Louis Spohr (1784–1859) was one of the most significant German composers of the first half of the nineteenth century. Widely recognized today as an important violinist, pedagogue and composer of string chamber music, Spohr was also considered a great composer of progressive symphonies and tone poems, operas and oratorios. He was viewed by many musicians of his day as the heir to Beethoven, and his music served as a model for composers from Carl Maria von Weber to Johannes Brahms.Footnote ¹

Francesco Parrino’s and Michele Fedrigotti’s two-disc recording Louis Spohr: Reisesonate presents for the first time a large selection of Spohr’s works for violin and piano duo, an unusual combination in Spohr’s output, and one that demonstrates an aspect of Spohr’s compositional personality that is rarely discussed in scholarship: his propensity for domestic performance and accessible, recreational music-making. A large proportion of his works was designed with the domestic amateur in mind, and his own everyday life was filled with recreational music-making in addition to his professional engagements.Footnote ² The four works for violin and piano duo on this recording were composed for performance with the composer’s second wife Marianne Pfeiffer.Footnote ³ As Keith Warsop suggests in his liner notes, the duos reflect a collaborative musical relationship; Marianne played new piano works for Spohr, inspiring new compositional activity, and they tried out his own works together as he composed them. Thus, the style here is more intimate and relaxed than in his more obviously public works.

The album begins with the world premiere recording of Spohr’s first Duo Concertant for Violin and Piano (or Violin Sonata), op. 95, composed in March 1836. The four-movement piece follows what we might describe as a typical sonata-cycle design. It begins with a sonata-form first movement that bears several of Spohr’s compositional fingerprints: the whole is tuneful and light, it emphasizes repetition of melodies, and it is filled with bubbling passagework in modulatory transition sections between themes. The development is short, but the recapitulation contains further development of the thematic material and some unexpected harmonic variety in the recomposed transition area. None of the passagework in either this movement or the finale (a set of variations) is especially flashy, and Spohr avoids long periods dominated by one instrument. The passing-off of melodies and motives from one instrument to the other is graceful and collegial. One has the sense of listening in on a polite and cozy conversation rather than a heated debate. The second-movement Adagio has an effective stately demeanour; it opens with a prelude-like section that sets a grave tone in the minor key. The piano gets several moments to shine in this movement, and the 1849 Broadwood piano used in the recording demonstrates a welcome timbral variety. Spohr explores the outer extremes of the instrument’s range with rumbling bass accompaniments in the left hand and tinkling scalar passages in the right hand. Parrino’s and Fedrigotti’s performance carries the gravitas of the Adagio into the Scherzo; though the movement is marked ‘Vivace’ in the published parts, their performance is a bit slow, giving the work a Biedermeier earnestness that Spohr probably didn’t intend. I would have enjoyed a stronger contrast with a light, lively pace as indicated by the composer. Nonetheless, the performance as a whole is thoughtful and sympathetic to Spohr’s aims.

The titular work, the ‘Reisesonate’ in F major op. 96 has the familiarity and friendliness of a travel diary, as it musically evokes a vacation the family took in 1836.Footnote ⁴ Subtitled, ‘Reminiscences of a journey in Dresden and through Saxon Switzerland’, the work calls to mind Spohr’s descriptive orchestral works, such as his Historical Symphony (op. 116), Weihe der Töne (The Power of Sound, op. 86), and Errinerung an Marienbad (Reminiscences of Marienbad, op. 89). Each movement of the sonata bears a word or phrase to indicate which part of the journey it reflects, and Spohr described the intent in some detail in his autobiography. The entire passage is helpfully reproduced (from the 1865 English version) in the CD’s liner notes.

This sonata is the most overtly ‘public’ piece recorded here, with more difficult and impressive passagework for both instruments and a balanced, well-crafted variety of styles and textures throughout. Spohr clearly understood that this quasi-programmatic work would receive multiple performances upon its publication, and that these would include public or semi-public presentations. The performance in this recording is superb. The special effects mentioned by Spohr in his programme – the inclusion of two different types of horn call, and the evocation of ‘Bohemian’ musical styles in the finale – come off very well. Both players get ample opportunities to demonstrate technical brilliance and interpretive sensitivity, as in the Adagio, where a lovely homophonic tune is played by the violin to a restrained accompaniment before the piano presents a moving variation on it with richer harmonies and textures.

Disc 2 of the set contains the last of Spohr’s Duos op. 112 and a set of six ‘elegiac and humorous’ duets that the composer also described as Lieder ohne Worte (songs without words) in emulation of Mendelssohn. This set of duets is the first of Spohr’s three published collections for violin and piano; opp. 135 and 145 are tellingly labelled ‘Salonstücke’, clarifying their audience as amateur players or players entertaining listeners in casual settings. The op. 122 duets, however, are not the light trifles that many readers will associate with the salon. The shortest is four minutes long, and the ‘Finale’ that closes the set clocks in at seven and a half minutes. Composed in song-like sectional forms, most of them contain a contrasting section of high drama conveyed through thick-textured accompaniments and double stops in the violin. The piano’s role in these works is primarily as accompanist to the violin, whose line carries the main melodic material throughout.

The Duo Concertant op. 112 remains the most ‘salon-like’ of the works included here. The recording emphasizes the intimate nature of the intended venue – noisy breaths and movement have been captured and not edited out, and the musical interpretation takes the accessible style a bit too far. As in the Scherzo of op. 95, the composer has marked a movement ‘Vivace’, but the performers have opted for a tamer tempo that gives the simple, unadorned violin lines a nearly blasé quality. The post-Classical ‘brilliant’ style of the piano writing gets a chance to shine, but at the expense of a vibrant dialogue between the parts. Likewise, the fourth-movement rondo lacks the expected fire of a grand finale. Fortunately, the minor-mode Scherzo in this work gets a vivacious reading that demonstrates how engaging and satisfying Spohr’s music can be in the right light.

That a ‘right light’ is needed for works like these bears further discussion. Spohr and his contemporaries (Kuhlau, Onslow, Reissiger, Veit and others whose works were wildly popular in the nineteenth century) created a style that lends itself to enthusiastic performances by concentrated, able players accustomed to playing chamber music by the Classical masters as they were known at the time – Haydn, Mozart, Clementi, Cramer, Dussek, Onslow and early Beethoven – but not much beyond the style of Beethoven’s String Quartets op. 59. Spohr composed well and rigorously for those players, and he did so in a style that was quite different from that of his more public works. Parrino’s and Fedrigotti’s performance on this album captures some of the mixture of styles Spohr employed. At times nearly virtuosic and concert-appropriate, and at others more intimate, the four pieces presented here show a composer addressing a variety of audiences, including casual listeners and amateur players. There’s something for everyone here, and I expect, now that we can sample works that were hitherto inaccessible to modern listeners, that more players will delve into the wealth of opportunities Spohr created for collegial, congenial music making in the home and the concert hall.