Sonata for cello and piano in B minor op. 27

“The author obviously sought to create a scholastic work as a tribute to M. Vincent d’Indy, borrowing his lofty rigidity, faultlessly authoritarian line, strict determination to banish the slightest questionable compromise with the temptations of facile charms and decadent sophistication -  a music of rationality where the majestic period replaces emotion, a firmly structured discourse that persuades rather than beguiling, a monument whose perspective plan displays few reliefs.” In reporting the first performance of Vierne’s Sonata for cello and piano on February 10^th, 1910 at the Société nationale de musique by Fernand Pollain and Marguerite Long, Tenroc – the journalist of the Brussels Guide Musical – rather mischievously placed Vierne in the shadow of Vincent d’Indy and the Schola cantorum. This concert was held right after the composer suffered a considerable humiliation: assistant professor of Alexandre Guilmant for many years, everything designated him to replace him at the head of the organ class at the Conservatory in 1911. Gabriel Fauré, director of the school at the time, chose Gigout instead; and it was d’Indy’s Schola cantorum that welcomed the rejected organist. Successive commentators, including his biographer Franck Besingrand, esteem nonetheless that this sonata verges on a “certain ideal of Fauré, by its great feeling for nuances, absolute mastery of proportions and architecture, superior ordering of the musical ideas.” Thus reconciling Fauré’s and d’Indy’s antagonist lineage, this sonata was naturally a must in the early 20^th-century French cellists’ repertory.