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HINDEMITH
SONATA FOR SOLO VIOLA
BACH
SUITE NO.6 IN D MAJOR
BARTOK
SONATA FOR SOLO VIOLIN (TRANS. HILLYER)
RAPHAEL HILLYER, VIOLA
SONATA FOR SOLO VIOLA, OPUS 11, NUMBER 5
“The most valuable thing we have inherited from Bach's music is a glimpse of the perfection that a human being might possibly attain, and a view of the path that leads to it.” With these words, quoted from an address given in 1950, Paul Hindemith gave eloquent expression to what has long since been recognized as an indisputable fact, namely, that J.S. Bach was less an inventor than a refiner and synthesizer of tendencies only hinted at by his predecessors. Bach's works for unaccompanied strings — or violin and cello “senza basso,” to use Bach's own terminology — offer an excellent example. While German and Austrian composers had already begun experimenting with this medium in the late 17th century, it was Bach who first revealed its unsuspected potential. His six sonatas and partitas for solo violin, composed around 1720 during his tenure as Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen, were designated “Libro Primo,” suggesting that the six suites for solo cello dating from the same period were the second installment of a systematic effort to prove that the members of the string family were perfectly capable of occupying the stage alone, without the support of the basso continuo. Although Bach's project did not encompass the middle voice of the string choir, violists have since redressed the omission through transcriptions of the cello suites for their instrument. Bach's approval of this practice can be inferred from the transmission of the fifth suite in two versions, one for cello, the other for lute.
Taking as his point of departure the standard succession of dances in the Baroque suite — duple-time allemande, triple-time courante and sarabande, and gigue in compound duple meter — Bach amplified this scheme by opening each of his cello suites with an imposing prelude and inserting a pair of lighter dances between the stately sarabande and the terminal gigue. While all the suites were thus conceived on a grand scale, the grandest suite of all is the sixth, in D major. A fitting capstone for the set as a whole, this work also poses a still unresolved question of performance practice: the identity of the instrument for which it was intended. Most of the principal manuscript copies of the suites (unfortunately, Bach's autograph does not survive) indicate that the final work in the series is to be rendered “a cinque cordes,” by an instrument tuned like a cello but with an additional string, tuned to E, on top.
Despite these uncertainties, there is no question that Bach exploited the register of the instrument he had in mind to the fullest, most obviously in the wide-ranging figuration of the Prélude, the acrobatic leaps of the Courante, and the treacherously high double stops of the Sarabande and Gigue. This expansion of registral space goes hand in hand with the breadth of conception of the suite's constituent movements. Again, this is most apparent in the Prélude — a full-fledged concertante design replete with ritornellos and contrasting episodes — but it is also evident in the florid arabesques of the Allemande, the elegant melodic line of the Sarabande, the long-held drone of the second Gavotte, and the exuberant sequential writing of the Gigue.
In the same speech in which Hindemith hailed Bach as a perfectionist, he commented further on his total immersion in the art and practice of music, noting his unrivalled achievements not only as a composer, but as a pedagogue, music director, and performer as well. For Hindemith, Bach was also a “primal musician,” a nurturing source for the generations of composers who followed in his footsteps. Hindemith himself aspired to be a total musician. A facile composer, accomplished conductor, and dedicated teacher, he was also a remarkably versatile instrumentalist. Although he launched his musical career as a professional violinist, and attained a high level of proficiency on the clarinet and piano, he was an especially gifted violist. Interestingly enough, it was in his early works for viola that he demonstrated how the music of the past in general, and that of Bach in particular, could point the way to the future.
Hindemith's Sonata for solo viola (Op. 11 no. 5), completed in 1919, and premiered by the composer a year later, provides a case in point. Writing about the new work in April 1920 to his publisher, Schott, Hindemith claimed to have made “an honest effort to produce a genuinely `intensive,' concentrated type of music.” Though at the time he was just beginning to be recognized as an enfant terrible of the New Music, Hindemith endeavored in the first of his four sonatas for solo viola to make explicit the connections between his burgeoning modernism and a compactness of utterance redolent of Bach. If the forceful opening chords of the sonata's first movement make an oblique reference to the style of Bach's works for unaccompanied strings, Hindemith spells out the connection in the finale, where the emphatic initial gesture of the first movement heads off a theme that is then elaborated in a rhapsodic series of variations. Cast “in the form and tempo of a passacaglia,” the last movement invokes the celebrated Ciaconna from Bach's D-minor Partita for unaccompanied violin both in its overall shape — rhythmic surges culminating in varied restatements of the main theme — and in matters of technical detail, including broken chordal patterns and “bariolage” effects in which stopped notes alternate rapidly with open strings. By way of contrast, the inner movements are lighter in mood. The spiky harmonies of the first movement give way to less pungent sonorities in the lyrical second movement, which, according to Hindemith's instructions, is to be played “with much warmth.” Likewise, the third movement introduces elements of humor and parody generally absent from the more serious music surrounding it. All in all, then, Hindemith's homage to Bach brings together innovation and tradition in equal measure.
In late November 1943, Yehudi Menuhin performed Bach's Sonata in C major for unaccompanied violin and Béla Bartók's Sonata no. 1 for violin and piano in a recital in New York. Bartók himself was present at this performance, and it would be fair to say that in fulfilling Menuhin's subsequent request for a new violin piece, he enacted a fusion of the musical languages — Bach's and his own — displayed separately at the New York concert. Completed in March 1944, and premiered by Menuhin the following November, Bartók's Sonata for solo violin would prove to be the final work that the ailing composer finished down to the last detail. (In his transcription for viola of this tour de force, Raphael Hillyer plays the original note-for-note, transposed down a fifth.)
Bartók proclaims his intentions with the sonorous chord that opens the first movement, an unmistakable allusion to the initial G-minor chord of Bach's Sonata no. 1 for unaccompanied violin. Furthermore, the title of Bartók's movement — Tempo di ciaconna — points unequivocally to another and even more decisive source: the finale of Bach's D-minor Partita for solo violin. Reminiscent of a ciaconna theme in character, metric profile, and chordal texture, Bartók's main idea eventually leads into a more lyrical, thinly textured melody in flowing triplets, which, together with the main theme, undergoes the developmental and recapitulatory processes characteristic of the classical sonata form. At the same time, the movement's high degree of chromaticism and many of its rhythmic gestures betray the influence of the Magyar peasant music that penetrated so much of Bartók's mature output. If this merger of older and newer styles recalls Hindemith's similar efforts, Bartók's integration of folk materials with an advanced contemporary idiom was very much his own.
The same observation holds true for the subsequent Fuga. A modern counterpart of the fugues in Bach's unaccompanied violin sonatas, it is based on a defiant, tonally restless subject that Bartók reshapes with increasing freedom as the movement proceeds. While the echoes of Bach recede in the following Melodia — a contemplative slow movement whose middle section features many of the effects of Bartók's delicate/trademark “night-music” style (mysterious trills, pizzicati, and tremolos) — they recur during the last movement. A brilliant vehicle for the virtuoso performer, it opens with an eerie evocation of the moto perpetuo finale of Bach's G-minor Sonata for unaccompanied violin. Two folkish tunes — one a vibrant dance in dotted rhythms and the other a wistful lament — fill out the roster of themes, fragments of which alternate kaleidoscopically in the coda. Once again, Bartók succeeded in synthesizing the most disparate elements into a majestic composition.
Raphael Hillyer's distinguished career as co-founder of the Juilliard String Quartet, soloist, teacher, and guiding light of the formation of the Tokyo String Quartet has made him one of our most respected musicians. Born in Ithaca, New York, Mr. Hillyer had his early violin studies in Berlin with Alexander Fiedemann, and in Leningrad with Serge Korgueff while also taking lessons in theory with the young Dmitri Shostakovich. He later attended the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia as a violin student of Edwin Bachmann, and made his first solo appearance in Budapest, Hungary. He graduated from Dartmouth College, earning a B.A. in mathematics, Latin and Greek, and did his graduate work at Harvard, earning his M.A. with Walter Piston and Hugo Leichtentritt in music and with George Birkhoff in mathematics.
Mr. Hillyer has appeared frequently in recital with such artists as Leonard Bernstein, Nadia Boulanger, and Ruth Laredo; played with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky and the NBC Symphony under Arturo Toscanini; and was a member of the Stradivarius and NBC String Quartets.
In 1946 William Schuman, President of the Juilliard School, invited Mr. Hillyer to co-found the Juilliard String Quartet, which went on to concertize throughout the world in thousands of concerts and broadcasts, becoming the quartet-in-residence at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and making numerous recordings for Columbia Masterworks and RCA Victor. Within his quartet schedule, Mr. Hillyer managed to make many solo appearances with orchestras in the United States and abroad, and in 1969 he resigned from the quartet to pursue an independent career. He has appeared in all the major halls in the United States, including Carnegie Hall, and has made solo tours in the Far East, Europe and South America. His guest appearances with chamber music groups include the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Amadeus, Alexander, Audubon, Borromeo, Cleveland, Colorado, Concord, Debussy, Franciscan, Muir, New World, Orlando, Panocha, Ridge, Rosamonde, Talich, Tokyo and Varsovia String Quartets. He has appeared with such orchestras as the Czech, Japan and Amsterdam Philharmonics and the American and Vancouver Symphony Orchestras.
Mr. Hillyer has taught at the Juilliard School, Yale University School of Music, the Tanglewood Music Center, the Aspen Music Festival, Meadowmount School, Longy School, the Banff Center for the Arts, Kneisel Hall, the Beijing Central Conservatory, the Conservatorium in Sydney, Australia, the Franz Liszt Hochschule in Weimar, the Pro Quartet in Paris, and in the conservatories of Nice, Lyon, Madrid, Bangkok, Seoul, Tokyo and San Paolo.
Mr. Hillyer was visiting professor in chamber music performance at Harvard University and is on the faculty of Boston University. He was chairman of the jury for the first and second Banff International Quartet Competitions, served as advisor to the U.S. Department of State and held a Distinguished Fulbright Professorship in Brazil. He has served as juror on other international competitions such as Munich, Budapest, Naumberg, Evian, Reims, Osaka, Florence and Montreal.
In addition to his many recordings with the Juilliard Quartet, Mr. Hillyer has recorded the viola concertos of Bartók and Hindemith for Nonesuch.
Sonata for Solo Viola (Op. 11 no. 5) (1919)
1 I. Lebhaft, aber nicht geeilt [3:23]
2 II. Mässig schnell, mit viel Wärme vortragen [4:04]
3 III. Scherzo — Schnell[3:14]
4 IV. In Form und Zeitmass einer Passacaglia — Das Thema sehr gehalten [9:43]
Recorded from radio broadcast performance, Radio Warsaw, 1980
Suite No. 6 in D Major (BWV1012, circa 1720)
9 V. Gavotte I; VI. Gavotte II [3:45]
Recorded in recital, 1976 in Marquand Chapel, Yale University
Sonata for Solo Violin (1944)
11 I. Tempo di ciaconna [10:42]
12 II. Fuga — Risoluto, non troppo vivo [5:48]
13 III. Melodia — Adagio [7:24]
Recorded, 1989 in Robert Schumann Hall, Düsseldorf
Engineer:Mark Donahue, Sound Mirror, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts
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