I'm on a bit of a Brahms kick.  I've been enjoying the summer heat, reading Hans Gal's look at Brahms' life, and had never heard the Violin Sonata in G Major before last night.  It is a moving piece of music. 

Let one-time Brahms pupil and love interest, Elisabeth von Stockhausen explain:

"Of course you are aware that no one can help loving it more than anything in the world, and that one becomes addicted to it just by studying and understanding it, by listening to it as in a dream, and by becoming completely absorbed in it.  The last movement utterly enmeshes one, its emotional content so overwhelming that one must ask himself whether it was this piece of music in G minor that has gripped him so or whether something else, unknown to him, has taken possession of his innermost soul."

Brahms wrote the G major sonata when he was 45 and 46, during summer retreats in Portschach.  As Gal notes, this piece along with his Violin Concerto and Second Symphony, would be the start of Brahms most "abundant and glorious creative period".

Take some time today and become absorbed.  Daniel Barenboim and Itzhak Perlman perform the Violin Sonata No. 1 in G Major: