Cello Sonata in A minor
by Marie Jaëll
- Instrumentation
- Cello, Piano
- Composed
- 1881
- Duration
- 36'
- Publisher
- Public Domain
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About this piece
Marie Jaëll dedicated her four-movement Sonata in A minor for cello and piano to the composer and critic Ernest Reyer. She played the piano part herself when Jules Delsart gave the first performance at the Société nationale de musique in Paris on 26 February 1881, and around the same time she also performed it with David Popper. According to Florence Doé de Maindreville's preface to the first edition (Delatour, 2012), the last surviving full score is dated January 1886 and shows that Jaëll reworked the piece after her husband's death, lightening the piano part and rewriting the cello line for better balance. That preface says the sonata's style recalls Schumann, Brahms and Liszt more than her French contemporaries, and quotes Popper telling her, "You don't have the French fibre." Reviewing the first recording, by Lisa Erbès (cello) and Lara Erbès (piano) on Solstice (2005), Patrick C. Waller of MusicWeb International called it "a conventional but substantial work" with an elegiac slow movement placed third. Natacha Colmez and Camille Belin recorded it on Impressions Romantiques (Présence Compositrices, 2025). The free score is the composer's manuscript, held in the Fonds Marie Jaëll at the BNU Strasbourg and posted on IMSLP with a manuscript cello part.
Technical overview
Four movements, about 36 minutes: I. Allegro appassionato; II. Presto (A major, with a slightly slower E-major middle section); III. Adagio; IV. Vivace molto. It is a large Romantic sonata against a heavy, virtuosic piano part. The cello line moves between bass and tenor clefs, with long sustained high lines, pizzicato passages and a wide dynamic range up to ff.