Musicologica Olomucensia

One of the dominant features of musical compositional thinking in the second half of the 19th century is the composing of one-movement compositions. Composers who work with an extremely brief motivic thought as the basic constituent of a given work, are faced with a difficult chore when they want to create a monumental formal configuration. In order to avoid the danger of monotony, the miniscule motivic shapes are subjected to variation, most frequently by using the "Brahms" technique of a developing variation or the "Liszt" technique of motivic transformation.
V. Novák in conceiving his Trio in d minor op. 27 takes advantage of Liszt´s trailblazing piano sonata c minor as a model. In one uninterrupted stream, the composition goes through a cyclic form of four parts with passages unambiguously defined by their content. At the same time, Novak thoroughly makes use of the "Brahms" variation technique, which allows him to create a highly complicated, ample whole from the fabric of rudimentary motifs which are connected among themselves genealogically.
Novák´s further one-movement chamber work also is based on the Liszt compositional conception - the sonata for violoncello and piano op. 67 was created nearly forty years later as an intentional analogy to Novák´s earlier composition.
The motivic unity of a work, however, does not suffice to fulfil the Brahms motivic method of development nor the Liszt-style transformation of a theme, as we have seen in the case of the first one-movement composition by Novák. The recapitulation of the violoncello sonata is made up of a so-called variational fugue and the fugue thematic principle penetrates at the same time also to the nonfugal parts of the work. From the complex of main and secondary subjects a fugue theme is created, specifically by "internal" motivic work based on division and supplementation of motives. Novák therefore finds a solution as to how to create motivic relationship between remote formal sections and this is to become typical for music of the 20th century.