18 NOTTURNO The Berceuses, Notturno e Tarantella, Après un rêve are by their very nature associated with night. But where do you perceive that in the sonatas, Eva? Eva Zavaro: It’s a personal interpretation on my part. I hear a variety of nocturnal evocations: epic, dancelike, mysterious, introspective, almost philosophical. Szymanowski wrote his Violin Sonata at the age of twenty-two, with all the ardour of a youth steeped in mystical poetry, especially the poems of Tadeusz Miciński (1873-1918). His quest for transcendence is perceptible in this still very Romantic sonata. I imagine a sleepless night of passionate torment in the first movement. The second movement begins with the calm of a starry sky, a backdrop to which it returns after a lyrical, exalted culmination that really suggests a night of love. The third is a frenzied gallop in tarantella rhythm that foreshadows the diptych Notturno e Tarantella. By contrast, Fauré’s night is inward, more intimate. The deafness from which he was suffering by the time he composed his Second Sonata in 1916 seems to me to be paralleled by a sonic opacity, an ‘acoustic night’. Not everything is revealed the first time you play or hear the movement; it gives you the impression you’re groping your way through the darkness. This music makes you want to listen to it again, to grow accustomed to it. Only then does the miracle happen. What was disconcerting comes to seem natural. Darkness is followed by clarity, and we end up longing for these wanderings as we long for a treasure.
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