© Luca Concas
Tribute to Beethoven 250 years after his birth
Francesco Manara violin
Cesare Pezzi piano
Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata no. 1 in D major, Op. 12 no. 1
Sonata no. 6 in A major, Op. 30 no. 1
Sonata no. 9 in A major, Op. 47 commonly known as “Kreutzer Sonata”
If the piano was Beethoven’s totem instrument, the strings undoubtedly contributed to the apprenticeship of the composer, who wrote ten violin sonatas, nine of which between 1797 and 1803. If the first, dedicated to Antonio Salieri, already showed a nearly equal partnership of the violin and piano, no. 6 saw the light in Heiligenstadt in 1802, at the same time as the “testament”, a letter to his brothers where he poured his despair over the illness that dominated his life. The ninth sonata, instead, disproportionately criticised as “artistic terrorism”, proved to be one of the biggest misunderstandings in musical history, since the dedicatee himself, Rodolphe Kreutzer, a great virtuoso of the day, failed to understand and appreciate it as a masterpiece, and never played it.
