspaper published an article entitled Muddle Instead of Music concerning his opera, whose headline Shostakovich reportedly noticed while being on a concert tour with the cellist Viktor Kubatsky. One of the pieces on their program was Sonata for Cello and Piano in D minor, Op. 40, dedicated to Kubatsky, which they premiered together on 25 December 1935 in the Leningrad Philharmonic’s Small Hall. Shostakovich wrote the sonata in the summer of 1934, the busy and hopeful period after the opera’s premiere when the world was learning about the young Russian composer. While retaining the traditional Classical-Romantic formal scheme, the sonata already bears the hallmarks of Shostakovich’s style, characterized by parodic elements and a tendency towards the grotesque. The first movement is reminiscent of the music of Romantic bourgeois salons. The composer assigns an extensive cantilena to cello accompanied by piano chords; in the development, the composer’s above-mentioned ability to lighten up can be felt. In the mirror recapitulation – i.e., with the reverse sequence of the two themes – the main theme is distorted and the end of the movement is melancholic, like a memory of times gone by. Allegro forms a contrast, a humorous exaggeration, sounding deliberately almost trivial at times. The somber, elegiac slow movement brings about another sharp contrast, giving the impression of resignation, but irony flashes through. The final movement, which according to the established canon of forms should represent a resolution of the conflicts raised in the previous movements, toys with these ideas, for example, by several mechanical repetitions of the motif in the very end.