Beethoven wrote his first violin sonatas, a set of three (Op. 12) in 1797-98. Six more appeared by early 1803, making a fairly compressed time span for a medium in which Beethoven was to write just one more in 1812. All but the tenth were written before the composer was 32 years of age.
Although we refer to these ten works as “violin sonatas,” in the original scores the music is identified as being “for the fortepiano and a violin” (rather than the other way around). Such was usually the case with eighteenth-century works of this type, but it was hardly true with Beethoven, where we can see in even the first sonata the nearly equal partnership of the two instruments.
Beethoven was renowned in Vienna for his capabilities as a pianist, but he was also intimately familiar with the violin. He had taken lessons as a young man in Bonn, and later, at the age of 24, he had further study with Ignaz Schupannzigh in Vienna.
As such, Beethoven was in an ideal position to explore the expressive potentialities and technical challenges of the violin as well as of the piano, some of which may sound “easy” to the casual listener, but which even today demand superior musicians to do them justice.
Listen now to two giants in the music world: Violinist David Oistrakh and pianist Sviatislav Richter as they perform the violin sonata #3 by Beethoven:
