Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) wrote his violin sonata in 1914, he did, however, revise it several times before its first performance in 1921. The composer, a dedicated Czech nationalist and pan slavist, remembers "...in the 1914 Sonata for violin and piano I could just about hear sound of the steel clashing in my troubled head..." the people of Moravia were waiting to be liberated by the Russians at the beginning of the First World War and the work is full of suspense and atmosphere. The first performance was given by violinist František Kudláček and pianist Jaroslav Kvapil on 24 April 1922 at a concert of new Moravian music organized by the Young Composer's Club in Brno. Interesting to note that the first performance abroad was in Frankfurt in 1923, violinist was the composer Paul Hindemith.

Here the performers are Jana Vlachova violin and Frantisek Maly piano
The work is in four relatively short and very tightly structured movements:

I. Con moto

The first movement clearly in sonata form, though first and second subjects are closely related, opens with an intense solo violin statement, the first subject with an agitated pulsating accompaniment on the piano gives way to a more lyrical transition and a cantabile second subject. The second subject does not retain its warm nature for long and disintegrates into a fragmented echo of the opening violin statement, after a complete repetition of the exposition, the short development nervously moves forward with violin trills and rapid ostinato passages on the piano, a typical trademark of Janacek, and anxious sequenced echoes of the opening statement. The violin attempts to recompose the fragments of the first subject, over what could be described as a descending pedal point on the piano, and finally succeeds at the opening of the recapitulation. Here the second subject is now taken first by the violin, but darkly in its lower register and then by the piano. The echoes of the opening statement conclude as an embryonic foreboding of the edgy 'shudder' theme from the final movement.