Written during a fertile period in 1924, when the composer headed the Cleveland Institute of Music, the Second Violin Sonata, "Poème Mystique," is a single-movement work. The composer's daughter has told the story that, at an opportunity in which Bloch attended a concert where his First Sonata for Violin was played, he felt that the intensity and the violence of the work were beyond the reach of most of the audience. He decided then to write another sonata "conceived as an antidote" of the First. The work has a lyrical, dreamy quality, without excluding sections of great intensity. The music makes very effective use of Hebraic themes and Gregorian chants.

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