Ysaÿe No More

I don’t know if anybody has realized, but we’re in the middle of Hurricane Eugène. Since 2020, recordings of all or parts of Ysaÿe’s Six Sonatas (Op. 27) have been released by violinists including Ju-young Baek-Laurent Albrecht Breuninger-Thomas Bowes-Maxim Brilinsky-Anca Vasile Caraman-Elmira Darvarova-James Ehnes-Julia Fischer-David Grimal-Jeroen De Groot-Hilary Hahn-Kejia He-Kerson Leong-Jack Liebeck-Daniel Matejča-Alessandro Perpich-Solveig Steinthorsdottir-Yayoi Toda-Niklas Walentin and Stefano Zanchetta.

And.

Breathe.

Ok, so some releases can understandably—if not necessarily justifiably—be linked to this year’s centenary of the Six Sonatas’ frantic birth. In the time between now and 2020, there was also the small matter of a global pandemic which saw performers turned outside-in, summoning the courage to find fresh challenges in an insular new context. Judging by the variety of performers who have tackled these works, it seems violinists at many stages of their careers—top virtuosi, college professors, younger competition winners—found solace in Ysaÿe during that time. Maybe an outbreak of Ysaÿe is a symptom rather than a cause.

Then again, this spike is a bit of an outlier given the widely understood state of the industry. As Andrew Clements wrote in a review of 2023 for The Guardian, “the continued exploration of neglected corners of the repertoire, increasingly works by women composers, has meant that there is always something fresh to discover.” Ysaÿe is not historically neglected, nor a household name capable of bringing in big bucks to fund something more esoteric, nor a person who is particularly under-represented on record at the moment. Nor does there seem to be much to discover through his music other than yet more people who are very good at playing the violin. So the question remains: Why do record labels turn to Ysaÿe so often? And more to the point, should they?

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Aside from the possibility that a load of labels are deep in the pocket of Big Walloon (a low-lying pressure group determined to push the cultural achievements of its residents into the mainstream, starting with the solo violin repertory and ending with the crowning of Ysaÿe’s 1931 Walloon dialect opera “Piér li Houïen” as a warhorse of the repertory), the financial and logistical appeal of recording a solo violin album over anything more expansive goes without saying—particularly with changing revenue streams making the recoup of earnings through the sale of physical CDs ever less viable. This corner of the recording industry is still working out if and how streaming might change their musical product; still, if assumptions about the appropriate length of an album hold up online, the dimensions of the entire Op. 27 collection mean they’re extremely workable on their own. Hahn’s recording comes in at just over an hour, Fischer’s at 57 minutes, Ehnes’s at an hour and five, meaning there’s no need for a companion piece to fill the time around a durationally awkward canonic work. Eugène is fine just the way he is.

Ironically, for one of the most technically taxing and harmonically adventurous collections for the solo violinist, everything about the Ysaÿe sonatas is just too easy. Take the biography. Each of the six sonatas is dedicated to a different violin-playing colleague contemporary: Joseph Szigeti, Jacques Thibaud, George Enescu, Fritz Kreisler, Mathieu Crickborn, and Manuel Quiroga, incorporating Ysaÿe’s understanding of their individual violin-playing quirks into the musical textures. Spelling out those references is simple enough: in the movement dedicated to the Spanish violinist Quiroga, there’s a handful of habanera rhythms in the final movement; the third incorporates the rhythms of Romanian folk music for Enescu, and so on. It requires very little thought from listeners to uncover the emotional heart in the music, and very little musical thought to come somewhere close to what Ysaÿe intended.

Even making them sound vaguely contemporary is straightforward enough. Perhaps the most famous sonata—and certainly the most immediately approachable for younger students—is the second, which opens with a reference to Bach’s famous Partita No. 3, a sweet moment that’s quickly buried under a torrent of dissonance. Bach was Ysaÿe’s main reference point, having speedily sketched the outline of the pieces shortly after hearing Joseph Szigeti play the G minor sonata in July 1923. Bach is referenced regularly throughout Ysaÿe’s Sonatas, both in the immediate foreground there, or in bigger background structures, like in the Allemande—Sarabande—Presto form of the fourth sonata. Though undoubtedly part of a frame of reference that involved now-lost musical jokes to his colleagues, today those moments today sound like the most boring kind of postmodern collage: rather than radically juxtaposing two essential things and seeing how they clash, it takes one established thing and simply adds something else essentially established alongside it, creating a conversation between old and slightly less old that’s only really interesting for those participating in it.

Nonetheless, the pieces are harmonically interesting, and fill a gap in the solo violin repertory after Bach and Paganini. There’s no doubting Ysaÿe’s importance to the violin either—without him, there’s no Debussy String Quartet (sad), no Franck Sonata in A minor (sad), and no Chausson “Poème” (less sad). He was even a nice guy too, apparently. (In 2001, the Grove Dictionary for Music and Musicians commended him for his “generosity, a sense of solidarity with other musicians and an unquenchable appetite for life,” suggesting that Big Walloon might be more influential than first thought.) And the set of Sonatas are the perfect balance of challenging to master yet straightforward to understand, which therefore makes the choice to record them obvious, and therefore unimaginative, and therefore dull.

The best person to consult about whether you should record Ysaÿe is Ysaÿe himself. A master violinist, he once wrote, “must be a violinist, a thinker, a poet, a human being, he must have known hope, love, passion and despair.” Clearly, what Ysaÿe neglected to say was that he must also follow the pack, and, in hock to record labels, management, agents, mentors, teachers, colleges, and the violin community, must record his debut CD of Ysaÿe Sonatas. Or alternatively, he could, you know, just like not. ¶