Violin Sonata in A Major, Op. 8

• Franck composed this sonata during the summer of 1886, and it premiered in Brussels in 1887.¹
• Franck wrote this sonata for his friend and fellow Belgian, Eugène Ysaÿe. Franck sent the work to Ysaÿe as a gift Ysaÿe’s wedding on September 28, 1886.²
  • Franck was not able to attend the wedding, so he sent the sonata with a friend, Charles Bordes. Bordes presented the sonata score to Ysaÿe at the wedding reception. 
  • Ysaÿe was delighted, and he insisted on sight-reading the piece right away for all his guests. Bordes’s sister-in-law, the French pianist Léontine Bordes-Pène was present, and Ysaÿe asked her to sight-read the piano part.
    • Fun fact: Bordes-Pène was also the dedicatee of, and first soloist in, D’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Air.

“Nothing in the world could have done me greater honor or given me more pleasure than this gift. But it is not for me alone. It is for the whole world. My part will be to interpret it with all the art, at my command, and I shall be helped by the profound admiration I have for the work of César Franck, so far insufficiently recognized. Whenever I play this work I shall be thinking of this happy day, and the art and affection which Franck has put into this music will spread its glow over our family life.”

Eugene Ysaÿe, reacting to the gift of Franck’s Violin Sonata, in a speech at his wedding reception.³

• Bordes-Pène and Ysaÿe played the public premiere of the work on Dec. 16, 1886, in Brussels.⁴

1. John Trevitt and Joël-Marie Fauquet. “Franck, César(-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert),” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed February 25, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000010121.
2.  R.J. Stove, César Franck: His Life and Times (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 256-7.
3. R.J. Stove, César Franck: His Life and Times (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 257.
4. Ibid., 258.