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At the start of the 1890s, French composers were largely divided into two groups: Conservatoire students who looked to Massenet as their guiding star; and the so-called bande à Franck who followed the Belgian masterindeed worshipped would not be too strong a word. The music historian Martin Cooper, in his classic account of the period, described Francks world as one of tremulous emotion, in which the nobility and purity of master and disciples seems to have been permanentlyand one cannot help feeling, rather self-consciouslyin evidence.

Guillaume Lekeu (18701894) was among the last arrivals in the bande. After lessons in his home city of Verviers in Belgium, he and his family moved to Poitiers and there, at the age of fifteen, he composed his first piece. They moved again to Paris in 1888, when Guillaume joined the bande. Between then and his death from typhoid, after drinking contaminated water, he wrote some fifty pieces, of which the Violin Sonata of 18923 is by far the best known.

Whether innate or in response to Francks example, tremulous emotion was decidedly a major part of Lekeus make-up: visiting Bayreuth in 1889, he fainted after the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde and had to be carried out of the theatre. He confessed to not liking music that is pretty but not felt and that for me art is entirely a matter of feeling. The Violin Sonata, written for the great Belgian virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe, declares its programme of sentiment from the opening phrasea bold downward octave followed by an upward scale. If there are echoes of Beethoven, Wagner and, of course, Franck, this is only to be expected of an impressionable twenty-two-year-old. Like Franck, Lekeu in the two outer movements proceeds by continual modulation, binding the music together with cyclic repetitions of material and especially of rhythms: phrases often have their longest note in the middle and end with a triplet. The finale also repeats sixteen bars almost note for note from the first movement during the build-up to the final section.

But perhaps Lekeus greatest achievement is to be found in the opening theme of the central slow movement. Not only does he manage the 7/8 (4+3) time signature with consummate flexibility, he keeps our interest through all forty bars and three minutes of the melody with only two brief excursions away from the tonic E flat major. The central section is introduced by a tune on the piano played very simply and with the feeling of a popular song. In this, Lekeu was following not so much Franck himself, as members of the bande such as dIndy, for whom folksong was the epitome of nobility and purity.

In June 1895, the twenty-year-old Maurice Ravels Conservatoire professor Émile Pessard described his harmony exercises as exactPessard lived on until 1917, perhaps long enough to blush at this judgment. At all events, in the exam in the summer of 1895 these exercises werent exact enough for the jury and Ravel had to leave the institution, before returning as a member of Faurés composition class in January 1898. In the meantime, he began a Violin Sonata in A major, but got no further than the first movement. This information comes from a note he sent to the violinist Paul Oberdoerffer in June 1929, consisting of the opening violin phrase and a dedication to him in memory of the 1st performance of the uncompleted first sonata (18&). Oberdoerffer went on to teach violin at the Conservatoire and wrote light music for his instrument with titles such as Chinoiserie and La petite fleur de mon jardin. Ravels single movement, in sonata form, juxtaposes modal writing, as at the opening, with more chromatic harmonies, including two passages of downward sliding chords that sound like Delius. The joins may not always be totally convincing, but there is no mistaking Ravels way with a lyrical idea.

From his arrival in Faurés class until that composers death in 1924, Ravel remained on friendly terms with his teacher, even though his music shows barely any Fauréan influence other than a distaste for loquacity. When the journalist Henry Prunières was planning a Fauré number of his Revue musicale in October 1922, Ravel joined six other pupils in providing a musical homage. Fauré had been let in on the idea and had suggested a theme drawn from his music to Prométhée, but in the end his pupils chose a musical transliteration of the name Gabriel Fauré: GABDBEE FAGDE. Ravels Berceuse has an unassuming grace worthy of its dedicatee, and its contrasts, as in the early Sonata movement, are largely between modal and chromatic harmonies. The score is marked semplice and the violin is muted throughout.

Also in 1922, Ravel began work on a violin piece that could hardly have been more different. At the end of June he went to London with the pianist Robert Casadesus and his wife Gaby to make some recordings for the Aeolian company. He was also able to hear the first British performance of his Duo for violin and cello in which the violinist was the Hungarian Jelly dArányi. Afterwards, he got dArányi to play him some gypsy folk music and, according to Gaby: DArányi, being Hungarian, didnt need to be asked twice and played passionately for at least two hours without stopping. She was sensational and Ravel was mad with joy & very shortly afterwards Tzigane was born. DArányi gave the first performance in April 1924 in London. The piece adopts the slow/fast (lassú/friss) form of the csárdás, the slow section being for violin alone. In imitating the gypsy styleharmonics, trills, glissandos, appoggiaturas, hesitations and passages in high positions on the lower stringsRavel may have left something of himself behind, but as pastiche it is undeniably brilliant, drawing some of its ideas from Liszts Hungarian Rhapsodies and Paganinis Caprices. When dArányi was rehearsing for a performance with orchestra in Paris that November, she is said to have introduced what she called a glissando with trills. Ravel supposedly confided to a friend, I dont know what shes doing, but I like it.

Ravels time as a lorry driver during World War I had undoubtedly undermined his health, and for the last twenty years of his life insomnia was a persistent problem. Also, in 1917 his mother had died, and many friends were of the opinion that he never fully recovered from this either. These factors contributed to make composition during these years a laborious business, and with no work more so than the Violin Sonata in G major. Begun in 1923, it was set aside for other compositions such as Tzigane and the opera LEnfant et les sortilèges, and was not completed for another four years. As late as 1926, Ravels pupil Manuel Rosenthal saw pieces of manuscript burning in the grate. It was the finale of the Violin Sonata, which he had liked. Yes, said Ravel, I too liked it very much. But it didnt fit the Sonata.

He claimed that he was trying in the work to point up the essential incompatibility of the two instruments. In the first movement, violin and piano do share material, but the first theme, for instance, is so obviously better suited to the violin that its initial presentation by the piano only emphasizes the incompatibility. The violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, to whom the Sonata is dedicated, felt that the violin was treated more like a woodwind instrument, while the piano, at least in the composers hands, sounded dry and percussive.

In the central Blues, Ravel takes over from where he left off in Tzigane, with glissandos, complex ornaments, and high string positions to imitate the characteristically husky tone of the African voice. One critic has even found detailed borrowings from Jelly Roll Mortons Black Bottom Stomp. In the final Perpetuum mobile, once the violin is hooked on its semiquavers, there is no holding it, and we sense the implacable, dark side of the Silly Twenties, as pictured elsewhere by Ravel in La valse and Boléro. We may seem to have come a long way from the ideals of nobility and purity that informed the world of César Franck. But in the Blues, and at times in the first movement, we may sense a tender vulnerability that Ravel had rarely allowed to rise to the surface. If he could not, like Lekeu, wear his heart on his sleeve, maybe this enabled him to sympathize with African music in a shared interiorization of feeling; and maybe that is why every performance of this Sonata tends to come up with something new, and surprising.

Roger Nichols © 2011