Strings Magazine
MARCH 14, 2018
By Brian Wise
Claude Debussy, battling late-stage cancer and faced with the growing hardships of World War I, had only a few self-deprecating words about his swan song, the Sonata for Violin and Piano in G minor. “I only wrote this sonata to be rid of the thing, spurred on by my dear publisher,” he wrote to a colleague in June 1917. “This sonata will be interesting from a documentary point of view and as an example of what may be produced by a sick man in time of war.”
Composers’ deathbed works often carry an aura of gravitas and poignancy—be it Mozart’s Requiem, Schubert’s Die Winterreise, or Berg’s Violin Concerto—but Debussy’s correspondence suggests that the sonata was less poetic than a dispiriting grind. Later biographers and critics perhaps didn’t help its reputation: Edward Lockspeiser’s two-volume biography deemed it “an illuminating failure” while critic Paul Griffiths, in a 2001 New York Times review, called it “disappointingly retrograde.”
“The opening is so dreamy and full of promise. It’s so personal but you need a wonderful touch. Most of us spend a lifetime learning that.”
—Anne-Sophie Mutter
But over the past century, violinists have come to embrace Debussy’s compact and exquisitely autumnal Violin Sonata—if partly out of gratitude to the French composer for devoting his fading energies to a solo instrument that he largely passed by earlier in life. In 2018, the centennial year of Debussy’s death, the sonata seems primed for a fresh appraisal.
“It’s such a wonderful example of French music,” says Anne-Sophie Mutter, who recorded the piece in 1995, and this year plans to return it to her recital programs. “It’s so different. The sonata is just an incredible example of sound colors, of delicacy, and subtlety of tonal development.”