LDV67

20 BRAHMS • THE VIOLIN SONATAS Brahms renewed this miraculous rapport between the two instruments in the Sonata op.100, composed during the summer of 1886 on the shores of Lake Thun; the work is in A major, an archetypally luminous key, already used in the Piano Quartet op.26. The same year saw the birth of the Cello Sonata no.2 in F major op.99, whose ‘vitalist’ and happy dimension may be compared with the violin sonata; the Five Lieder op.105 also attest to the remarkable fertility of that summer, and motifs from three of them are heard in the course of the sonata. The work bears the nickname of ‘Thuner-Sonate’ in German, thanks to Brahms’s friend the writer Josef Viktor Widmann, who wrote a poem of that title – a ballad of the kind Brahms enjoyed – reflecting the composer’s blissful state during this period: ‘I . . . slept, and dreamt, on that bright summer day, / So delightfully that I can hardly relate it.’ The pastoral mood of the First Sonata recurs at the beginning of the Allegro amabile: a tranquil, almost playful phrase, borrowed from one of the op.105 songs (and also, coincidentally, from a famous motif in Wagner’s Meistersinger ), is first stated on the piano, then taken up by the violin. The second theme, gently nostalgic, gradually grows more animated, until the appearance of the third theme, more rhythmic and assertive, which henceforth guides the discourse; here one admires once more the genuine fusion between the two instruments. A remarkable extended coda, so dreamy as almost to be a lullaby, leads the movement towards an energetic conclusion.