In 1886 Brahms spent the first of three idyllic summers in the village of Hofstetten in the Swiss mountains where the Aare flows into Lake Thun. He wrote to his publisher Simrock of the wonderful view from his lodging—on one hand the ancient town and castle and on the other the amazing array of mountains of the Bernese Oberland. These inspiring surroundings contributed to his immense productivity that summer: he composed his F major Cello Sonata, his C minor Piano Trio, two of his most beloved songs (“Immer leiser” and “Wie Melodien zieht es mir”), his A major Violin Sonata, and all but the finishing touches of the present D minor Sonata.

Unlike that summer’s other three chamber works, which Simrock published the following year, the D minor Sonata remained in manuscript until Brahms completed it during his third Hofstetten summer. In October 1888 he sent the Sonata and over twenty new vocal works to his good friend Elisabet von Herzogenberg, who wrote back in ecstatic terms about the Sonata. To Clara Schumann, another of his closest circle, he wrote that he then felt confident enough to have the work sent on to her—thus braving Clara’s disapproval at not receiving it first—saying she might try it out with Naret Koning and with celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim, their longtime mutual friend. With typical self-doubt he added that if she did not like it, not to bother trying it with Joachim, but send it back. Clara often had rheumatic pains at the time, so she first let her daughter Elise play it through with Koning, pronouncing it “magnificent” and “ravishing” in her diary.

Clara played the work privately with Koning in Frankfurt on December 8, 1888, and Brahms tried it out himself at the home of his physician friend Theodor Billroth in Vienna four days later. The composer then gave the first public performance with violinist Jenö Hubay on December 21 in Budapest, where he had gone to conduct his Fourth Symphony. After playing the Sonata again with Hugo Heermann in Frankfurt on January 11, 1889, Brahms performed the work with Joachim in Vienna on February 13. When the Sonata appeared in print that spring, Brahms dedicated it to conductor Hans von Bülow, champion of Brahms’s orchestral works. Thirty-five years earlier Bülow had been the first person, aside from Brahms himself, to perform one of the composer’s works publicly (his Opus 1 Piano Sonata).

The D minor Violin Sonata, Brahms’s third and last, shows remarkable scope but also great concision. He cast the work in four movements rather than the three of his G major and A major Sonatas, but so concentrated are his methods that it lasts just over twenty minutes, making it shorter than the G major and the shortest of his four-movement chamber works, except, perhaps, for the C minor Trio. The sense of breadth arises out of his invoking such a wide dramatic range, from intimacy to brilliance.

The first movement opens sotto voce (in a hushed voice) with the violin singing high above a restless accompaniment. His quiet, extended theme provides a great foil for the passionate eruption that ensues before the gentle second theme. But the movement’s most striking feature is its development section, which takes place over an insistent pulsing low note in the piano—his longest pedal point since the celebrated one in the third movement fugue of his Requiem. This harmonic anchoring of what would traditionally be a harmonically unstable section led to his ingenious transfer of that adventurousness into the recapitulation.

The gorgeous slow movement owes its economy to one of Brahms’s simplest forms—basically a melody and its elaborated restatement. Yet the spacious, lyrical line and the luxurious harmonic flow leave no impression of terseness. Brahms sweetens the intensity of each section’s peak with the violin playing parallel thirds, a sonority he loved, with the added phrase of descending thirds in the second section casting a glow that subsides like a musical sunset.

The scherzo begins with a quintessentially Brahmsian combination of playfulness and mystery. An impassioned outburst midway through the movement suggests a contrasting trio, which instead turns out to develop ideas from the first section. The return of the playful opening contains some charming variants and a “puff-of smoke” ending.

Brahms’s finale is the most impassioned and vehement movement of any of his violin sonatas, despite his contrasting of the turbulent main theme with a more subdued chorale-like idea begun by the piano alone. The movement’s dramatic qualities have led some to speculate that it may have roots in one of the destroyed sonatas of his youth, written around the time his friendship with Joachim began. The most striking structural feature is the entrance of what seems to be a restatement of the dramatic opening in the home key but which soon turns into development, boasting some of Brahms’s most persistent syncopation. When the recapitulation proper begins, Brahms cleverly picks up just where that earlier restatement left off. His fiery coda demands virtuosity and all-out sound from both players.

—©Jane Vial Jaffe