»Six Sonates« for violin and piano, score and violin part, edited from the
text of the Carl Maria von Weber Complete Edition by Claudia Theis.
Practical guidance on performance by Volker Worlitzsch.
In
the years 1807 to 1810 Carl Maria von Weber worked as private secretary
to Duke Louis, younger brother of the king of Württemberg, in Stuttgart
and Ludwigsburg. This employment ended at the beginning of 1810 in a
disaster, for Weber involved in the duke's financial manipulations and
burdened with heavy debt from his own sumptuous lifestyle was
imprisoned and, together with his father, ultimately expelled from the
country. On 27 February they turned up in Mannheim, Weber with the duty
of paying down his enormous mountain of debt ahead of him. He set about
doing this with earnings from his own concerts and from the sales of his
compositions to publishers. Weber had already been in contact with the
publisher Johann Anton André since 1801, but became personally
acquainted with him only during a trip with Abbé Vogler to Frankfurt at
the end of June 1810. After several meetings they agreed on a number of
works, amongst them the 1st piano concerto and the 1st symphony, but
also mentioned were the 6 sonatas whose composition Weber began in
September, they thereby have to be deemed as commissioned work,
undertaken only after consultation with the publisher. The 6 sonatas
were then composed in quick succession between the end of September and
the middle of October, though not without effort, as the composer
himself reported in letters to his friends, and probably also under the
influence of Vogler with whom he had moved in, meantime, in Darmstadt.
On 17 October 1810 the diary announced »?nished my 6 sonatas«, and as
early as a day later Weber sent the sonatas together with the piano
concerto and the rondo WeV E.7 to André in Offenbach. In the covering
letter to the music shipment Weber referred to the fact that he had
interchanged the sequence of the last two sonatas in the 2nd volume in
order to attain a more brilliant close, in the opening movement of what
was originally his last sonata. Weber wrote variations on a theme from
the Mechthilde aria (no. 10) of his opera Silvana (to which he reverted
later in his variations Op. 35 for clarinet and piano).
To Weber's
great exasperation, however, André rejected the sonatas on the basis
that they were too good and too challenging, whereupon Weber then
offered them to Simrock in Bonn on 3 November. The latter, though, took
his time in answering. Only at the end of December did Weber send the
sonatas to the publisher where they seem to have first turned up after
considerable delay, as we learn from Weber's letter to the publisher on
23 April 1811 from Munich, in which he renews his request for the
despatch of the honorarium. The two instalments of the sonatas probably
then appeared in October 1811, though the composer was evidently not
informed about it, because on 25 February 1812 he wrote to Simrock: »l
have not heard anything from you in some time. I have seen my sonatas
and lieder elsewhere, but you had still not been so good as to let me
have a couple of exemplars of them.« Weber himself does not seem to have
played his sonatas in private or public contexts: perhaps André's
criticism had annoyed him too much. Nevertheless, they can be considered
as typical representatives of a sophisticated literature originating at
this time for private middle-class music practice.
Publisher: Schott Music VLB196.
Content:
- Sonata no. 1 F major
- Sonata no. 2 G major
- Sonata no. 3 d minor