The Violin Sonatas

At the height of his creative activity, between 1903 and 1915, Charles Ives completed four violin sonatas. His projected fifth sonata, which he never finished, was to have been an arrangement for violin and piano of his New England Holidays. He also wrote two earlier sonatas. The first of these was written while he was a student at Yale in 1895, but all that remains of it is a pencil sketch eight measures long, the rest of the score having been lost. The second early sonata was written around 1903 and is known as the Pre-First Sonata. Ives wrote two slow middle movements for this Pre-First Sonata. The first of these slow movements has been published as a Largo' arranged for violin, clarinet, and piano and is also available in an arrangement for violin and piano. The other slow movement of the Pre-First Sonata became the second movement of the published first sonata, and the third movement became the first movement of the published second sonata. (Ives frequently reused movements and materials from earlier works.) Therefore, of the original four movements of the Pre-First Sonata, only the first movement has not been published. Three of the other sonatas were published in the 1950s, forty to fifty years after they were first written. Only the fourth sonata, published in 1942, was prepared for publication by Ives himself. Each of the printed violin sonatas now has