This is a work of the last year of Bartok's studies at the Conservatory in Budapest. Even though Bartok did assign it an opus number, he numbered his next violin sonata (the first of two great ones he wrote in 1921 and 1922) "No. 1," thus ensuring this one's neglect.

He may well have intended this result. Bartok was a slow to develop as a composer. Although this is a solid piece of music, it lacks most of the characteristics of the mature Bartok, aside from a good sense of musical proportion, imagination, and formal logic. His basic musical style and ideas of form derive directly from Brahms, although by now he had become enamoured of the virtuosic approach of Richard Strauss. Of the most recent musical ideas emanating from Claude Debussy in Paris, Bartok so far knew nothing.

Although Bartok was already an ardent Hungarian Nationalist, he also had not begun to suspect the existence of a body of genuine ancient Hungarian folk music. It would take his folksong collecting partnership with Zoltan Kodaly to bring him into contact with that great tradition, and it is the influence of that music which would create Bartok's true voice. Instead, Bartok had some recourse to the gypsy-derived music of Liszt, then taken widely to be the true Hungarian folk music, for some of his musical material, particularly in the final movement. There is some unease in the combination; Brahms was actually more adept at using this "Hungarian" element in his works, even in the German academic sonata model, than Bartok showed he was here.,

The work is quite listenable, firmly of the Romantic Era, and uses the instruments in their familiar way. Its first performance was by violinist Jenš Hubay and the composer in January, 1904.

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