Louis Vierne ‒ Cello Sonata, Op.27

Louis Vierne (1870 - 1937), Cello Sonata, Op.27 (1910-1911)

Performed by Peter Bruns (cello) and Annegret Kuttner (piano)

00:00 - No. 1 Poco lento - Allegro moderato
08:35 - No. 2 Molto largamente
17:37 - No. 3 Risoluto - allegro molto

Despite his contributions to many genres, including a symphony, songs, chamber music and several piano cycles, in the music world Louis Vierne is mainly famous as one of the eminent representatives of the French organ school, and in this field he was praised as a performer and a composer alike. Vierne received his initial training at the Institute of the Blind in Paris. Later, his teachers included César Franck and Charles-Marie Widor, whose specific organ style he continued in a consistent tradition.

It was not long before Louis Vierne became Widor’s assistant at St. Sulpice and at the conservatory, while learning in free private lessons all that transcended the simple act of organ playing: composition, chamber music, music history – in short, he learned everything that distinguishes a mere virtuoso from a discerning artist and did so with great speed and productive readiness and willingness. Here it should also be said that he learned all of the above despite a physical handicap. Although his congenital gray cataract had been successfully operated during his childhood, his vision remained severely limited his whole life long, and for some years (1915 to 1920) he again had to fear that he might become blind when it was diagnosed that he had glaucoma. It was only with great material sacrifices that he could be treated in Switzerland.

Astonishingly, the musician repeatedly was able to sublimate all these and countless other severe strokes of fate – divorce, the war deaths of his brother and of a son, and thwarted career opportunities. He was also able to compensate for his constant exposure to a field of tension produced by his claims to the title of “Widor, Jr.” If one does not dare to approach the really influential mind, then, as is well known, one takes things out on those in his immediate orbit. And this is exactly what Gabriel Fauré, for one, ended up doing. He did not like Widor’s gossiper’s gift for the gab and later saw to it that Vierne did not take over the organ class of the recently deceased Alexandre Guilmant in 1891, even though he had been his assistant for many years.

It was precisely at this time, when a whole barrage of misfortunes was raining down on Louis Vierne, precisely in the annus terribilis of 1911 with all its losses and frustrations, that he wrote his Sonata for Violoncello and Piano op. 27, and it would certainly be easy to read all the difficulties of those days into and out of the music. As in his magnificent third Organ Symphony op. 28, however, here too the composer proves to be more inclined to conquer than to despair. Strong self-control, tightly held formal reins, magnificent melodic ideas (with the secondary theme of the sonata-form Allegro moderato movement being just as French as it could possibly be!), and at the most an echo of the contemporaneous tragedy in the harsh Molto largamente(with this exercising not the slightest bit of lachrymose influence even on the slow introduction) – this discipline, never overly insistent or ostentatious, is what lends the remarkable score its classical balance.