Arnold Bax ‒ Piano Sonata No.2

Arnold Bax (1883 - 1953), Piano Sonata No.2 (1919, revised 1920)
Performed by Ashley Wass
Arnold Bax was one of a group of talented young pianist-composers who emerged from London’s Royal Academy of Music in the years immediately after 1900. They included York Bowen, Benjamin Dale and Paul Corder, all pupils of Tobias Matthay for piano and Frederick Corder for composition. At much the same time the pianists Myra Hess, Irene Scharrer, and a little later Harriet Cohen were all Matthay pupils, and of course they played Bax’s music. While Bax took many years to make a career, his contemporary York Bowen was an immediate hit both as pianist and composer and appeared at Queen’s Hall in his own music while still a student. Yet Bowen’s orchestral music is now largely forgotten while Bax is widely known.
Bax’s early years were closely associated with Ireland where he spent much time in the far west aborbing both the musical and literary atmosphere. Here he developed his literary alter ego Dermot O’Byrne, publishing poetry, short stories and plays. The Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, though viewed by Bax from England, came as a personal blow and is reflected in various scores of the time. Bax’s shorter pieces were not all sunlit idylls, and in such darker scores as the piano pieces Winter Waters and What the Minstrel Told Us it seems probable that there may be some programmatic elements from this time. This is a sensibility reflected in our programme in Dream in Exile and the Second Sonata
The Second Sonata, still in one movement, is much grimmer in character than the first, though also epic in treatment and is dated 19th July 1919. Bax does not give us a specific programme, but we might well assume it to be related to the First World War, or more likely, again the tragedy of the Easter Rising, which is hinted at in the folk-like second subject of the first section. The sonata was first performed by Bax’s friend Arthur Alexander in November that year, though on the manuscript Harriet Cohen has written a dedication to herself and when the revised version appeared in June 1920 she was the pianist. In a letter to Tilly Fleischmann Bax admitted the Sonata was ‘concerned with the warring forces of light and darkness’.
The sonata, which plays continuously, broadly subsumes elements of three movements with two new themes in the middle section and the motif of the long threatening introduction to the sonata returning to mark the third. Here, material from the previous two sections are juxtaposed and the work ends with the motif from the introduction now in the major, all passion spent.
The journey from the ominous, foreboding introduction with its distinctive motif (perhaps a ‘fate’ motif) through the heroic first subject, marked ‘Brazen and glitteringly’ to the contrasted folk-like second theme, first introduced very quietly, gives the music an enormous emotional span. Bax launches his middle section with a typical lyrical reverie marked to be played ‘very still and concentrated’ but in the space of four minutes his tune is itself found to be heroic, setting the literal return of the sonata’s opening into striking contrast.
By this time we have thoroughly convinced ourselves that Bax’s epic score must reflect the composer’s autobiographical response to the recently ended war or the Easter Rising, or both. Bax reviews his themes in his third section, a movement of conspicuous drama and contrast. Then the tune from the slow movement returns to be played ‘very simply’, and suddenly one begins to wonder if he is more than hinting at the opening phrase of his song Roundel, at Chaucer’s words ‘Your ey-en two wol slay me sodenly’. Is Bax, who had only recently left his wife and family for Harriet Cohen, writing a quite different sort of musical autobiography? Or rather, is he celebrating the human condition out of his own experience. The sonata ends as the ‘fate’ motif from the introduction returns, briefly threatens, but soon becomes a distant muttering, as the light and Bax’s vision slowly fades.