Minimum means, maximum effect: the sonata is like a drama film for your ears

« Nothing but this music makes us feel what death is. » That’s what pianist Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982) once said about the second part of Schubert’s last pianosonate. In it, a melancholic melody continues slowly, covered by a wonderfully austere, rocking guidance. Every now and then the sadness is relieved by a glimpse of serenity. Also from other musicians and writers, these music associations with great life themes elicited: loneliness, farewell, catharsis and transfiguration. Schubert managed to call it all without words. The power of the Sonata lies in it: with only one or two instruments still causing music with large narrative and emotional power. Minimum resources, maximum effect.

What is a sonata?

Together with the etude And the solo concert with orchestra is the Sonata the musical standard diet of musicians who earn their living as a soloist. The sonata (‘something that is played’) simply started centuries ago as the counterpart of the cantata (‘something that is sung’). Sonates could therefore be anything – from a trits short dance pieces for domestic entertainment to pea beings for the church – and for one instrument or ensembles, just that people felt like. About the time Haydn and Mozart, at the end of the 18th century, the term Sonate got the fixed meaning of a piece of music in which one or two instruments play the leading role.

Like many chamber music pieces and symphonies, Sonates usually consist of three or four parts that contrast in pace and atmosphere. They are for every instrument, although you will find most for piano solo and for piano with violin. Those were the most popular instruments of romance, when the genre became really big. In 19th-century composers, Sonates became longer, technically challenging and more emotionally more intense. The tension was tense tense and the Sonate developed into a compelling listening experience full of dramatic highs and lows.

How does that sound?

Sonates have changed considerably in style over the centuries: a sonate from Mozart sounds completely different from a sonata from Shostakovich two hundred years later. But the method with which composers ordered their ideas has been more or less the same for a long time (although there are of course many exceptions). Just as Rembrandt with light and dark sharp in his paintings, Sonates swing you back and forth between tension and relaxation with musical contrasts.

Those contrasts are between the individual parts, and also within the often relatively long opening part, in which two musical ideas (‘themes) compete with each other. You can regard that opening part as a film for your ears: a sultry romance, a drama with emotional punch, or a psychological thriller that you grabs when lurging. You can hear a main character in music; Not just a flat figure, but a character with depth, inner conflicts and rough edges. First, for example, we meet his heroic side: a sturdy melody in a resolute rhythm (the first theme). Then suddenly a different trait comes to the surface: the character shows soft, dreamy, perhaps even a bit melancholic.

And then the adventure really starts. The main character is thrown back and forth between those two sides of himself. The two musical themes are picked apart and put together again, collide, melt, lose each other and find each other again. Many plot twists later we return to the music from the beginning: the main character is at home, but is no longer the same. And then the beauty in the parts two, three and four still have to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YVBOWKUSJC

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