You Might Have Ever Heard This

It is customary to begin pieces like this one with a notice of the stringent limitations of the solo repertoire for the cellist. Having met that requirement, I shall venture to say that there's a lot more good stuff out there than you are likely to know about (unless you are a cellist or a dedicated student of the Schwann catalog). For example, I was just now totally charmed by an MHS collection called Virtuoso Cello Music from the Early Romantic Era, which offers works by such obscurities as Franchomme, Dotzauer, Servais, and Robert Lindley.

The two sonatas on the present record are not quite that obscure, but I imagine that many a garden-variety music lover lives out his days without ever having heard of them. Oddly, both sonatas were completed in the same year (1883), though one was the work of a mature creator, the other of a fairly prodigious teenager.

The latter was the 18-year-old Richard Strauss. Parallels have been drawn between Strauss and Mozart, some of them by Strauss himself. If his juvenilia were hardly of Mozartean quality and he had no career as a child-genius performer, he got off to a respectably early start as a composer.

Strauss came to music naturally, being the son of Franz Josef Strauss, virtuoso horn player, violist, professor of music, conductor, and occasional composer. Young Richard was studying piano and violin by the age of five, and two years later produced his initial compositions, a Weihnachtslied (Christmas carol) and polka. At 12 he wrote an orchestral Festmarsch. Three years later it was published as op. 1 by the firm of Breitkopf and Hartel -- though perhaps less on its merit than because of the money ponied up by the composer's admiring uncle, a well-heeled brewer.

The notes for this record tell us that Richard Strauss began his sonata when he was 15, taking it up again three years later, though other sources mention only 1883 as the date of composition. In these years he was expectably trying out his wings, dabbling in various styles and in genres (chamber music, keyboard) that he would not return seriously to in the final 60-odd years of his life. After five early piano sonatas, he published a sonata apiece for that instrument alone and in company with the violin and the cello.

The present example contains some dutiful padding and is said to reflect Strauss' then-current worship of Brahms. For all that, it is remarkably fresh and self-confident, and I hear in it early evidences of the ecstatic style of the mature composer. It evidently made something of a hit when first introduced to the public, and Strauss was tickled pink when Brahms' friend Joachim said some nice things about it.

Did you know that Edvard Grieg had a brother named John? No, not Johan or Johann, but plain old J-o-h-n. I don't know whether the name was pronounced Jon or Yone, but I suspect he received it because his grandfather, a Scot named Alexander Greig (note spelling), had English as his first language (but why not Ian?) Anyhow, John Grieg played cello, and apparently inspired Grieg's sonata, which was dedicated to him.

Edvard was 40 when he produced it. Like Strauss he wrote few sonatas. Of the others, only the third for violin and piano was later, the other two and the single example for solo piano having been completed when he was in his early 20s.

Because Grieg was a miniaturist, one might tend to think chamber music would attract him. But the sonata is, in fact, a large and complex form and seems to have been alien to his nature. Here he has some charming and echt-Griegian ideas, but (particularly in the finale) he seems not to know when to quit.