Composed 1917; 13 minutes

Debussy planned to write a set of six sonatas in 1915 but completed just three. In them, he consciously rejected the Austro-German romanticism that he found so distasteful during the war. Instead, he turned to the music of the French keyboard composers of the 18^th century, clavicinistes like Rameau and Couperin. Acknowledging tradition, he signed the sonatas "Claude Debussy, Musicien Français." His health took a turn for the worse after he had completed the second of the sonatas, for flute, viola and harp. Then, he had surgery and radiation treatments. After a slow start, an idea for the finale eventually came, during a trip to Cap-Ferrat in October 1916. By the following February, the first two movements were in place, the first bound together by repetitions of the violin’s opening theme, dominated by the interval of a falling third and the second, marked ‘fanciful and light.’ The rest followed with some difficulty. Though the roots of the Sonata for violin and piano are firmly in the past, the elusive, fleeting music remains forward-looking. "By one of those very human contradictions it's full of happiness and uproar," he wrote at the time. Although acutely sick with cancer, in low spirits and finding himself "fighting for a lump of sugar or for manuscript paper, not to mention my daily bread," Debussy gave the first performance on May 5, 1917, with the violinist Gaston Poulet. Less than a year later, as the German guns were pounding Paris, Debussy died. The Violin Sonata, innovative in form, extrovert in spirit, was to be his final work.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)