Philipp Scharwenka: Sonatas Nos. 1 & 2 for Violin & Piano

Philipp Scharwenka occupies a revealing place within the musical culture of late nineteenth-century Berlin. A Polish-German composer and teacher, he belonged to a generation for whom composition, pedagogy and public concert life formed a single professional field. His early training at the secondary school in Posen was followed, after his family’s move to Berlin in 1865, by study with Richard Wüerst and Heinrich Dorn at Kullak’s Neue Akademie der Tonkunst. By 1868 he had begun the long teaching career that shaped his public identity. From the middle of the 1870s his orchestral works began to reach performance. When his brother, Xaver Scharwenka, founded the Scharwenka Conservatory in Berlin in 1881, Philipp joined the staff as a teacher of theory and composition; in 1891 he became co-director with Hugo Goldschmidt during Xaver’s temporary move to the United States. The outline is that of a musician rooted in institutions and craft. That institutional life matters to these two violin sonatas. Scharwenka’s catalogue, extending to 123 opus numbers, includes stage and choral works, songs, piano music, orchestral scores and a substantial body of chamber music. The later opus numbers reveal a concentration on instrumental dialogue, with a Suite for violin and piano op. 99, a Piano Trio op. 100, a Viola Sonata op. 106, the Sonata for Violin and Piano in B Minor No. 1 op. 110, a further Piano Trio op. 112, the Sonata for Violin and Piano in E Minor No. 2 op. 114 and a Cello Sonata op. 116. This succession places the two violin sonatas within a mature chamber sequence, where Scharwenka returned repeatedly to equal partnership among instruments. The published work-list gives no date for op. 110 and assigns op. 114 to 1904, so the pair can be heard as products of the period in which his experience as a composer-teacher had fully settled.

The title The Rediscovered Romantic suits Scharwenka because his music asks for recovery through close listening, through the patient re-opening of a repertoire shaped by conservatory culture and narrowed by twentieth-century taste. His career was historically overshadowed by the more forceful public profile of his brother, yet Philipp’s output shows a steady command of large and small forms. Earlier works such as the Album polonais and the Polnische Tanzweisen show an attachment to national colour and dance character; the two violin sonatas belong to the abstract chamber tradition cultivated in German-speaking musical centres. Their key scheme, B Minor followed by E Minor, gives the pair a shared minor-mode gravity. Their three-movement designs suggest compression, balance and directness. Each sonata presents a fast first movement, a central slow movement and a finale, with the second sonata making that concluding function explicit in its title. In this repertory the violin and piano medium carries a precise historical meaning. The nineteenth-century sonata for these instruments had moved decisively towards a dual discourse in which thematic argument, harmonic momentum and timbral contrast are distributed between two players. Scharwenka’s professional world makes that balance especially plausible. As a teacher of theory and composition he inhabited the disciplines of motivic working, tonal architecture and formal proportion. The medium itself allows biography and craft to meet with unusual clarity.

The Sonata for Violin and Piano in B Minor No. 1 op. 110 opens with Allegro, a marking of purposeful breadth. B Minor gives the movement a colour associated in nineteenth-century chamber writing with density, tension and inward concentration. A first movement under this heading belongs naturally to the sonata-allegro sphere, with the expectation of contrasted thematic areas, tonal departure and return, and intensification in the central span. Scharwenka’s late position in the Romantic tradition suggests an idiom in which classical outlines remain legible while harmonic detail, accompanimental figuration and phrase expansion create the expressive surface. The piano can be understood as a structural agent, capable of laying out harmonic fields and rhythmic pressure; the violin supplies registral profile, articulation and thematic projection. The slow movement, Largamente followed by Andante con moto, is the most suggestive title in the first sonata. The opening word implies amplitude, weight and a broadened sense of pulse; the continuation towards Andante con moto introduces motion within that breadth. The design points to a movement that grows out of a spacious initial utterance into a more flowing discourse. Such a plan suits Scharwenka’s mature chamber manner, where lyricism can be organised through changes of density and pacing. The central position of this movement deepens the expressive world opened by B Minor and prepares the finale by transforming weight into continuity. The final Allegretto con moto then avoids grandiose closure through moderation and mobility. Its alert character can bring release through rhythmic pliancy, thematic recall or contrapuntal interplay, and its proximity to the character-piece tradition links the conclusion with Scharwenka’s wider piano idiom.

The Sonata for Violin and Piano in E Minor No. 2 op. 114 stands close to op. 110 in scoring and general design, yet its movement headings define a distinct dramatic path. The first movement, Allegro moderato, begins from restraint. The tempo qualification frames energy within proportion. E Minor shares the sombre resonance of the first sonata’s B Minor while opening a different tonal space, one step around the circle of fifths. A first movement so marked encourages breadth of paragraph, controlled thematic unfolding and an avoidance of rhetorical haste. For a composer formed in Berlin’s academic institutions, moderation could be an expressive principle, allowing chromatic inflection and motivic development to carry the drama. The second movement, Andante tranquillo, gives the sonata its lyrical centre. The word tranquillo indicates calm as a composed state, achieved through texture, tempo and harmonic repose. In a late Romantic chamber work this tranquillity depends upon the handling of suspension, register and phrase rhythm, upon the way the piano can colour harmony while the violin shapes an arc across it, and upon the distribution of cadences so that repose becomes audible as a destination. Placed after an Allegro moderato, the movement offers stillness held within discipline. Its title suggests a form of inward eloquence, clear in surface and carefully weighted beneath. Scharwenka’s experience as a pedagogue is again relevant because such music depends on control of proportion as much as on melodic invention. The closing movement is named Finale. Allegro animato, and the explicit title gives the end of the cycle a more public profile. Animato points to enlivened rhythm, quicker exchanges and a sharpened sense of direction. The finale of the second sonata therefore seems conceived as the most active movement in op. 114, the place where accumulated restraint turns into kinetic argument. Within the violin and piano sonata tradition, this character often brings rondo-like recurrence, developmental episodes or compact sonata-rondo procedures. The documented heading alone cannot determine the exact form, yet it securely establishes the movement’s function as culmination. The final energy arises from animation and coherence, qualities suited to a composer whose art was grounded in learned fluency.

Taken together, the two sonatas form a concise portrait of Scharwenka’s late chamber imagination. Their minor keys give continuity. Their tempo sequence reveals a preference for seriousness moderated by proportion: Allegro, breadth and motion, then Allegretto con moto in the first sonata; moderated allegro, tranquillity and animation in the second. The pairing also shows how Scharwenka could move from inward pressure to poised closure, and from controlled opening to a more animated public ending. The language implied by the titles is Romantic in harmonic climate and classical in formal conscience. The contemporary critical record preserved around Scharwenka strengthens this picture. His chamber music attracted specialist attention in H. Wetzel’s study Philipp Scharwenkas Kammermusik in the periodical Die Musik in 1910-11, while his piano music was discussed by the same writer shortly afterwards. Hermann Kretzschmar’s concert guide also placed his larger works within the repertorial map of the time. These references show that Scharwenka’s music circulated within serious musical discussion during his lifetime. The violin sonatas arrive today with the double force of recovery and reassessment. They invite the listener to hear a Berlin composer whose professional life was spent between classroom, publishing house and concert room, and whose chamber music distils that world into concentrated dialogue. Scharwenka’s Romanticism is measured, architecturally aware and rooted in the culture that produced it. The two sonatas renew inherited forms through tonal character, pacing and the disciplined interplay of two equal instruments.