“My sonata pleased the audience immensely, and it received colossal applause. I was congratulated from all sides, and everyone was of the same opinion”, Richard Strauss proudly wrote to his parents on 19 December 1883 after the work’s first performance.
Strauss started work on his only cello sonata in 1881 at the age of 17, completing it two years later. By then, he had already done a lot of composing – like Mendelssohn Bartholdy, he was very much a child prodigy. In fact, Mendelssohn’s influence can be clearly heard in Strauss’s early works, as here in the Finale of the Cello Sonata: it recalls the lightness of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the playfulness of the piano piece Rondo Capriccioso.
