Jacqui Johnson cello, Dominic Piers-Smith piano

Saint-Saëns Sonata no 1 in C minor, op 32

Allegro
Andante tranquillo sostenuto
Allegro moderato

The Cello Sonata No 1 in C minor Op 32, from 1872, was the first result of the new Société Nationale de Musique, and therefore a work of significance for France. As in the case of Brahms’s First Symphony, the choice of key may owe something to Beethoven. The second movement is in the relative major key of E flat and originates from an organ improvisation in the church of Saint Augustin. Charles-Marie Widor told the story of the composition of the third movement. After attending the successful first performance of the Sonata, Saint-Saëns, surprised that his mother had made no comment on the piece, asked: ‘Don’t you have anything to say? Aren’t you pleased?’ Mme. Saint-Saëns then said she liked the first two movements, but not the finale. A few days later he triumphantly told her: ‘I have composed a new finale! Do you want to hear it?’ This is the finale we know today. It contains quotes from the first act of Meyerbeer’s L’Africaine—possibly a favourite of Saint-Saëns’s mother’s. The Sonata is in good company in his output, preceded by the Introduction et rondo capriccioso Op 28 for violin and orchestra and Le rouet d’Omphale Op 31, considered the first French symphonic poem, and followed by the Cello Concerto No 1 in A minor Op 33.

Cesar Franck Sonata in A major

Allegretto ben moderato
Allegro
Recitativo-Fantasia: Ben moderato
Allegretto poco mosso

The conventional wisdom likes to date the beginnings of a new French artistic sensibility from the death of Victor Hugo in 1885. But in the musical world it came about both earlier and later: earlier in that the foundation of the Société nationale de musique in 1871 provided at last a regular forum for French chamber and orchestral music, free from the dictates of the opera house; later in that the new, non-Germanic language took time to develop.

For César Franck, this development seems to have been more a matter of confidence than of technique. His move away from church music in the last fifteen years of his life was encouraged by his adoring pupils, ‘la bande à Franck’, who, while recognizing his status as pater seraphicus, also saw beyond it to his creative power and originality: both, in their view, worthy of a wider audience. Franck had in fact written four piano trios back in the 1840s, but then no other chamber music until the piano quintet, premiered at the Société in 1880. Saint-Saëns was the pianist in that performance, and the premiere of Saint-Saëns’s first violin sonata in October 1885 may have provided an additional inducement to Franck to engage with the medium—and to produce something totally different.

Saint-Saëns’s sonata begins by injecting enormous energy into the proceedings, and in this respect has a long tradition behind it. Franck on the other hand draws on his organist’s heritage, and at the start time seems to stand still, as in some magic garden. This was the Franck who would play the first notes of the ‘Moonlight’ sonata to himself, murmuring: ‘J’aime, j’aime.’ At the same time these four opening bars are structurally important in containing the interval of the major third that underpins much of what follows. Formally, too, this movement is unusual: it may owe something to sonata form, but there is no development. This is postponed until the second movement. Not a minuet or scherzo, then? No, a wild (and technically difficult) allegro which, in tone and tonality (ultimately converting D minor into D major), seems to risk sounding dangerously like a finale.

The pseudo-operatic recitativo-fantasia, itself replete with magic moments, is the nearest the work comes to a slow movement, but in the fantasia section the violin’s passionate, widespread phrases carry a momentum of their own, sailing above the piano’s comfortable triplets. For the finale, Franck, knowing that he had to come up with something to trump the second movement, turned to counterpoint and crowned the sonata with a purposeful canon. Since the sonata was a wedding present in 1886 for the Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe, who premiered it in Brussels on 16 December that year, it is perhaps not too fanciful to hear this canon as representing two lovers setting out on a life together with a single mind—‘whither thou goest, I will go’.