Weber, C. M. v.: 6 Violinsonates progressives WeV P. 6 book 1

»Six Sonates« for violin and piano, score and violin part, edited from the text of the Carl Maria von Weber Complete Edition by Claudia Theis.
Practical guidance on performance by Volker Worlitzsch.

In the years 1807 to 1810 Carl Maria von Weber worked as private secretary to Duke Louis, younger brother of the king of Württemberg, in Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg. This employment ended at the beginning of 1810 in a disaster, for Weber – involved in the duke's financial manipulations and burdened with heavy debt from his own sumptuous lifestyle – was imprisoned and, together with his father, ultimately expelled from the country. On 27 February they turned up in Mannheim, Weber with the duty of paying down his enormous mountain of debt ahead of him. He set about doing this with earnings from his own concerts and from the sales of his compositions to publishers. Weber had already been in contact with the publisher Johann Anton André since 1801, but became personally acquainted with him only during a trip with Abbé Vogler to Frankfurt at the end of June 1810. After several meetings they agreed on a number of works, amongst them the 1st piano concerto and the 1st symphony, but also mentioned were the 6 sonatas whose composition Weber began in September, they thereby have to be deemed as commissioned work, undertaken only after consultation with the publisher. The 6 sonatas were then composed in quick succession between the end of September and the middle of October, though not without effort, as the composer himself reported in letters to his friends, and probably also under the influence of Vogler with whom he had moved in, meantime, in Darmstadt. On 17 October 1810 the diary announced »?nished my 6 sonatas«, and as early as a day later Weber sent the sonatas together with the piano concerto and the rondo WeV E.7 to André in Offenbach. In the covering letter to the music shipment Weber referred to the fact that he had interchanged the sequence of the last two sonatas in the 2nd volume in order to attain a more brilliant close, in the opening movement of what was originally his last sonata. Weber wrote variations on a theme from the Mechthilde aria (no. 10) of his opera Silvana (to which he reverted later in his variations Op. 35 for clarinet and piano).
To Weber's great exasperation, however, André rejected the sonatas on the basis that they were too good and too challenging, whereupon Weber then offered them to Simrock in Bonn on 3 November. The latter, though, took his time in answering. Only at the end of December did Weber send the sonatas to the publisher where they seem to have first turned up after considerable delay, as we learn from Weber's letter to the publisher on 23 April 1811 from Munich, in which he renews his request for the despatch of the honorarium. The two instalments of the sonatas probably then appeared in October 1811, though the composer was evidently not informed about it, because on 25 February 1812 he wrote to Simrock: »l have not heard anything from you in some time. I have seen my sonatas and lieder elsewhere, but you had still not been so good as to let me have a couple of exemplars of them.« Weber himself does not seem to have played his sonatas in private or public contexts: perhaps André's criticism had annoyed him too much. Nevertheless, they can be considered as typical representatives of a sophisticated literature originating at this time for private middle-class music practice.
Publisher: Schott Music VLB196.

Content:

• Sonata no. 1 F major
• Sonata no. 2 G major
• Sonata no. 3 d minor