Concerto in D major for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 61
Related Artists/Companies
Ludwig van BeethovenPast Performances
National Symphony Orchestra: Leonard Slatkin, conductor/Itzhak Perlman, violin - Feb 5 - 7, 2004
WPAS: St. Petersburg Philharmonic - Oct 23, 2007 at 8:00 PM
About the Composition
The Violin Concerto was composed in 1806 and given its premiere at the Theater an der Wien on December 23 of that year by Franz Clement. Roman Totenberg was the soloist in the National Symphony Orchestra's first performance of this work, with Hans Kindler conducting, on November 7, 1935; when the NSO last presented the Concerto, on February 5-7, 2004, the soloist was Itzhak Perlman and the conductor was Leonard Slatkin.
In addition to the solo violin, the score, dedicated to Stephan von Breuning, calls for a flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings. Duration, 44 minutes.
_________________________________________________
Beethoven did not compose a full-scale concerto for the violin until he had completed all the concertos he wrote for his own use (the first four of his five piano concertos) and the Triple Concerto, in which the violin shares solo honors with the cello and piano. He did begin sketching the opening movement of a violin concerto in C major in the early 1790s, when he was still resident in Bonn, but he never brought even that single movement to completion. (It was completed, on its own, by Joseph Hellmesberger some 50 years after Beethoven's death, and was published after another half-century went by.) Once in Vienna, he appears to have worked up to the Concerto in D major by way of a series of somewhat more modest concerted works for the violin-first the two Romances (Opp. 40 and 50), composed between 1798 and 1802, and then the Triple Concerto, which he completed in 1805. When the Concerto in D major materialized the following year, those earlier efforts must have seemed irrelevant, for here was a work of unprecedented proportions and depth for its category.
Franz Clement, to whom the premiere of this work was entrusted, was a distinguished musician who took part in several important performances of Beethoven's works in his capacity as concertmaster of the orchestra at the Theater an der Wien, on whose stage he introduced the Concerto at the end of 1806. He was himself the composer of a violin concerto that earned a good deal of admiration in his time. Beethoven referred to his own Violin Concerto humorously as a "Concerto par clemenza por Clement," and was not distressed by having the first movement separated from the last two at the premiere by a sequence of virtuoso stunt pieces, since that was the custom of the day. He wrote the last two movements, however, as he did those of several other major works of this period, so directly connected to each other that they cannot be separated.
A more widely remembered musician with a name similar to Clement's came into the picture shortly after the Concerto's premiere: Muzio Clementi, who was by then a music publisher based in London as well as a respected piano virtuoso and composer, persuaded Beethoven to adapt the work as a piano concerto. The piano version was dedicated to the bride of Beethoven's friend Stephan Breuning, who himself had received the dedication of the Violin Concerto in its original form For the piano version, which is very seldom performed, Beethoven supplied cadenzas, actually the first he gave out for any of his concertos. He never wrote any for the violin version, but proceeded thereafter to supply his earlier piano concertos with cadenzas, and when he wrote the last (No. 5 in E-flat, known as the "Emperor") he provided it at the outset with cadenzas so integrated that there could be no question of replacing them.
What made Beethoven receptive to Clementi's suggestion was that there was little interest in the Violin Concerto following its premiere, and indeed for the rest of his life. The Concerto appears not to have been given a second performance until Alois Tomasini, the son of Haydn's Eszterháza concertmaster, played it in 1812. Few other violinists gave the work a nod. Pierre Baillot performed it in 1828, Henri Vieuxtemps ten years after that. It was not until the 12-year-old Joseph Joachim played the Concerto in his London debut on May 27, 1844, that the work began to take hold. (The conductor on that occasion was the young Joachim's mentor Felix Mendelssohn, who composed his own Violin Concerto in E minor in the same year.) Joachim was for several years virtually the only violinist to perform the Beethoven Concerto with any frequency. He became the most illustrious violinist of his time, and an eminent conductor, composer and pedagogue as well, and he composed cadenzas for this concerto which are still in use. Far more generally favored since about the time of Joachim's death, a hundred years ago, however, are those of the beloved violinist Fritz Kreisler, who, like Joachim, was also a composer; it is the Kreisler cadenzas that Nikolaj Znaider plays in the present performances.
While all the piano concertos Beethoven had composed by 1806 can trace their ancestry, in greater or lesser degree, to those of Mozart, the Violin Concerto might be said to have had no models except among Beethoven's own works in other forms. That is not to say, however, that he was without guidance in the specific area of writing for violin and orchestra, which he found in the music of eminent virtuoso-composers as closely identified with the violin as he and Mozart were with the piano. Like most of the great composers, Beethoven had a healthy reverence for earlier masters and a productive interest in his contemporaries. He kept Bach's Well Tempered Clavier by his bedside; he urged his piano pupils to study that work, and assigned the Gradus ad Parnassum of the aforementioned Clementi. Like Mozart, he also had first-hand knowledge of stringed instruments as a performer on both the violin and the viola. He knew not only Clement's concerto, but those by representatives of the French school of violin playing: its transplanted Italian founder Giovanni Battista Viotti, whose lifetime (1755-1824) spanned those of Mozart and Beethoven, and who composed more than two dozen concertos, some of which are still in circulation; and the two Frenchmen he came to know
For all the thoroughly idiomatic writing for their instrument in Beethoven's Concerto, however, violinists in the first half of the nineteenth century may have been put off by the work's unprecedented proportions as well as the seriousness of its content. This was clearly no mere showpiece for the soloist, but a work that put the whole idea of the concerto in a new light, following what Haydn and (far more emphatically) Beethoven himself had achieved in doing just that for the symphony, and in so doing seizing for the symphony the position formerly held by the concerto as the highest category of concert works. In this light (though not in its character), the Violin Concerto was as revolutionary a work in its genre as the Eroica was for the symphony.
The length of Beethoven's first movement alone exceeds that of nearly every earlier complete concerto for the violin, and its character is even more strikingly different from that of its predecessors. The opening measures proclaim it as being at once expansive and dramatic, and, while the solo writing is extremely demanding, there is virtually nothing in the way of bravura material in this exalted disquisition.
The slow movement, essentially a romance in modified variation form, reaches far beyond the sweetness of the two independent romances Beethoven composed earlier, to attain a level of sublimity paralleled among his works only in his most intimate chamber music. It leads directly into the concluding rondo, for which the ostensible pattern is the "hunting" music found in the symphonic and chamber-music finales of Mozart and Haydn. In Beethoven's hands the solid, earthy character comes more to the fore, even while taking us to an Olympian level in keeping with the nobility of the two preceding movements.
Beethoven left us no music in which he is more sure of himself, and none in which his humanity is more warmly evident. The unique qualities of this concerto have tended to limit speculation on what sort of work he might have produced if he had composed a second concerto for the violin: this is not the sort of piece to share honors or vie for attention with companion works. No one even tried to compose another violin concerto of similar character and proportions till Brahms produced his, more than 70 years later.
