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Niels W. Gade (1817-1890) was beyond comparison the best known and most widely recognized Danish composer of the nineteenth century. He was an excellent violinist, and thus wrote a good deal for the violin. His fondness for the instrument is most in evidence in the works for violin and piano, among which the three sonatas trace Gade's stylistic development over 40 years: from youthful imagination in the early first sonata, through a firmer hand with the Classical-Romantic ideal of the period in the second, to the experienced, more rigorous Classical lines of the third and last, with none of the heavy scent of the Late Romanticism of the day.