Furtwängler completed his extensive First Violin Sonata in D minor in 1935, but the initial sketches reach back almost twenty years. The work was premiered in the Gewandhaus in Leipzig on March 4, 1937. The violinist was Hugo Kolberg, then leader of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Furtwängler himself was at the piano. A review of that evening's performance included the comment: "Passionately powerful obsession with music and supreme artistic determination are in constant interaction, giving the sonata stylistic complexity, behind which is concealed nothing more or less than an unceasing struggle for the highest spiritual truth."
