Ottorino Respighi is best known for his Roman trilogy: Fountains of Rome (1916), Pines of Rome (1924) and Roman Festivals (1928), three orchestral tone poems of extraordinary imagination, so bombastic and colourful that they have tended to overshadow his smaller-scale works, such as the Violin Sonata of 1917.
Respighi showed an early aptitude for the piano, becoming proficient after a few lessons from his piano teacher father, Giuseppe. One account describes how Giuseppi, ‘coming back home earlier than usual one day, was surprised to hear on the stairs that someone was playing Schumann’s Variazione sinfoniche; none of his pupils was studying that piece, and immense was his surprise when he found Ottorino sitting at the piano, for he has not imagined that his son could have acquired such a level of skill through the few, sporadic lessons he had given him.’
Respighi went on to study violin and composition at Bologna’s Liceo Musicale. While working as an orchestral viola player in Russia, he briefly studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, which influenced his orchestration, although lessons with Bruch in Berlin were less fruitful. Back in Bologna, Respighi played in orchestras and transcribed scores. He moved to Rome in 1913 to become professor of composition at the Liceo Musicale di Santa Cecilia, marrying his student, Elsa Olivieri Sangiacomo, in 1919. International fame brought travel and the approval of Mussolini, who nevertheless sided with modernists against Respighi and his colleagues when, in 1932, they urged a return to Italian traditions.
By the time Respighi had arrived in Rome in 1913, the city had consolidated its position as Italy’s cultural capital. This inspired him to compose Fountains of Rome which, though not instantly as successful as it would become, proved to be a pivotal moment in his career. The Violin Sonata dates from the period directly after the tone poem’s composition, when Respighi was yet to appreciate the significance of his own achievement. Consequently, he took his time deciding which stylistic direction to pursue, and the Violin Sonata reflects this in its range of vocabulary, from Romantic idioms suggesting the influence of Franck and others, to the academic prowess of the final passacaglia.
This was Respighi’s first large-scale chamber composition since his attempted string quartet of 1909, but there is no hesitancy in his assured treatment of two contrasting themes: an expansive, heartfelt violin melody over sombre accompaniment, and a softer theme that is sweet and seductive without being cloying. The airy central movement is closer in feel to the impressionism of Respighi’s orchestral output, opening with gloriously relaxed, almost improvisatory piano writing before the violin unfolds a melody that seems to radiate Italian light.
Then comes the vigorous final movement. A passacaglia, like a chaconne, is structured around a recurring line: in a chaconne this is restricted to the bass, but in a passacaglia the recurring theme may be used in other parts of the texture. Respighi’s is a powerful, Brahmsian example, showing the weighty technique that underpinned his music; but with characteristic flair he varies the mood by lightening the texture to create witty contrast, or by unfurling a leisurely, romantic passage that slowly darkens, returning us to the opening atmosphere for a dramatic coda.
The first performance in Bologna in 1918, performed by Respighi’s former teacher Federico Sarti with the composer as the piano, was a success. Respighi wrote afterwards: ‘Praise be! I shouldn’t say so, but we played it well. Me included!’ A subsequent performance in Chicago in 1923 prompted a review in the Chicago Daily Tribune declaring that ‘this sonata served to indicate how the new generation of Italian composers is labouring to get away from the theory that Italian music means Italian opera … Respighi has written rather a good sonata … conceived along broad lines and on large ideas.’

It was about a decade later that Shostakovich and the great violinist David Oistrakh first met, in the mid-1930s. This was at around the time of Shostakovich’s denunciation in the state newspaper, Pravda – just one of a litany of state persecutions he endured alongside, giddyingly, moments of being paraded about as their spokesperson. Oistrakh had been hoping for a concerto from his friend for some time and was eventually rewarded with Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto. The Second Violin Concerto followed much later, in 1967 – intended as a 60th birthday present to Oistrakh. But Shostakovich was a year out, as Oistrakh explained:
‘Dmitri had been wanting to write a new, second concerto for me as a present for my 60th birthday. However, there was an error of one year in his timing. The concerto was ready for my 59th birthday. Shortly afterwards, Dmitri seemed to think that, having made a mistake, he ought to correct it. That is how he came to write the Sonata … I had not been expecting it, though I had long been hoping that he would write a violin sonata.’
Shostakovich completed the Violin Sonata in G in the autumn of 1968, and Oistrakh gave the premiere in May 1969 at the Moscow Conservatory. These were years of ill health for Shostakovich; he was diagnosed with polio in 1965, and the Sonata was composed as he recovered from breaking his right leg in September 1967 (having broken the left at his son Maxim’s wedding in 1960). As he wrote wryly to his friend, the critic and librettist Isaac Glikman: ‘Target achieved so far: 75 per cent (right leg broken, left leg broken, right hand defective)’. He missed the premiere of the Second Violin Concerto as a consequence.
There was a silver lining to this particular cloud, however, which was that Shostakovich, with no hope of publicly playing the Violin Sonata’s piano part himself, indulged in some of his most virtuoso writing since his First Piano Sonata. He admitted to Glikman that he had attempted these challenging passages while rehearsing with Oistrakh and had found the strain ‘awful’. Nevertheless, he and Oistrakh made an informal recording together, after which came some unofficial performances – with other pianists – before the work’s official premiere.
The Violin Sonata is a formidable work. Shostakovich’s preoccupation with his own mortality at this time spawned an interest in a new and bracing range of procedures, including his own take on the 12-tone techniques – with their wide-ranging harmonic implications – pioneered by the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg and Webern). True enough, the Sonata’s first movement begins with a tone-row for the piano in octaves and, while the work is not strictly ‘serial’ throughout, Shostakovich’s flexible approach to meter during the movement allows for the row to undergo different permutations. The influence of Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No.1 – which had been premiered by Oistrakh – is also palpable. The movement ebbs and flows between remote otherworldliness and surges of threatening tension, with surprising contrast created by a characteristically sardonic little dance that starts with a childlike melody on the piano.
The second movement also includes an injection of humour – of a kind – when a waltzing ‘trio’ section abruptly interrupts the muscular scherzo, but things become increasingly unhinged with toy-box piano writing and wailing violin lines. The final movement, in common with that by Respighi, is a passacaglia, although of a very different nature. The theme is unveiled on pizzicato violin, like some ghostly memory, answered by hypnotic piano writing. Bar occasional interruptions, the theme threads its way through the whole movement, culminating in a cadenza-like section for the violin. The introductory material is reprised, and there are references to the first movement including ‘sul ponticello’ (near the bridge) writing for the violin. There are brief outbursts from both instruments and shivering death rattles from the violin before the music, almost imperceptibly, dies away.

© Joanna Wyld, 2023