This week’s selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Béla Bartók’s Violin Sonata No. 2. The work was composed in 1922, in the immediate aftermath of World War I and the dismemberment of Hungary under the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.

For Bartók, Trianon was not merely a political catastrophe but a cultural one. Hungary’s territorial losses severed regions that had been central to his ethnomusicological work, such as Transylvania and Slovakia, where he had collected folk music for years. Moreover, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire meant that Bartók would no longer enjoy the support of the cultural institutions that had once supported him.

Unlike his Violin Sonata No. 1, which still bore traces of late Romantic exuberance, the Second Sonata is compressed, angular and severe. Bartók was consciously moving toward a style from which he had stripped away rhetorical excess in favor of concentrated gesture and structural rigor.

A decisive influence on the work’s genesis was Jelly d’Arányi, the Hungarian violinist to whom Bartók dedicated the sonata. D’Arányi was not only a virtuoso but a musician who admired Bartók’s idiom and rhythmic demands. D’Arányi became an advocate for Bartók’s violin music at a time when it was widely considered forbidding and unappealing.

The U.S.-based Coolidge Foundation commissioned the work. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, one of the most important patrons of new chamber music in the early years of the 20th century, commissioned Bartók to write a violin sonata for d’Arányi. The commission turned out to be a life-saving break for Bartók. Now that his music no longer enjoyed institutional backing in postwar Hungary, commissions from abroad came to sustain his compositional activity.

Bartók originally conceived the sonata in two movements, a choice that already signaled his break with the conventional sonata form. Rather than offer a fast–slow–fast contrast, the sonata unfolds as a dialogue between fragmentation and continuity.

The first movement is driven by harsh dissonances and asymmetrical rhythms. The music feels tense, purposeful and uncompromising, immediately drawing the listener into Bartók’s world of concentrated energy. Instead of offering Romantic consolation, the second movement gives us Hungarian or Eastern European folk music, which Bartók treats abstractly, taking the essence of the folk sound and folding it into his modern, rigorous style.

The sonata does not try to charm or persuade. From the first moments, the violin sounds tense and exposed. The piano does not accompany in the usual sense; it presses, interrupts and sometimes seems to confront aggressively.

The first part of the piece feels restless and combative. Silence matters here: pauses moments not of rest but uncertainty. When the music gathers speed, it does not flow smoothly; it lurches forward, stops and then surges again. There is an underlying sense of urgency, but also of restraint.

The second part of the sonata has a very different character. It is quieter, slower and more reflective, but it is not peaceful. Instead, it is as if the same emotional landscape is being looked at from a different angle.

Rather than build toward a triumphant conclusion, the music seems to withdraw. The tension does not resolve so much as exhaust itself. The final moments feel calm, but it is the calm of acceptance rather than relief.

The sonata was completed in 1922 and premiered in 1923, with d’Arányi on violin and Bartók himself at the piano. Contemporary reaction was unenthused, even hostile. Many listeners found the work austere, even aggressive.

Nonetheless, critics have come to see the Bartók’s Violin Sonata No. 2 as a key moment in the composer’s work, marking the transition from late-Romantic, expressive lyricism to austere, modernist rigor. It is a critical milestone in Bartók’s development as a composer--at once modernist and deeply rooted in Central European culture.

In this performance from 2020, Leonidas Kavakos is at the violin and Ferenc Rados is at the piano.