Leoš Janáček: Sonata for violin and piano, JW VII/7
Igor Stravinsky: Divertimento for violin and piano
Leoš Janáček: 1 October 1905 (From the street on 1 October 1905), JW VIII/19
Sergei Prokofiev: Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in D Major, Op. 94a
Janáček's Sonata for violin and piano was written in close proximity to his Fairy Tale. The composer worked on it in 1914-15 under the impression of the political situation at the time, which is evidenced by the following memory: I wrote the violin sonata at the beginning of the war, in 1914, when we were already waiting for the Russians in Moravia. The Ballad was the first and apparently originally a separate composition, and it was only in 1915 that other movements were added. The composer only revised it in 1920. The first performance took place in Brno on April 24, 1922 at an evening of Moravian musical novelties organized by the Club of Young Moravian Composers.
In 1928, Stravinsky composed the ballet The Fairy's Kiss based on the fairy tale by H. Ch. Andersen. The ballet was created as a tribute to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky on the 35th anniversary of his death. Based on melodies from some of Tchaikovsky's early piano pieces and songs, Stravinsky created this remarkable one-act ballet. Not long after, the orchestral suite saw the light of day, as is often the case with Stravinsky, and in 1932 Samuel Dushkin and the composer created a version for violin and piano called Divertimento, which was finally expanded in 1947.
Janáček's piano composition 1. X. 1905 (Z ulice 1. října 1905) is a work that was created spontaneously as a reaction to the tragedy that took place during the demonstrations for the Czech University in Brno. Because Brno was predominantly German, the German representatives of the city were afraid of a greater influence of the Czechs and convened the so-called Volkstag on October 1, 1905, when German associations and organizations from a wide area were summoned to Brno to demonstrate their disapproval of the establishment of a Czech university in Brno. In response, the Czech residents of Brno also organized a large anti-German demonstration. Street fights took place between the two camps, to which the gendarmerie and subsequently the army were called. During one of the attacks, a young Czech worker, František Pavlík, was killed near Besední dom. Under the impression of this tragic event, Janáček originally wrote the three-movement composition Z ulice I. X. 1905. Just before the Brno premiere on January 27, 1906, however, he burned the last movement and after another performance in Prague even threw the entire autograph into the Vltava. Fortunately, the first performer of the piece, the pianist Ludmila Tučková, kept the original copy, which she drew attention to only in 1924. Thanks to this, this piano composition, forgotten by the composer and those around her for many years, has survived.
In the summer of 1943, Sergei Prokofiev fled the war-torn region of the Eastern Front to the Central Asian city of Alma-Ata, where he worked intensively on the extensive and demanding score for Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible. During this great work, the composer felt the need to compose something in opposition to film music. He thus wrote a work that he himself described as a sonata in a gentle, flowing classical style. That composition is the Sonata for flute and piano in D major, Op. 94, which he soon revised for violin and piano at the insistence of violinist David Oistrach. It premiered on June 17, 1944, performed by David Oistrach and Lev Oborin.
