Sonata de cesar franck biography

composition by César Franck

The Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano by César Franck is one of his best-known compositions, and is considered one of the finest sonatas for violin and piano ever written.^[1] It is an amalgam of his rich native harmonic language with the Classical traditions he valued highly, held together in a cyclic framework.

Background

The Violin Sonata in A was written in , when César Franck was 63, as a wedding present for the year-old violinist Eugène Ysaÿe.^[1] Twenty-eight years earlier, in , Franck had promised a violin sonata for Cosima von Bülow.

This never appeared; it has been speculated that whatever work Franck had done on that piece was put aside, and eventually ended up in the sonata he wrote for Ysaÿe in ^[2]

Franck was not present when Ysaÿe married, but on the morning of the wedding, on 26 September in Arlon, their mutual friend Charles Bordes presented the work as Franck's gift to Y