Brahms breathed songs into his violin sonata

Na Sung-in

The author is a music critic and director of the classical music brand Poongwoldang. 

As a chamber music genre, the violin sonata has a symbolic quality: it pairs the piano, the quintessential instrument of equal temperament, with the violin, a leading instrument of just intonation. The piano is a composer’s instrument, independent enough to fill a concert hall by itself. The violin, meanwhile, is a basic building block of orchestral and chamber music and a supreme solo instrument, with expressive powers often compared with the human voice.

Yet for all their expressive range, neither instrument requires the player’s breath to produce sound directly. Perhaps that is why composers have sometimes sought to breathe song, and breath itself, into them. The contrast between their mechanics and their capacity for deeply human expression gives the pairing a special fascination: two instruments that do not literally breathe can nevertheless seem to sing.

Brahms’s “Violin Sonata No. 2” (1886) is such a work. While spending a summer holiday near Lake Thun in Switzerland, Brahms learned that his close friend Hermine Spies would visit. She was an accomplished mezzo-soprano, and Brahms naturally placed melodies suited to her voice at the heart of the sonata’s movements.

The first movement draws on “Wie Melodien zieht es mir leise durch den Sinn” (1886), a song setting a poem by Klaus Groth, while another musical idea is connected with “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer” (1886), set to a poem by Hermann Lingg. The finale also recalls “Auf dem Kirchhofe” (1888), a setting of Detlev von Liliencron. Song, quite literally, breathes life into the work. The sonata is filled with lyricism and introspection, but also with the composer’s warm affection as he awaited a friend. It is music shaped not only by formal craft, but by anticipation, memory and the imagined presence of a human voice.

Song may be among music’s smallest genres, but it is also among its most fundamental. Brahms was hailed as the great successor to Beethoven’s symphonic tradition, yet he always cherished the “small genre” of the Lied.

He believed a song should be simple enough for someone to whistle along with it. Only then, perhaps, could it readily find its way into people’s hearts.

Brahms possessed compositional technique of the highest order, but he continued to value simple beauty. That combination — mastery without ostentation, sophistication joined to directness — is part of what gives his music its enduring dignity. His greatness lies not only in complexity, but in knowing when the simplest melody can fully say what technique alone cannot.