Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major: An Homage to American Jazz

With its sultry, bluesy second movement, Maurice Ravel’s Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano in G Major, M. 77 is an homage to American jazz.

It was Ravel’s final chamber work. He completed it in 1927, shortly before the trip to America where he met George Gershwin. By the early 1920s, the jazzy strains of Harlem, New Orleans, and W.C. Handy’s St Louis blues had found their way into Parisian cafés. With these exotic sounds in his ear, Ravel had begun to sketch the Sonata in 1923. He wrote the work for French violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange. By the time it was completed, arthritis had forced her to retire from the stage. The premiere was given by Romanian violinist Enescu, with Ravel and the piano.

In a 1928 Musical Digest essay, Ravel implored Americans to Take Jazz Seriously! He wrote,

Personally I find jazz most interesting: the rhythms, the way the melodies are handled, the melodies themselves. I have heard some of George Gershwin’s works and I find them intriguing…Abroad we take jazz seriously. It is influencing our work. The Blues in my sonata, par example, is stylized jazz, more French than American in character perhaps, but nevertheless influenced strongly by your so-called ‘popular music.’

A master of tonal color, Ravel considered the violin and piano “essentially incompatible instruments, which not only do not sink their differences, but accentuate incompatibility to an even greater degree.” Orrin Howard notes that in the Sonata, “the two instruments are separate but equal, reacting to each other dispassionately, yet each maintaining its distinct identity.”

The first movement (Allegretto) is dreamy and continuously flowing, with a sense of soft pastel fairytale colors. Poised precariously on the home key of G major, the music is fluid in terms of harmony and meter. It gives us the sense of floating in midair rather than settling into a groove. Seconds into the movement, a spirited, mischievous intruding voice enters in the “wrong key” in the pianist’s left hand. This motif and others are tossed back and forth between the two instruments. The movement builds to a climax with a  passage of mysterious, intensifying tremolo in the violin. It gives way to a warm, expansive melody. The final bars bring a sudden, magical resolution in G major.

The opening of the second movement (Blues) is saturated with the summertime humidity and lethargy of the rural Louisiana delta. In a striking example of bitonality, the violin’s pizzicati begins in one key (G), while the piano enters rudely, establishing A-flat. The flatted thirds and sevenths of the soulful blues scale meet jazzy portamento and raspy pizzicati. The final bars fade away into blissful fatigue with sultry musical dialogue.

The final movement (Perpetuum Mobile) begins with a comically tentative return of the spirited motif from the first movement. Mischeviously, the motif develops into a wild, unstoppable machine. With echoes of the earlier movements, the music is propelled forward into wild, sometimes bluesy, adventures.

Recorded in November of 2021, this performance features violinist Augustin Hadelich and pianist Orion Weiss:

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