Violin Sonata No. 3 (Enescu)

The Sonata No. 3 in A minor "dans le caractère populaire roumain" (in Romanian Folk Style), for violin and piano, Op. 25, is a chamber-music composition written in 1926 by the Romanian composer George Enescu. The score, published in 1933, is dedicated to the memory of the violinist Franz Kneisel. It is one of the composer's most popular and at the same time most critically respected works.

The Third Violin Sonata was written in a span of about four months in 1926 at a time when Enescu was also occupied with the late stages of work on the opera Œdipe. The sonata was first performed in Oradea, in January 1927 by the composer and the pianist Nicolae Caravia, who repeated it shortly afterward in Bucharest. Enescu and Caravia also gave the Paris premiere in March 1927, in the Salle Gaveau. A particularly notable early performance took place in Paris in June 1930, when the composer was partnered by Alfred Cortot. Since both of these artists were at the height of their careers at that time, it is a shame they did not make a recording. However, Enescu's pupil Yehudi Menuhin did make a recording in 1936 with his sister Hephzibah Menuhin on piano, and the composer himself recorded the work twice as a violinist, in 1943 with Dinu Lipatti and again a few years later with Céliny Chaillez-Richez. A remarkable performance took place in May 1946 with Yehudi Menuhin playing the violin part, accompanied on the piano by the composer (Bentoiu 2010, 287, 305).

The sonata is divided into three movements:

Without ever quoting actual folk tunes, the material possesses the authenticity of a sort of "super folklore". The violin is cast in the role of a gypsy fiddle, and the writing for the piano imitates the cimbalom and kobza (Bentoiu 2010, 286).

The first movement is in a loose sonata-allegro form, beginning with a suave and nostalgic first thematic group presented in continuous and supple lines in the piano and more hesitantly in the violin. When this material returns in the recapitulation it will be transformed into a kind of "horă bătrînească" (old men’s dance). The second thematic group brings a contrasting atmosphere of sobriety and intensified differentiation of colour, a characteristic that will return for further development in the second movement (Hoffman and Marbe 1971, 549–50). The development is confined almost entirely to material from the first thematic group, but after the recapitulation there is an extended coda that brings together motivic fragments from both groups. The transformation of the material from the lyrical, songlike style of the exposition and development into the persistent dance rhythms of the recapitulation bestows upon the movement the overall impression of a two-part rhapsody in the traditional lassú–friss pattern (Bentoiu 2010, 291).

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