Experiencing the Violin Concerto: A Listener's Companion 9780810888852

Table of contents :
Cover
CONTENTS
Series Editor’s Foreword
Timeline
Introduction
1 In the Baroque: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Bach’s Four Keyboards
2 Mozart—Haydn—Brunetti—Tomasini
3 Viotti and Beethoven
4 The Meteoric Paganini and His Epigones
5 At the Heart of German Romanticism: Mendelssohn,
Schumann, and Bruch
6 Brahms’s Violin Concerto and the End of an Era
7 In the After-Brahms: Monsters and Leprechauns
8 Pillars of Modernism: Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Berg, and Bartók
9 Barber and Korngold, Shostakovich and . . . Schoenberg
10 Music without Anxieties
Notes
Selected Reading
Selected Listening
Index of Names
About the Author

Citation preview

E XP ERIENC ING THE V IOLIN C ONC ERTO

The Listener’s Companion Gregg Akkerman, Series Editor Titles in The Listener’s Companion provide readers with a deeper understanding of key musical genres and the work of major artists and composers. Aimed at nonspecialists, each volume explains in clear and accessible language how to listen to works from particular artists, composers, and genres. Looking at both the context in which the music first appeared and has since been heard, authors explore with readers the environments in which key musical works were written and performed.

Experiencing David Bowie: A Listener’s Companion, by Ian Chapman Experiencing Jazz: A Listener’s Companion, by Michael Stephans Experiencing Led Zeppelin: A Listener’s Companion, by Gregg Akkerman Experiencing Leonard Bernstein: A Listener’s Companion, by Kenneth LaFave Experiencing Mozart: A Listener’s Companion, by David Schroeder Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener’s Companion, by Durrell Bowman Experiencing the Rolling Stones: A Listener’s Companion, by David Malvinni Experiencing Rush: A Listener’s Companion, by Durrell Bowman Experiencing Schumann: A Listener’s Companion, by Donald Sanders Experiencing Stravinsky: A Listener’s Companion, by Robin Maconie Experiencing Tchaikovsky: A Listener’s Companion, by David Schroeder Experiencing Verdi: A Listener’s Companion, by Donald Sanders Experiencing the Violin Concerto: A Listener’s Companion, by Franco Sciannameo

E X PERIENC ING THE V I OLIN C ONC ERTO

A Listener’s Companion Franco Sciannameo

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Franco Sciannameo All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sciannameo, Franco, author. Title: Experiencing the violin concerto : a listener’s companion / Franco Sciannameo. Description: Lanham, MD : Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. | Series: The listener’s companion | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016005006 (print) | LCCN 2016006438 (ebook) | ISBN 9780810888852 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810888869 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: Concertos (Violin)–History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML1263 .S53 2016 (print) | LCC ML1263 (ebook) | DDC 785/.7194117–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005006 TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

In memory of Ruggiero Ricci (1918–2012)

CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Foreword

ix

Timeline

xi

Introduction

xv

1 In the Baroque: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Bach’s Four Keyboards

1

2 Mozart—Haydn—Brunetti—Tomasini

21

3 Viotti and Beethoven

37

4 The Meteoric Paganini and His Epigones

47

5 At the Heart of German Romanticism: Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Bruch

59

6 Brahms’s Violin Concerto and the End of an Era

75

7 In the After-Brahms: Monsters and Leprechauns

95

8 Pillars of Modernism: Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Berg, and Bartók

115

9 Barber and Korngold, Shostakovich and . . . Schoenberg

137

10 Music without Anxieties

153

Notes

171

Selected Reading

173

Selected Listening

175

Index of Names

177

About the Author

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SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD

The goal of the Listener’s Companion series is to give readers a deeper understanding of pivotal musical genres and the creative work of its iconic composers and performers. This is accomplished in an inclusive manner that does not necessitate extensive music training or elitist shoulder rubbing. Authors of the series place the reader in specific listening experiences in which the music is examined in its historical context with regard to both compositional and societal parameters. By positioning the reader in the real or supposed environment of the music’s creation, the author provides for a deeper enjoyment and appreciation of the art form. Series authors, often drawing on their own expertise as both performers and scholars, deliver to readers a broad understanding of major musical genres and the achievements of artists within those genres as lived listening experiences. The violin concerto of the Baroque and Classical periods was often a tool to feature the performance skills of the composer, and this alone makes the genre worthy of study because it allows us to imagine the context of said composers in a concert setting. When we listen to one of Mozart’s five authentic concertos, we not only enjoy the beauty of the music but can conjure images of the dazzling young musician performing the solo violin parts himself for European royalty. But with the rise of Paganini and the virtuoso performer during the Romantic era, composers could no longer afford the enormous practice time required to compete with instrumental specialists whom audiences began to idolize. This advancement of the technical brilliance found in the violin concerix

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to provides yet another reason to admire and appreciate the genre. The violin concerto has also proven itself resistant to the passage of time, being composed from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first by the greatest musical craftsmen of the ages including Bach, Bartók, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruch, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Paganini, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, and Vivaldi. Recent compositions from James MacMillan, Magnus Lindberg, and Esa-Pekka Salonen give continued credence to a genre that is still relevant and exciting in contemporary settings. As a violinist and scholar of the Classical, Romantic, and modern eras, Franco Sciannameo is wonderfully suited to guide us through the centuries of the violin concerto. Following a mostly chronological path, Sciannameo gives not only key biographical information but places the reader directly in the context of the “when and where” from which the composition derives, whether it be the absolute sensibility of Bach and Handel or the brash modernity of Shostakovich and Schoenberg. In this way he expertly delivers the experience of listening to the violin concerto as intended by the overall mission of the series. Gregg Akkerman

TIMELINE

1698

Giuseppe Torelli, violinist and composer in Bologna, produces concerti grossi in which the concertino is reduced to a single violin, thus giving birth to the solo violin concerto.

1712

Antonio Vivaldi publishes L’estro armonico Op. 3, a collection of twelve concertos that establishes the solo violin concerto as a genre. His Four Seasons, part of Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione Op. 8, also a set of twelve concertos, were published in 1725.

1733

In Amsterdam, Pietro Antonio Locatelli publishes his Op. 3, a collection of twelve solo violin concertos each containing two extremely difficult capriccios. Locatelli named his collection L’arte del violino.

1775

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composes five violin concertos, although the first could have been written two years prior.

1790s

Giovan Battista Viotti composes in London his Violin Concerto no. 22 in A Minor, a milestone in the violin concerto literature and much admired by Johannes Brahms and Joseph Joachim.

1806

In Vienna, Franz Clement premieres Ludwig van Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 61. The works was published two years later.

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1816

Louis Spohr composes his Violin Concerto in A Minor, Op. 47 “in Form einer Gesanszene.” Spohr is credited with ushering the violin concerto into the Romantic era.

1817

Niccolò Paganini, the greatest violin virtuoso of all time, takes Europe by storm with his Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major.

1845

The first performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 takes place at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. Ferdinand David was the soloist and Niels Gade the conductor.

1866

Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 26 is performed for the first time in Coblenz, Germany, on April 24.

1875

Eduard Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole is first performed by Pablo de Sarasate at the Cirque d’hiver in Paris on February 7.

1878

Peter Tchaikovsky completes his Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35. Adolf Brodsky finally premieres the work in Vienna on December 4, 1881.

1879

Joseph Joachim gives the world premiere of Johannes Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77. The event occurs at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig with the composer conducting.

1883

The much-delayed premiere of Antonin Dvorak’s Violin Concerto in A Minor, Op. 53 takes place in Prague. Franticek Ondricek is the soloist, and Moric Anger conducts the National Theatre Orchestra.

1896

Ernest Chausson turns his idea for a violin concerto into a Poème for violin and orchestra, which he dedicates to Eugene Ysaÿe.

1904

Jan Sibelius’s Violin Concerto is performed in Helsinki. The composer revises the work and has Karl Halir and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Richard Strauss, re-premiere it on October 19, 1905.

T I M E LI N E

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1910

Fritz Kreisler premieres Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto in B Minor, Op. 61 in London’s Queen’s Hall on November 10.

1931

Igor Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto in D is premiered in Berlin on October 23. The soloist is the concerto’s dedicatee, Samuel Dushkin, and the composer conducts the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra.

1935

On December 1, the Madrid Symphony Orchestra conducted by Enrique Fernández Arbós premieres Sergey Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 63. The soloist is the work’s dedicatee, Robert Soetens.

1936

On April 19, the groundbreaking violin concerto by Alban Berg is premiered in Barcelona, Spain. Louis Krasner is the soloist, and Hermann Scherchen conducts the orchestra.

1936

Arnold Schoenberg composes, in the United States, a formidable violin concerto premiered by Louis Krasner on December 6, 1940, in Philadelphia with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

1939

Béla Bartók’s violin masterpiece, the Violin Concerto No. 2 composed in 1938, premieres in Amsterdam by Zoltan Székely and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Willem Mengelberg.

1941

The Philadelphia Orchestra and its music director, Eugene Ormandy, offer the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto with Albert Spalding as soloist.

1947

From St. Louis, on February 14, Jascha Heifetz is heard performing for the first time Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D. On March 30, live from Carnegie Hall in New York, Heifetz broadcasts the concerto for the Columbia Broadcast System (CBS). Korngold’s concerto is heard by millions.

1955

Dmitri Shostakovich’s violin concerto receives its premiere in Leningrad on October 29. David Oistrakh is the soloist, and Yevgeny Mravinsky conducts the Leningrad Philharmonic. In December 29 of the same year, Oistrakh

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TIMELINE

and Mitropoulos present Shostakovich’s concerto at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic and record it on January 2, 1956. 1998

This year marks the release of François Girard’s film The Red Violin with a soundtrack by John Corigliano. The soundtrack consists of a Chaconne for violin and orchestra performed by violinist Joshua Bell.

2003

Corigliano’s violin concerto entitled The Red Violin is premiered on September 13 by Joshua Bell and the Baltimore Symphony conducted by Marin Alsop. The concerto is based on the Chaconne Corigliano composed in 1998 for the homonymous film’s soundtrack. Corigliano’s remains one of the most innovative and accessible violin concertos in the repertoire.

2010

Jennifer Higdon is awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for her Violin Concerto. On May 12, violinist Vadim Repin premieres in London’s Barbican Centre the Violin Concerto composed by Scottish composer James MacMillan. Valery Gergiev conducts the London Symphony Orchestra.

2015

On November 25, the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jaap van Zweeden and violinist Frank Peter Zimmerman offers the premiere of the Violin Concerto No. 2 by Magnus Lindberg.

INTRODUCTION

In this book, I invite you to consider not only the components of music, but the power of your perception as it transforms those components into memorable listening experiences elicited by “live” performance of concertos written for violin and orchestra: a study in contrasts between the soloist’s virtuosity (Solo) and the blended sonority of many instruments (Tutti). Although the focus of my narrative is on “live” performances, I will discuss audio/visual renditions when considering lesserknown concertos by famous or “forgotten” masters because these compositions appear too infrequently in contemporary concert programs. A thorough investigation of experiences during performances of violin concertos, or any other form of music composition, requires professional expertise in several domains, which, in turn, requires the use of pertinent jargon, musical notation, explanatory graphics, and extensive footnotes. In sum, it requires the very full critical apparatus this book wishes to dispense with, in favor, of a clearer narrative. The plan is simple but its realization posits many questions: what is a person supposed to experience during the performance of a violin concerto? What if he/she listens to it for the first time? Would his/her experience be measured against the evocation of memories of past performances in the case of a familiar work? Whose memories, though? Those verbalized by the author that may or may not coincide with those of reader? Or would the author wish to lecture ex cathedra about the experience that he, the author, has committed to paper without the possibility of confronting immediate rebuttal? If not, would the author put forth an xv

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INTRODUCTION

omnibus recipe for good listening and experiencing that adheres to some sort of preconditioned, time-honored formulary? I answer these and other questions in the course of the book’s narrative as I discuss outstanding concertos that present experiential possibilities and contextualized historical information. As stated before, I articulate my reflections in lay terms: form, melodic lines, rhythmic patterns, harmonic structures, instrumentation and technical passages appear in a graceful (I hope) fashion so the listener can concentrate on the emotional/intellectual immediacy provided by the “live” performance or the recorded afterthought when desired. I begin by offering a synthetic history of the violin concerto in the Baroque Era, and in doing so I have chosen to dwell on the performing idiosyncrasies of the most performed and recorded set of violin concertos in the history of the repertoire and the recording industry: Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” a calculated risk on my part since Vivaldi wrote hundreds of violin concertos. Curiously though, “The Four Seasons,” four highly descriptive concertos, despite their popularity are still in search of a definitive performing formula that could accommodate the sonnets Vivaldi wrote and embedded in the instrumental parts (no score was ever unearthed). Thus, in chapter 1 (In the Baroque: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Bach’s Four Harpsichords), I sort out Vivaldi’s experiential possibilities before landing on a description of Johann Sebastian Bach’s much more pragmatic, abstract (non-descriptive, that is) Violin Concertos in E major, A minor, and D minor (for 2 violins). Also, I wish to make the listener aware of two main styles of performance practices employed in Baroque music: (1) a scholarly informed style played on period instruments or replicas thereof and (2) a traditional style performed on modern instruments according to nineteenth century practices. Thus, the experiential outlines of these two scenarios are reviewed and proposed as guidelines for a more enjoyable listening experience. The two styles mentioned above play a lesser role in Mozart’s three violin concertos K. 216, 218, 219 and Symphonie Concertante for violin and viola K. 364. Thus, these works are considered from the traditional point of view with the caveat, though, that the reader should not shun sporadic performances on period instruments as they may offer many a refreshing surprise. In chapter 2 (Mozart—Haydn—Brunetti—Tomasini), I dwell on Mozart’s earlier violin concertos (K. 207 and 211) and on

I N T RODU CT I ON

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several concerto movements comprised in various serenades, cassations, and divertimentos. Finally, a look at Michael and Franz Joseph Haydn’s seldom-performed violin concertos closes the chapter dedicated to the Classical Era. Chapter 3 (Viotti and Beethoven) is wholly devoted to the first of the great violin concertos composed in the Romantic Era: Beethoven’s Concerto in D major Op. 61. Naturally, no work so rich in performance possibilities and listening experiences should be observed without a foray into its predecessors and the epochal transmutation of Classicism into Romanticism. So, the concertos of Giovan Battista Viotti and Franz Clement in addition to Beethoven’s own early attempt at composing a violin concerto, are amply examined. But, in a book about experiencing the violin concerto, no figure can occupy a more preeminent position than Niccolò Paganini. In fact, chapter 4 (The Meteoric Paganini and His Epigones) is all about this meteoric artist, his concertos, and the “lesson” he bestowed upon dozens of emulators whose fame vanished into oblivion as soon as the vagaries of Romanticism shifted from ephemeral showmanship to more profoundly poetic and philosophical pursuits. Chapter 5 (At the Hearth of German Romanticism: Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Bruch) highlights the listening delights of what was labeled the most perfect violin concerto ever composed: Felix Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E minor, Op. 64. At the heart of German Romanticism, the story of this concerto unfolds around the collaboration between composer and interpreter—Mendelssohn and Ferdinand David in this case. Theirs was a collaborative effort that ultimately made this concerto the model of the genre upon which composers like Robert Schumann, Max Bruch, and many others elaborated. Ultimately it brought the history of the Romantic violin concerto to a pinnacle for Johannes Brahms to cap. Indeed, Brahms and the great violinist Joseph Joachim remain eternally credited for having created—following the example of Mendelssohn and David—the Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77, a masterpiece of monumental proportions and virtuoso challenges unseen since Beethoven’s titanic concerto. Chapter 6 (Brahms’ Violin Concerto and the End of an Era) reflects on the friendship among Brahms, Joseph Joachim, Clara Schumann—a peculiar circle of friends—and the genesis, trials, and transformations of the concerto that mirrored their lives

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INTRODUCTION

and thoughts in a uniquely convoluted web of emotions fueled by hidden desires, renunciation, and remorse. The impact Brahms’ concerto had on contemporary and following generations of composers, violinists, and concertgoers is very much alive nowadays. Performers and listeners continue to experience the wonders emanating from this incredibly vivid score. Brahms’ concerto inspired a long string of large-scale masterpieces leapfrogging to secure first place in the highly competitive post-Brahms violin concerto repertoire that reflected too well the agony and anxieties of a century at the end of its parable. Chapter 7 (In the After-Brahms: Monsters and Leprechauns) discusses the unforgettable violin concertos of Reger, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, Elgar, and other prototypical concertos that ushered the advent of modernity. Then, chapter 8 (Pillars of Modernism: Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Berg, and Bartok) and chapter 9 (Barber and Korngold, Shostakovich . . . and Schoenberg) examine the concertos of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Berg, Bartok, Barber, Korngold, Shostakovich, and Schoenberg all of which question the future of the violin concerto as a genre and challenge the composers’ quest for originality. In chapter 10, I review several lesser-known modern and contemporary violin concertos, which I consider promising candidates for permanent placement in future concert programming. A list of selected books, articles, and recordings, provide a way to learn more about the sources informing my research and to spur further studies in the experiential history of the violin concerto. Finally, an index of names concludes the volume.

1 IN THE BAROQUE Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Bach’s Four Keyboards

The music of Antonio Vivaldi has permeated the soundtrack of modern life through conciseness, structural logic, rhythmical vitality, and . . . exceptional marketable attributes. In fact, The Four Seasons, four concertos for violin, strings, and continuo composed in Mantua in 1720, have reached the pinnacle of the universally recognized artworks. However, Vivaldi, author of more than 1,500 compositions, was barely known at the turn of the twentieth century. Celebrated during his lifetime, he and his music suffered neglect during post-Baroque times and fell into oblivion in the Romantic era; it took a musical bluff played by a violin virtuoso to call attention to the Venetian composer commonly known as the “Red Priest” because of the color of his hair. In 1913, Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962) composed a Concerto in C for Violin, Strings and Organ, which he performed and eventually published in 1927 under Vivaldi’s name. Ultimately, Kreisler recorded it in 1945, ten years after the hoax had been revealed. The concerto was re-labeled “Written in the style of Vivaldi.” Vivaldi was born in Venice in 1678, a time when the city boasted an exceptionally rich and varied cultural life. The Venetian Republic enjoyed a unique political security resulting from a policy of strict neutrality in the frequent conflicts between Ottomans, Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and other tyrannical dynasties. Consequently, Venetian statehood flourished and provided plenty of exotic diversions for legions of foreign 1

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diplomats and thousands of visitors. As commerce prospered, music became a marketable commodity; composers were often approached directly by visitors wishing to take home an autographed musical manuscript as a souvenir of their Laguna sojourn. The more famous the composer the higher the price they were willing to pay. The Venetian Republic supported four music conservatories organized within four major welfare establishments known as Ospedali (Pietà, Mendicanti, Incurabili, and Derelitti). The Ospedale della Pietà existed in principle to support and educate orphaned, illegitimate, or abandoned girls. Vivaldi’s position of violin teacher and director of the orchestra at the girls’ conservatory attached to the Pietà extended— with some interruptions—from 1703 to 1740. Rich and influential foreign visitors sought out Vivaldi’s manuscripts for purchase as his fame began to spread throughout Europe. The most famous music publishers of the time became interested in Vivaldi’s music. For instance, Estienne Roger of Amsterdam managed to sign up Vivaldi with a very lucrative contract concerning the publication of nine groups of works, totaling some 130 pieces of music that included The Four Seasons. While providing music to Roger and his business partner Le Cène, Vivaldi continued his duties at the Pietà, which, besides teaching, often included the composition of two new concertos per month. Through salaries, commissions, royalties, and profits from private music sales, Vivaldi became a wealthy man, a status that urged him to finance operatic productions in Venice and abroad, especially in Vienna. He composed many operas and became his own impresario. At the end, though, it seems he lost everything; Vivaldi died a pauper in Vienna in 1742 like Mozart would fifty years later.

THE PISENDEL LEGACY German violin virtuoso and composer Johann Georg Pisendel (1687–1755) lived in Venice from April to December 1716 as the leader of a chamber ensemble patronized by Frederick Augustus II of Saxony who had taken residence in Venice from February 1716 to July 1717. In addition to Pisendel, the ensemble included Christian Petzold, Franz Xaver Richter, and Jan Dismas Zelenka. Pisendel became Vivaldi’s pupil and friend, and Vivaldi dedicated to Pisendel a great number of

I N T H E B AROQU E

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sonatas and concertos for violin. Those manuscripts are now at the Saxon State Library in Dresden. As a result of Pisendel’s Venetian stay, Dresden later became a major center of the Vivaldi vogue in Germany for many years afterward. In the wake of the Bach revival spearheaded by Felix Mendelssohn in 1829, Vivaldi emerged from obscurity as an incidental ghostly figure. Naturally, the concentration was on Bach—and the fact that he had reworked some of Vivaldi’s best-known pieces was of interest exclusively to musicologists. In fact, in 1905, German musicologist Arnold Schering published a monumental book in which Vivaldi’s historical and musical importance was seriously evaluated for the first time. Schering was able to examine the manuscripts of more than eighty concertos preserved in the Saxon State Library—the Pisendel legacy! Studies like Schering’s were the knowledge of a few scholars, musicology being then a newborn discipline. Concertgoers at large had to remain satisfied with music of the past that, from time to time, appeared in programs reflecting some sort of pseudo-intellectual reliquary. Fritz Kreisler, as noted before, enriched his own repertoire by performing, publishing, and recording a large number of short pieces that he claimed to have discovered under the most romantic circumstances in underground archives of monasteries, church vaults, and the like. It is important to remember that at the dawn of the recording industry anything sensational—true or false—was used to promote sales. The purported authors of Kreisler’s pieces were all glorious names of the past: Corelli, Tartini, Pugnani, Bach, Mozart, and . . . Vivaldi, whose notoriously spurious Violin Concerto in C elicited the interest of Marc Pincherle, a French scholar who specialized in violin matters. Pincherle became particularly enticed by Kreisler’s latest “discovery,” so much so that he decided to conduct a systematic investigation into Antonio Vivaldi’s life and works. If Vivaldi had written such a beautiful concerto, he must have composed others as was customary in the eighteenth century—and, indeed, Vivaldi had written more than eight hundred. Pincherle’s study was revelatory, showing the rediscovery of some two hundred works by the “Red Priest,” including The Four Seasons and other masterpieces. It revamped Schering’s original assessment of Vivaldi and stimulated younger scholars to pursue a serious evaluation of music by many violinist-composers of the Baroque period. Pincherle’s

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definitive work was finally published in Paris in 1948, while its English version, Vivaldi, Genius of the Baroque, did not see daylight until 1957.

PHILANTHROPY AT WORK In 1926, Alberto Gentili, professor of music history at Turin University, was asked by the curator of the Turin National University Library to investigate the contents of a collection of manuscripts that the monks of the Collegio San Carlo in Monferrato wished to sell. Excited to find that the majority of the works in the collection were by Antonio Vivaldi, Gentili endeavored to obtain the collection for the National University Library. That was accomplished through the generous assistance of banker Roberto Foá, after whose late son, Mauro, the collection was named. Upon close scrutiny, though, the volumes proved to represent only half of the original collection, which likely was split with the rest of its owner’s estate at some point. Gentili traced the original ownership of the Foá manuscripts back to Count Giacomo Durazzo—well-known patron of Gluck in Vienna and Austrian ambassador to Venice from 1764—and discovered that the grandson of Giacomo’s brother, Giuseppe Marcello Durazzo, was still living. By a stroke of good fortune, the Durazzo family was still in possession of the collection’s missing half. In 1930, the National University Library acquired the missing volumes with the assistance of industrialist Filippo Giordano, who, by a strange coincidence, had also lost a son, Renzo, after whom the second portion of the collection was named. The newly acquired music was sensational more for its variety than quantity alone. There were the scores of seventeen complete operas, which gave scholars their first opportunity to become acquainted with that aspect of Vivaldi’s creativity. Vivaldi’s sacred music was no less a revelation. Just think of the Gloria, Magnificat, and the Stabat Mater. Even the concertos held surprises, like the many works for bassoon, cello, viola d’amore, mandolin, and several other unexpected instruments, either solo or in combination. In sum, by the year 1930, there was enough music by Vivaldi to fuel a serious renaissance on behalf of the Master.

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THE POLITICAL SPIN The cultural climate promoted by the Fascist regime (1922–1942) encouraged musicians to compose and perform works inspired by nationalism, wars, conquests, and scientific and artistic achievements as long as they bore genuine Italian connotations. The study of Italian folk music was intensely encouraged, as was music education in public schools. Academies, symposia, and festivals dedicated to nationalistic celebrations sprang up all over Italy. If works of circumstance disturbed many people because of their mediocrity and blatant opportunism, the revival of glories of the Italian past (always safe ground) found many enthusiasts even among those opposed to political impositions. The likes of Giovan Battista Pergolesi, Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti, and the freshly rediscovered Antonio Vivaldi became instant beneficiaries of this cultural policy. Their works were earnestly proposed at entire ceremonial festivals designed to showcase proofs that Italian musical genius was superior to any other nations’—the claim being that Fascist Italy was not only the cradle of Ancient Rome and opera, but that she had finally found her own “Johann Sebastian Bach,” not without a strong hint at the possibility that Bach had learned from Vivaldi! The year 1939 saw the creation of the very first Vivaldi Festival, which took place September 16–21 at the Chigiana Academy in Siena under the artistic direction of Alfredo Casella (1883–1947) with the collaboration of two indefatigable supporters, American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and his companion, the violinist and musicologist Olga Rudge (1895–1996).

THE VIVALDI RENAISSANCE The Vivaldi Renaissance had finally been launched, and the musical world took notice of it while listening to the Italian Fascist government–promoted recording of The Four Seasons played by the Orchestra dell’Augusteo conducted by Bernardino Molinari. Shortly after, the regime collapsed, the dictator was assassinated, and a new, democratic Italy arose from the ashes of an atrocious war. So that 1942 wartime “naphthalene-coated” recorded performance of Vivaldi’s masterpiece was quickly put away with other memorabilia belonging to the past

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twenty years. For surviving musicians though, Vivaldi’s music became the radiant symbol of liberation and musical universality at the hands of a man of entrepreneurial savvy who took the newly lit Vivaldi torch and ran around the world in one of music history’s most successful marathons. That man was Renato Fasano (1902–1979). In 1947, Fasano founded and conducted the Collegium Musicum Italicum, an ensemble later known as I virtuosi di Roma, with which he circled the globe many times carrying the sound of Vivaldi’s music and that of The Four Seasons in particular.

LE QUATTRO STAGIONI—THE FOUR SEASONS The rationale behind The Four Seasons’ everlasting, extraordinary success may reside in the multifaceted uniqueness that characterizes this cycle of four violin concertos or a violin concerto in twelve movements when performed in a sequence. Therefore, a probe into the prismatic uniqueness of this work must begin by taking into account the role descriptive poetic text plays throughout the music. There are four original sonnets, each musing about a season of the year in the form of “realistic” representation of nature as well as advancing a metaphor for the phenomenological life cycle and its full gamut of emotions. “Descriptive” instrumental music, a forerunner of the Romantic notion of program music, was a fashionable curiosity in the Age of Enlightenment. Composers like Couperin, Marais, Biber, Kunhau, Locatelli, and even Johann Sebastian Bach (Capriccio sopra la lontananza del suo fratello dilettissimo) tried their hands at instrumental music with a subtext. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons though, because of their popularity, have been subjected to scrutiny on the ground that the sonnets—likely written by Vivaldi himself—could have been conceived before or after the music. In fact, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione Opera Ottava (The Trial of Harmony and Invention, Op. 8), Vivaldi’s anthology of twelve concertos, including the Seasons, was first published by MichelCharles Le Cène in Amsterdam in 1725, with the composer’s dedication to his patron Lord Wenzel Count von Morzin:

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I beg you not to be surprised if, among these few, feeble concerti, you find the Four Seasons that found favor with you such a long time ago, but please believe me when I say that I thought it right to publish them, because even though they are the same pieces, which have merely been augmented, apart from the sonnets, by a very clear description of all the things portrayed in them, I am confident that they will appear as new to you.

Such a declaration may lead one to suppose that Count Morzin was familiar with an earlier manuscript copy of the Four Seasons since sometime after the mid-1710s, when he began to use Vivaldi’s services as supplier of fresh compositions, and the four concertos were performed for him without the sonnets or descriptive captions interspersed in the music manuscript. Of course, it is also possible that the sonnets were declaimed by someone before each concerto or movement. The nonautograph manuscript copies of the instrumental parts preserved at the Henry Watson Music Library, Central Library, Manchester in the United Kingdom, originally belonging to the court collection of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in Rome, seem to “accurately transmit a text that is older than the retouched versions as published, despite their postdating the Amsterdam printed version,” wrote Paul Everett. The Manchester manuscript contains both sonnets and captions cued into the parts, in addition to many more performative indications, which allow the modern violinist more interpretative freedom than the published version since perhaps the former was intended to conform somewhat to the established musical style to which potential buyers were accustomed. In the absence of the Vivaldi’s original manuscript, probably submitted to Le Cène for the publishing engraving process and then lost, doubts about whether the sonnets were written before or after the music are bound to persist. That said, a theory advanced by Paul Everett regarding the possible origin of the sonnets is rather intriguing; he noticed compelling similarities between the verses of Vivaldi’s sonnets and many passages in John Milton’s L’allegro and Il penseroso, a three-hundred-line poem written circa 1631–1632 and used by Handel in 1740. John Milton (1608–1674) enjoyed great appreciation and friendship among the Italian members of the intelligentsia who were anxious to have Milton’s works, chiefly Paradise Lost, translated into Italian. Although poetic translations were a difficult and laborious undertaking,

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we know of a 1690 Latin version of Paradise Lost, which made the poem available to the international audience of the learned. However, it was not until 1729 when Paolo Rolli (1687–1765), an Anglophone poet born in Rome, published in London the first six books of Milton’s masterpiece. Thus, the hypothesis advanced by Everett that abstracts of other works by Milton, including L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, could have circulated in private circles takes hold with the supposition that somehow these works had gained Vivaldi’s attention. Notions of this sort enhance our understanding of the socio-cultural milieu during which Vivaldi’s Seasons came to light while informing performers and their audiences about how to better experience the artistic idiosyncrasies of this unique quadrifold violin concerto.

A TALE OF TWO STYLES Thanks to the curiosity elicited by the descriptive program imbued in the Four Seasons, these concertos achieved immediate popularity as soon as they were published. For instance, Spring was performed in Paris several times by celebrated virtuosi like Guignon, Gaviniès, Pagin, and Ferrari. When Vivaldi’s Four Seasons appeared though, there was already a repertory inspired by the seasonal cycle of nature, for instance the works by Simpson, Lully, Fisher, Schmierer, and, among Vivaldi’s contemporaries, Graupner, Joseph, Knecht, and Telemann, culminating later in Franz Joseph Haydn’s great oratorio The Seasons (1799–1801). Vivaldi composed some fifty concertos bearing dedications to individuals and implicit/explicit programmatic or symbolic connotations like La notte (The Night), Il gardellino (The Goldfich), La tempesta di mare (The Storm at Sea), Il piacere (The Pleasure), Il sonno (Sleep), and so on. Others contain specific performing instructions like the concerto senza cantin (without [the use of the] E string) or the effective setting of the instrumental ensemble in order to emulate l’eco in lontano ([effect of] faraway echo). As part of another category, some concertos reflect Vivaldi’s own operatic arias through the use of thematic and rhythmic references, which unveil the composer’s sophisticated pictorial and representative lexicon. However, a program as detailed as The

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Four Seasons accompanies none of these concertos, thus the uniqueness of the set here under review. In modern times, the first editions of The Four Seasons were those edited in 1919 by Alceo Toni and in 1927 by Bernardino Molinari, which encouraged performances that adhered scrupulously to the written page—as one can judge by listening to some very early recordings. These adventuresome violinists’ interpretations “sounded” almost restrained as the artists seemed self-consciously careful about crossing boundaries set by pure violin playing and what they perceived as naïve and formless theatrics suggested by the Seasons’ descriptive program. For them, performance practice of music belonging to a remote past had to be divested of any excess of expressivity typical of the late Romantic school of violin playing to which they ironically still belonged. The results were renditions that sounded as though they were carved out of marble, like those offered by violinists Alfredo Campoli in 1939 and Remy Principe in the Bernardino Molinari 1942 historical recording. Then came American violin virtuoso Louis Kaufman, who was able to turn ice into flame by playing Vivaldi’s music with technical aggressiveness, contained enthusiasm, and richness of tone—all dispatched with refined taste. Kaufman’s live and recorded performances set the path for the midcentury’s interpretive mode. It is by a remarkable coincidence, clever design, and progressive intuition that famous pedagogue Remy Principe (1889–1977)—the violinist who recorded the Seasons commercially for the first time in 1942 and then joined I virtuosi di Roma in 1947 as a ripieno player—became the creator of I Musici, a group of string players (six violins, two violas, two cellos, double bass, and a harpsichord) mostly drawn from his class at the Conservatorio di musica Santa Cecilia in Rome, which debuted in 1951. A sensational 1955 recording of The Four Seasons starring twenty-two-year-old Basque born, naturalized Italian violinist Felix Ayo sealed the extraordinary success of this ensemble. Meanwhile, I virtuosi di Roma and their leader, Renato Fasano, issued in 1959 their own recording of The Four Seasons. Both groups toured the world many times under the Vivaldi banner and preceded by a market-savvy distribution of their recordings, which sold by the millions. I Musici and I virtuosi di Roma were not alone though; the NBC Symphony Orchestra and its concertmaster, Misha Mishakoff, broadcast Vivaldi’s masterpiece under conductor Guido Cantelli in the early 1950s. Subsequently, Cantelli recorded The

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Four Seasons in 1955, with the New York Philharmonic and violinist John Corigliano, who recorded them again in 1965, with Leonard Bernstein. This severe performing style placed a great deal of emphasis on lushness of tone and intense vibrato that aimed perhaps at a sonic reproduction of vivid colors rather than bending one’s bow to the literary affectations required by Vivaldi’s sonnets, a factor that generated a much more fluid performing style. In the case of the Four Seasons, the popularity of the freer style of playing coincided directly or tangentially with the discovery of the Manchester version of Vivaldi’s masterpiece as the ensuing debate about sources’ authenticity opened the floodgates to more imaginative types of performance. What makes a performance more imaginative though? One could begin by enlisting the sonic dimension established by use of period instruments; lower tuning; raspy yet tender sound produced by the gut strings stricken by a shorter biting bow; faster tempos that compensate for the lack of sustained tone caused by both short arched bow and noninvasive vibrato; drastically accented dynamics often on the verge of the sensational; and disinhibited gestural performing style. In sum, a truly extroverted execution of Baroque music and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in particular must regale the listener with an evergreen sense of improvisation against the rigors of the written page—rigors which remain the prerogative of an academic rendition. It would be truly exceptional for a gifted violinist to offer a performance of The Four Seasons playing period instruments while reciting the sonnets in whatever language! Here is the English translation of Vivaldi’s sonnets preceded by the letters he placed in the parts to liaise descriptive program and musical notes.

Spring A

Spring has arrived, and joyfully

B

the birds greet her with glad song,

C

while at Zephyr’s breath the streams flow forth with a sweet murmur.

D

Her chosen herald, thunder and lightning, come to envelop the air in a black cloak;

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once they have fallen silent, the little birds return anew to their melodious incantation.

F

Then on the pleasant, flower-bedecked meadow, to the happy murmur of fronds and plants the goatherd sleeps next to his trusty dog.

G

To the festive sound of rustic bagpipes nymphs and shepherds dance beneath the beloved sky at the glorious appearance of spring.

Summer A

In a harsh season burned by the sun, man and flock languish, and the pine tree is scorched;

B

the cuckoo unleashes its voice, and soon

C

we hear the songs of the turtle-dove and the goldfinch.

D

Sweet Zephyr blows, but Boreas suddenly opens a dispute with his neighbor;

E

and the shepherd laments his fate for he fears a fierce squall is coming.

F

His weary limbs are robbed of rest by his fear of fierce thunder and lightning and by the furious swarm of flies and blowflies.

G

Alas, his fears are only too real: the sky fills with thunder and lightning, and hailstones hew off the heads of proud cornstalks.

Autumn A

The countryman celebrates with dance and song the sweet pleasure of a good harvest,

B

and many, fired by the liquor of Bacchus,

C

end their enjoyment by falling asleep.

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D

Everyone is made to abandon singing and dancing by the temperate air, which gives pleasure, and by the season which invites so many to enjoy the sweetness of sleep.

E

The huntsmen come out at the crack of dawn with their horns, guns and hounds:

F

the quarry flees and they track it;

G

already terrified and tired out by the great noise of the guns and hounds, the wounded beast

H

makes a feeble effort to flee, but dies in agony.

Winter A

To shiver, frozen, amid icy snow

B

in the bitter blast of a horrible wind;

C

to run, constantly stamping one’s feet;

D

and to feel one’s teeth chattering on account of the excessive cold.

E

To spend restful, happy days at the fireside while the rain outside drenches a good hundred;

F

to walk on the ice, and with slow steps

G

to move about cautiously for fear of falling;

H

to go fast, to slip and fall down: to go on the ice again and run fast

L

until the ice cracks and opens up.

M

To hear coming out of the iron gates

N

Sirocco, Boreas, and all the winds at war: that’s winter, but of a kind to gladden one’s heart.

In conclusion, the concertgoer attending a performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons may experience two types of performing styles: one that reflects a strict interpretation of the notes written on the page and another that departs substantially from the written text in favor of a

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more imaginative evocation of the human emotions Vivaldi wished to achieve by attaching a set of programmatic sonnets to his music. Artists and their audiences are not faced here with a question of right or wrong but merely with choices and preferences. A strict or traditional performance places a premium on violin playing that emphasizes lush tone, broad bowings, and refined musicianship, thus presenting Vivaldi’s music filtered through the teaching of Romanticism in an aesthetic fashion. Such an interpretation may leave the listener with a marvelous sense of awe and admiration for the performer viewed as the bearer of classy schooling. The other type of performing style, much more frequent these days, calls for the use of instruments employed at the time of Vivaldi, which are identified as original-period instruments or replicas thereof. The sound produced by such instruments and the techniques used to perform on them may sound indeed unfamiliar at first. The sound is raspier, the rhythmic articulations shorter and sharper, tempos faster, and the dynamics, from very soft to loud, much more sudden and unexpected. This type of performance becomes then rather improvisatory and theatrical, offering the instrumentalists a great deal of freedom while combining skills that would have been considered out of place or outright histrionic in a “traditional” performance. In substance, Vivaldi’s music remains untouched by its interpretative changes. Instead, it offers the listener a panoply of alternatives that can only enrich one’s listening experience, the reasons perhaps why these concertos have endured the test of time so well while continuing to regenerate themselves in new, unpredictable, amazing ways.

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685–1770): THE VIVALDI “LESSON” AND THE TRANSCRIPTIONS Bach was an inveterate transcriber bent on recasting his own music many times, from unaccompanied violin and cello to lute, from violin to keyboard, from keyboard to instrumental ensemble, from cantatas to concertos, and finally composing in open score format as in portions of The Musical Offering (BWV 1079) and the whole Art of Fugue (BWV 1080). Furthermore, Bach transcribed a great deal of music by other

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composers, including Antonio Vivaldi, who figured so preeminently in Bach’s catalog of works as to constitute a veritable “lesson.” Baroque music scholarship points to the years 1713–1714 as a time when Johann Sebastian Bach, organist at the ducal court in Weimar from 1700 to 1717, became acquainted with several concertos for violin and oboe by Antonio Vivaldi and the brothers Alessandro (1669–1747) and Benedetto (1686–1739) Marcello. During that period Bach transcribed a number of their concertos for solo harpsichord and organ, and years later for four harpsichords and strings. Self-education, curiosity, search for instrumental challenges, and professional obligations all played a role in inducing Bach to transcribe or to “rethink” Vivaldi’s music, which was first shown to him by Prince Johann Ernst of SaxeWeimar (1669–1715), a competent composer and keyboardist who had acquired Vivaldi’s newly published concertos Op. 3 (L’estro armonico) and the manuscripts of others during a study sojourn in the Netherlands. Very impressed by the new so-called Italian Style, which identified elements of cantabile and capriciousness displayed through a three-movement (Allegro-Adagio-Allegro) framework, Prince Johann Ernst crafted his own compositions in the fashionable idiom and commissioned Bach to transcribe for solo keyboard some of his own concertos as well as those by the contemporary masters whose music had just come into his possession. Out of the sixteen concerto transcriptions for solo harpsichord constituting Ernst’s commission, six were after Vivaldi: 1. Concerto No. 1 in D major, BWV 972 [Vivaldi Op. 3, No. 9 RV 230] 1 2. Concerto No. 2 in G major, BWV 973 [Vivaldi Op. 7, book 2, No. 2 RV 299 (Amsterdam, 1720)] 3. Concerto No. 4 in G minor, BWV 975 [Vivaldi Op. 4, No. 6 RV 316] 4. Concerto No. 5 in C major, BWV 976 [Vivaldi Op. 3, No. 12 RV 265] 5. Concerto No. 7 in F major, BWV 978 [Vivaldi Op. 3, No.3 RV 310] 6. Concerto No. 9 in G major, BWV 980 [Vivaldi Op. 4, No. 1 RV 381]

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Others were transcribed for organ: 1. Concerto in A minor, BWV 593 [Vivaldi Op. 3, No. 8 RV 522] 2. Concerto in C major, BWV 594 [Vivaldi “Grande Mogul” RV 208] 3. Concerto in D minor, BWV 596 [Vivaldi Op. 3, No. 11 RV 565] Furthermore, in 1730 while in Leipzig, Bach transcribed Vivaldi’s Concerto for Four Violins in B minor (Op. 3, No.10 RV 580) as the Concerto in A minor for Four Harpsichords and Strings, BWV 1065, here listed as No. 10. Bach studied Vivaldi’s style, thematic treatment, schemes of modulations, and forms, while making transcriptions that were remarkably faithful—although he enriched the harmony and texture and increased the thematic concentration. In sum, there is no doubt, though, that Vivaldi’s influence on Bach was profound, immediate, and durable to the point of generating in Bach the desire, after having “compressed” Vivaldi’s airy scores into the sonic domain of solo keyboard instruments, to explore the possibilities of the harpsichord as a “solo” instrument pitted against an orchestral background. During his period of service as court Kapellmeister at Cöthen (1717–1723), Bach wrote eight concertos for one harpsichord (BWV 1052-1059), three for two (BWV 1060-62), two for three (BWV 1063-64), and ultimately, as already noted, one for four (BWV 1065 after Vivaldi Op. 3, No. 10). Of great interest is the notion that these keyboard concertos were all transcriptions of works for solo violin and oboe that Bach had composed during an earlier period, and since the originals of some never resurfaced, musicologists felt encouraged and at times “obliged” to reconstruct or retranscribe the original versions. Such was the case with Bach’s well-known violin concertos in A minor (BWV 1041), E major (BWV 1042), and the Double Concerto in D minor (BWV 1043). It appears that Bach composed these concertos for his own use since, according to his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, the great keyboardist, “in his youth and until the approach of old age, [he] played the violin cleanly and penetratingly.” Later, from 1729 to 1741, when Bach took over the directorship of the Collegium Musicum upon becoming cantor and director musices at St. Thomas in Leipzig in 1723, Carl Philipp

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Emanuel Bach, Ludwig Krebs, and Johann Sebastian himself copied out the concertos’ performing parts as needed.

THE COLLEGIUM MUSICUM AT ZIMMERMANN’S COFFEEHOUSE The Collegium Musicum was a bourgeois concert enterprise that drew on university music students and both amateur and professional forces. It was founded and directed in 1702 by Georg Philip Telemann, soon succeeded by Melchior Hoffmann (1704–1715), Johann Gottfried Vogler (1716–1720), and Georg Balthasar Schott (1720–1729). After Schott’s departure from Leipzig to Gotha in March 1729, Bach assumed the Collegium’s organizational and artistic leadership. The Collegium Musicum became Bach’s center of secular music activities in Leipzig, offering regularly scheduled weekly concerts that took place at the Zimmermannische Coffee-Haus while occasional celebratory performances were represented at ad hoc locations. Aside from a large repertoire of instrumental music, some vocal compositions entered the Collegium’s repertoire, like the two secular cantatas The Contest of Phoebus and Pan (BWV 201) composed in 1729 and the appropriately titled Coffee Cantata of 1734–1735 (BWV 211), which was a sort of indirect endorsement of Zimmermann’s coffeehouse.

THE VIOLIN CONCERTOS The division of Bach’s musical estate was not as intriguing as Vivaldi’s but perplexing nevertheless. The Master’s elder brothers inherited the bulk of the vocal works, whereas the younger sons, Johann Christoph Friedrich and Johann Christian, seem to have been the primary recipients of the chamber works, which with few exceptions did not survive. Bach’s violin concertos have traditionally been considered works of the Cöthen period (1717–1723), but recent research into the sources and stylistic premises of Bach’s chamber music has shed serious doubt on previous assumptions. Many surviving original sources clearly belong to the years after 1729, when Bach directed in Leipzig.

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The Violin Concerto in A minor, listed as No. 1, has survived in the form of six original parts: Violino concertino (solo part), Violino I, Violino II, Viola, and two continuo parts probably written out in 1730 for performances at the Collegium Musicum. Johann Sebastian Bach wrote out the solo violin and viola parts as well as all the parts of the last movement except the first continuo part, which was penned by Carl Philipp Emanuel. This set of parts is now preserved at the Berlin State Library. Scholars do not exclude the possibility that Bach himself had used these parts in arranging this work into the Harpsichord Concerto in G minor (BWV 1058) between 1738 and 1742. The events surrounding the Violin Concerto in E minor, known as No. 2 but probably composed before the Concerto in A minor, are by comparison a bit more complex. The only extant set of manuscript score and parts were written around 1760 by Johann Friedrich Hering (1724–1810), a member of C. P. E. Bach’s Berlin circle. Thus, speculations may arise as whether Hering copied his material from a now lost original score provided to him by C. P. E. Bach or readapted for the violin the original score of the Harpsichord Concerto in D major (BWV 1054), which Bach wrote between 1738 and 1742. Regarding the celebrated Concerto for Two Violins in D minor (BWV 1043), there is no reason to question that its period of composition occurred around 1730. The work’s thoroughly contrapuntal design (the dense three-part texture at the very opening sets the tone for the whole) and the extensive ritornello structure display a maturity of writing that apparently benefited from Bach’s experience with large-scale instrumental designs and sophisticated textures in cantata movements. The overall harmonic planning, as well as the shape and gesture of the prolonged melodic phrases in the slow movement, provide considerations that place this work into the deliberately modern, “progressive” style of the middle Leipzig years. A further transformation that strengthens the forward-looking features of Bach’s style can also be observed in the later arrangement of the piece, dating from around 1736, as the Concerto in C minor for two harpsichords and strings (BWV 1062). Not only does this score vividly illustrate the transformational process, but it is invaluable to editing the violin version, since it allows one to fill in the missing passages in the ripieno parts and sheds light on several uncertain readings in the three original parts (two solo violins and continuo). Performers of the violin version of the Double

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Concerto should also find it interesting to compare the tempo marks Bach gave to the movements of the harpsichord version, whereby they were undoubtedly chosen not only in consideration of the two new solo instruments. Hence the second movement is an “Andante e piano” instead of “Largo ma non tanto,” and the third movement is an “Allegro assai.” We have no information about the kind of performance, or performances, the D minor concerto might have received in Bach’s Leipzig Collegium Musicum, but it is safe to assume that Bach himself participated therein. As the participation of the young C. P. E. Bach in preparing the parts might suggest, J. S. Bach might well have been joined—for a performance in the early 1730s—by his two eldest sons, Wilhelm Friedemann and Carl Philipp Emanuel, both of whom played violin and keyboard instruments. Various configurations—father and one son playing violins, the other son keyboard; both sons playing violins, the father keyboard—would also have been possible. These three violin concertos have been a strong staple of the repertoire since the nineteenth century’s Bach revival. The granitic structure of the Concerto in E major, for instance, has offered violinists of the Romantic school the opportunity to emphasize their propensity for big, expressive tone that favors slower tempos like the gorgeously grave second movement. On the other hand, the Concerto in A minor is lighter, lyrical, and more virtuosic, particularly in the third movement. It has always been a violinist’s favorite next to the perennially challenging concerto for two violins in D minor, the so-called Double Concerto. Bach’s instrumental music is experienced differently than Vivaldi’s as it lacks literary associations or frame of reference. It is simply performed for its own sake. One plays these concertos for the joy of making music one measure at a time, according to the master plan indicated by the written page. It is up to the violinist to decide upon the most appropriate reading of such a plan. As mentioned before, Bach indirectly has provided us with interpretive options through his keyboard transcriptions, which may be still problematic regarding tempos and articulation depending on whether a given concerto is performed on the piano or harpsichord. A scholarly informed performance should be executed on the harpsichord, so it is in the spirit of the plucked, dry sonority of the harpsichord that the violinist should readapt his or her playing when performing Bach’s concertos. However, it is not unusual

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for the concertgoer to experience a densely lyrical performance or a spiritedly staccato one of the same concerto played even by the same artist.

2 MOZART—HAYDN—BRUNETTI— TOMASINI

INTO THE WOODS

Johann Sebastian Bach’s violin and keyboard concertos lost much of their appeal shortly after the composer’s death in 1750. In fact, with the demise of Georg Frederick Handel in 1759, the 1750s marked the end of the Baroque era. A new style alternatively called Rococò, Galant, Pre-Classical, or Early Classical found its major proponents and practitioners in Bach’s sons Johann Christian (1735–1782), active in London, and Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714–1788), who held a strong school of followers in Berlin. Bach’s sons contributed considerably to the development of the keyboard solo concerto in line with the mechanical morphing of the harpsichord into a fortepiano and the “Symphony,” the new orchestral genre and form that arose from the ashes of the old Concerto Grosso. The concerto for violin, on the other hand, suffered a decline in terms of innovation as the instrument’s construction reached its apogee at the hands of luthier Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737) at a time when Vivaldi’s galvanizing concertos saturated the repertoire. Only Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770), a progressive thinker and celebrated violinist/composer came close to embracing the so-called Style of Sensibility (Empifindsamkeit Stil), a movement highlighting the expressive potential of central slow movement of the concerto for violin or any other instrument through sensitivity already foreshadowed in some of Vivaldi’s program21

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matic and/or “titled” concertos. C. P. E. Bach and Johann Joachim Quantz (1697–1773) championed the Style of Sensibility in treatises that pointed the way toward Romanticism. That said, it is important to remember in the context of this narrative that during the period between the death of Johann Sebastian Bach and the middle 1770s, when Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed his violin concertos, the violin repertoire resembled a forest thick with works written by hundreds of composers now forgotten and yet deserving of consideration on the grounds that the violin concerto as a genre, once liberated from the aristocratic/ecclesiastical courtly hold, became the staple of the virtuoso’s career. Virtuoso composers active in this transitional period presented their violin concertos as showcases of technical bravura in the fast outer movements and expressive sentimentality in the central slow movement in order to provide the new ticket-purchasing audience with a fully satisfactory and balanced range of emotions. Of distinction were works reflecting the performing skills of violinists like Pietro Nardini (1722–1793), praised by Leopold Mozart for his lovely tone; Domenico Ferrari (1722–1780), a pupil of Tartini who made a strong impression in Vienna; Maddalena Lombardini-Sirmen (1745–1818), the last of Tartini’s pupils and composer of inventive concertos; Gaetano Pugnani (1731–1798), the renown teacher of Viotti; Felice Giardini (1716–1793), whose career was centered in London; Luigi Borghi (1745–1806), whose style foreshadowed Mozart’s; Giovanni Battista Sammartini (1700–1775), who achieved fame as a symphonist ahead of Franz Joseph Haydn; Antonio Lolli (1725–1800), a wayward sensational technical wizard; Franz Benda (1709–1786), who served Frederick the Great of Prussia for over half a century; William Herschel (1738–1822), celebrated English astronomer and violin virtuoso; Johann Stamitz (1717–1757), founder of the renown Mannheim Orchestra; Christian Cannabich (1731–1798), successor of Stamitz and leader of the Mannheim Orchestra; Georg Christoph Wagenseil (1715–1777), important predecessor of Haydn; Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739–1799), the most prolific Austrian composer of violin concertos of his generation; Johann Baptist Vanhal (1739–1813), one of the most popular and widely known composers working in Vienna during the years when Haydn and Mozart flourished in that city; Pierre Gavinies (1728–1800), the most esteemed and influential among Leclair’s successors; and Jean-Babtiste

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Davaux (1742–1822), a composer who specialized in concertos for multiple instruments known as Symphonies Concertantes. The concertos composed by these virtuosos, although they never entered the standard repertoire, are being revived now by accurate musicological research and by the specialized recording industry, whose hawkish “artists and repertoire” experts are determined to leave no stone unturned.

LEOPOLD MOZART’S TREATISE ON THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF VIOLIN PLAYING (1756) It is a matter of speculation as to whether Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ever performed the violin concertos he composed in 1773 and 1775 or whether Salzburg Concertmaster Antonio Brunetti, Michael Haydn’s brother-in-law, premiered them following his appointment in 1776. Whichever the case, it is plausible that Mozart’s considerable abilities as a violinist did not equal his prowess at the keyboard insomuch that, after 1780, he abandoned the violin altogether in favor of playing the viola in occasional chamber ensembles. Mozart was trained on the violin by his father Leopold (1719–1787), a true man of the Age of Enlightenment knowledgeable about anything—from music to history, literature, sciences, and mathematics. In 1755, Leopold completed his Treatise, which was published in 1756, the year of Wolfgang Amadeus’s birth. This fundamental book, reprinted and translated several times, assured its author a solid reputation even if, at the employ of the Prince/Bishop of Salzburg (Sigismund III of Schrattenbach succeeded by Hieronymus von Colloredo), Leopold’s professional status never rose above that of deputy music director (notwithstanding his assuming full responsibilities for the music composed and performed at both court and church for long stretches of time amid the many political intrigues that colored Archbishop Colloredo’s court at the hands of his favorite Italian court musicians). The rigor of the pedagogical principles and practical application outlined in Leopold Mozart’s Treatise offers, when compared to the level of technical difficulties required by the violin concertos and the challenging solo movements Mozart interspersed in various Serenades and Divertimentos of the same period, a fair assumption that the prodigious

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young man played the violin well. A letter he wrote to his father describes the outcome of a concert performed in Munich in fall 1777: The day before yesterday . . . we had a little concert here. . . . I played my [keyboard] concertos in C [K. 246], B flat [K. 238], and E flat [K. 271], and after that my trio [Divertimento in B flat, K. 254]. . . . As a finale I played my last Cassation in B flat [Divertimento in B flat, K. 287]. They all opened their eyes! I played as though I were the finest fiddler in all of Europe.

Leopold plaintively replied: I am not surprised that when you played your last Cassation they all opened their eyes. You yourself do not know how well you play the violin; if only you would do yourself credit and play with energy, with more whole heart and mind, yes, just as if you were the premier violinist in Europe!

Despite Leopold’s paternalistic admonition, it must not have been easy, even for a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, to strive for preeminence as a violin soloist when the world was surrounded by the virtuoso stars mentioned before whose performing and compositional styles were beginning to coalesce into a “classical” mold.

SALZBURG Modern Salzburg, the fourth-largest city in Austria, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are indelibly branded together as a cultural destination, a world treasure for all music lovers to discover and enjoy. The Mozarteum, Salzburg’s venerable institution, reigns supreme over the city like the Archbishopric did at the time of Mozart when, to borrow John Rosselli’s evocative prose, [Salzburg] was a handsome, prosperous town in a part of the German-speaking lands where Roman Catholicism, imposed once again by force after the Reformation, now held sway as the unquestioned, often deeply felt religion. It was the seat of a principality ruled by an archbishop, one of the hundreds of states large and small that made up the Holy Roman Empire—a ramshackle, weak leftover from the

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Middle Ages, spread over much of central Europe. Contemporaries tended to think of Salzburg as geographically part of Bavaria to the north; Munich, the Bavarian capital, was the nearest large city. To the south, Italy was within easy reach: the town had for over a century employed Italian architects and musicians, and Italian musical influence was strong. Mozart was born into a part of Europe where nationality in the modern sense did not exist. As he grew up, some educated people—himself among them— talked at times warmly of promoting the German language and German music, but they did not look for a united German state. If Germanness had a capital (which was doubtful) that capital was Vienna, but in Vienna as in Salzburg the educated looked almost as much to France and Italy as to central Europe. Mozart was to dedicate his string quartets to Haydn in Italian (the language of music), and now and then to write to his family in Italian or French. His baptismal names symbolized these openings to different cultures. The first two names, those of the saint on whose day he was born, marked the family’s steadfast Catholic piety. Wolfgang, the name his family chose to call him by, was straightforwardly German. Theophilus (“lover of God”) was the Greek form of a name often rendered in Latin as Amadeus, or at times in German as Gottlieb. Mozart himself in later life more often than not signed himself Wolfgang Amadé—another linguistic hybrid, for the Amadé, a form occasionally met with in German-speaking lands, was a conflation of Amadeus and the French Amédée.

Scholars who have investigated the social interactions occurring between the Mozart family and the dynamics of daily life in Salzburg are often divided in their assessments juxtaposing the family’s apparent snobbishness against a perhaps too provincial town for their talent and Archbishop Colloredo’s lack of artistic empathy and a bit of hostility toward them. Yet Leopold, always the practical man anchored to the time-honored duties of courtly subservience, was determined to carve out of the situation the dignified employment he and his family deserved. Of course, reality resided somewhat in the middle. It may be fair to say that the Mozart family felt trapped in a socio-political vicious circle to which Leopold held steady while Wolfgang, striving for progressive artistic freedom, eventually escaped. As a consequence, one could detect a certain acrimony between father and son that could be

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symbolized by the level of violin playing Leopold expected from his son pitted against the expressive possibilities of the mechanically evolving piano that so much attracted Wolfgang’s attention. In all, Salzburg represented a situation marred by a series of turns and twists that for Mozart became a complex existential and professional problem gradually turning from the idyllic to the unbearable. These thoughts aside, it remains an undeniable fact that in that very despised Salzburg with its narrow-minded court, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart drew benefits from the patronage and esteem of several influential individuals, including the supercilious Colloredo.

1775: THE YEAR OF THE VIOLIN I think of 1775 as the “year of the violin” when following the path of Mozart’s works for violin and orchestra. In May 1772, with Wolfgang’s performance of his one-act dramatic serenade Il sogno di Scipione, composed to honor Count Heronymus Colloredo’s election as princearchbishop of Salzburg, assumed catalytic importance. Pleased by the performance, the newly elected ruler appointed Mozart concertmaster of the Salzburg court orchestra with the yearly salary of 150 florins and then, on October 24, granted him permission to leave Salzburg for a third trip to Italy. There, in November–December, Mozart took part in rehearsals and in the premiere performance of the opera Lucio Silla (Milan, Teatro Regio, December 26). In January 17, 1773, also in Milan’s Theatine Church, he offered the first performance of the motet Exultate, Jubilate K.165, 1 written for and performed by the celebrated castrato and composer Venanzio Rauzzini (1746–1810). Mozart returned to Salzburg on March 13 and traveled to Vienna with Leopold from July 14 to September 26. This Vienna trip, though, failed to materialize a position sought by Wolfgang in the imperial capital. Works of notice composed during this period were the Piano Concerto No. 5 in D major, K. 175, possibly the Violin Concerto No. 1 in B flat, K. 207, and the Serenade (Final-Musik) No. 3 in D major, K. 185, commissioned by the Autretter family. The work, scored for two violins, viola, bass, two oboes (two flutes), two horns, and two trumpets, includes an Andante (second movement) featuring a solo violin. Mozart remained in Salzburg throughout 1774, except for a trip to Munich on

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December 6 for the first performance of his comic opera La finta giardiniera, which took place on January 13, 1775. To 1774 belong the Serenade No. 4 in D major, K. 203 for two violins, viola, bass, two oboes (two flutes), bassoon, two horns, and two trumpets, written for Colloredo, and the Concertone in C major, K. 190 for two violins and orchestra with oboe and cello obbligati. The “Colloredo” serenade includes an Allegro (fourth movement) featuring a solo violin. It is likely that Wolfgang conducted and played these works as a violinist, including the Concertone, which he could have performed either with Leopold, Michael Haydn, or the archbishop himself, who often fancied to play the violin in the orchestra. Mozart returned to Salzburg from Munich on March 7, 1775, to compose the opera or dramatic cantata Il re pastore, premiered at the Archbishop’s Palace in Salzburg on April 23 on the occasion of the visit to Salzburg of Archduke Maximilian Francis of Austria. This work included a beautiful Aria for soprano and obbligato violin entitled “L’amerò, sarò costante.” After Il re pastore Mozart composed the Violin Concertos K. 211 (June 14), K. 216 (September 12), K. 218 (October), and K. 219 (December) and spent 1776 entirely in Salzburg composing prolifically while Neapolitan violinist Antonio Brunetti, Michael Haydn’s brother-in-law and a member of the court orchestra, advanced to the post of Konzertmeister, replacing Mozart who was traveling to Mannheim and Paris with his mother. Works featuring extended violin solos composed in 1776 included the Serenade No. 6 in D major, K. 239, “Serenata notturna” for two small orchestras, one comprising two solo violins, solo viola, and violone (double bass), the other two violins, viola, cello, and timpani. In this serenade, the principal solo violin assumes a concertante role throughout. The following work, Serenade No. 7 in D major, K. 250 for two violins, viola, bass, two oboes (two flutes), two bassoons, two horns, and two trumpets, was commissioned by the Haffner family on the occasion of the wedding of Marie Elisabeth Haffner to Franz Xaver Spaeth. The work, featuring a solo violin in the second, third, and fourth movements (Menuetto, Andante, Rondo), was performed on July 21, the eve of the wedding. Other large-scale compositions featuring movements with solo violin are the Divertimento No. 10 in F major, K. 247 for two violins, viola, bass, and two horns and the Divertimento No. 11 in D major, K. 251 for oboe, two violins, viola, bass, and two horns. In these works it is possible that Mozart

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conducted the various ensembles and performed the violin solos himself unless it was Brunetti who assumed the soloist role. It is important to remember that Antonio Brunetti requested that Mozart replace the finale of Concerto No.1 in B flat, K. 207 with the Rondo in B flat, K. 269 and the Adagio of Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219 with the Adagio in E major, K. 261—perhaps in view of an integral performance of the five concertos or a partial revival of them. In 1777, Mozart composed the Divertimento No. 15 in B flat, K. 287 for two violins, viola, bass, and two horns, whose fourth and sixth movements (Adagio, Andante) feature a solo violin. Mozart returned to Salzburg from Paris in 1779 to reconcile with the family after the death of his mother in Paris and to ponder his next career move. He continued to compose works in concertante style, a trend started in Paris with the Sinfonia Concertante for oboe, clarinet, bassoon, French horn, and orchestra, K. 297b; the Concerto in C for flute, harp, and orchestra, K. 299; and the Concerto in E flat for two pianos and orchestra, K. 365/ 316a. The new batch of works in the genre were to include a Concerto for piano, violin, and orchestra in D major, K. 315f, which remained unfinished, followed by the also unfinished Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola, and cello in A major, K. 320a, which was perhaps a try out for the Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola, and orchestra in E flat, K. 363. There is no information regarding for whom the great Sinfonia Concertate, K. 363 was written, who performed it, or when. That said, one could speculate that the first interpreters were Antonio Brunetti and Mozart. The year 1781 sees the composition of the Rondo for violin and orchestra in C major, K. 372, written specifically for Brunetti in Vienna during the Colloredo residency in the imperial capital. Two years later, Mozart composed Two Duos for violin and viola, K. 423/24 to help an ailing Michael Haydn fulfill a commission of six duos. Thereafter, Mozart ceased composing for the violin as a solo instrument.

EXPERIENCING THE VIOLIN CONCERTOS Mozart’s Violin Concertos Nos. 3, 4, and 5 are the milestones of the violin concerto classical repertoire—very frequently performed, recorded hundreds of times by hundreds of violinists, and studied by anyone serious about learning how to play the violin well. Although

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composed in close proximity, these concertos reveal an extraordinary diversity of musical ideas, tone colors, and progressive maturity and an obsequiousness to form that only Mozart was able to infringe upon in remarkable ways. Consider the Concerto in G major, K. 216. Completed on September 12, 1775, this Concerto a Violino, as identified in Mozart’s autograph, is scored for solo violin, two oboes substituted by two flutes in the second movement, two horns, and strings. The opening measures of the first movement (Allegro) recall closely the orchestral ritornello (Introduction) of the aria “Aer tranquillo e dì sereni” sung by Aminta in the two-act serenata Il re pastore, K. 208 which premiered in Salzburg on April 23, 1775. Obviously a favorite theme still ringing in Mozart’s ears, this lifting, cheerful beginning suits the violin magnificently as the opening G major chord takes full advantage of the resonance emanating from the D open string, and even from the open G string when added on to the chord by some performers. Such a start, though, does not project the violinist on stage like a dramatic operatic character as the quotation of the aria would have suggested. Instead, it turns the violinist into a graceful dancer set in motion by the sweeping gesture of the bow, thus establishing the dynamics of the entire movement. In fact, soon our dancer invites the first oboe to join in with imitative episodes ending with the violinist holding up the note G above the staff as if it were a question mark urging an answer. That answer comes in the form of a brief flourishing, a reverence, before resolving onto a short bridge passage tapered off by a descending line played by the oboes in thirds, which brings the piece to the recapitulation (the beginning of the piece) followed by the customary cadenza. Then the movement comes to a close. The second movement (Adagio) is a transparent study in colors. First, Mozart substitutes the two oboes with two flutes paired with lower horns in D, an interesting combination that blends the diaphanous sound of the flutes and the corporeal tone of the horns. Secondly, Mozart mutes violins and violas, which are supported by nonmuted pizzicatos played by cellos and basses so as to create an unusual sonic tapestry for the solo violin to web a beautiful romance urged on by triplets played by the violins and intermittently by the violas. The incantatory beauty of this movement foreshadows the Mozart of the late piano concertos. The third movement (Rondeau) illuminates the scene again through a whirlwind of a 3/8 staccato tempo as the oboists put the

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flutes away and regain possessions of their original instruments while the horns are played in the bright key of G. The violin solo is accompanied most of the time only by violins, perhaps Mozart’s homage to an honored Italian concerto practice. The tempo is brisk and requires considerable dexterity of both left hand and bow arm until all comes to a stop, a so-called GP (grand or general pause), after which, like a miniscule change of theatrical scene, the music turns to a very charming Andante, a gavotte played on point (to continue our dancing metaphor) by the solo violinist accompanied by pizzicato strings imitating the sound of a mandolin. Quickly though, the “powdery” gavotte gives way to a rustic Allegretto that proposes a gentrified version of an old popular tune called the Strassburger. Here the solo violin alternates bravura variations to a hornpipe-like drone employing the open strings fiddle like. The rustic dance ends with another GP. Then, the Tempo I (tempo of the beginning) recapitulates the initial Rondeau and brings this brilliant sequence of events to a close. Mozart’s Violin Concerto in G, a violinist’s ballet in multiple tableaux, is as much fun to perform as it is to listen to it. It is pure joie de vivre! Concerto No. 4 in D major, K. 218, entitled in Mozart’s autograph Concerto per il Violino, is, on the other hand, a serious composition written barely a month after its vivacious predecessor. The initial movement (Allegro) opens with an imposing, militarish “call to attention” on the note D vigorously played by the orchestra in unison. This gesture underscores the whole orchestral introduction, including the second theme briefly stated by violins and violas again in densely packed unison. Then the return of the marching orders ushers in the solo violin, which having indeed “heard” the initial “call to attention,” reiterates it in high positions on the E string. Absolute precision of articulation and intonation are the characteristics of this movement in which the performer must be guarded against playing its lyric theme with distracting sentimentality. The second movement (Andante cantabile) is just as serious and compact as the opening Allegro. It sings intensely and often from within the melodic and harmonic fabric of the composition. In addition, Mozart exploits the lower strings of the violin, thus adding intensity to the already terse character of the piece. The final Rondeau is brilliantly conceived. Episodic and spirited, it presents two alternating themes marked Andante grazioso and Allegro ma non troppo, which

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Mozart flashes before the listener like the two sides of a coin. However, the composer breaks the incantation by introducing another Andante grazioso, which contains a hornpipe drone that recalls similar moments heard in the Rondeau of the Concerto in G. The Concerto No. 5 in A major, K. 219, indicated in Mozart’s autograph as Concerto di Violino, was completed December 20, 1775. Scored for violin solo, two oboes, two horns, and strings, this concerto, fifth and last of the set, is often referred to as “Turkish” because of some Eastern European, or rather Ottoman, colorations present in the final Rondeau. Mozart could have intended this Concerto di Violino as a sort of theatrical fantasy rather than a formal concerto. For example, in the first movement, the indication Allegro aperto, I would interpret aperto (open) as a qualifier referring to amplitude of sonority. We hear the resounding key of A major branded upon the relatively compact orchestral introduction, which has all the characteristics of a curtainraiser. But it is interrupted by the appearance on the proscenium of the solo violin playing a brief Adagio that consists of a soft melody accompanied by a murmur of strings punctuated softly by the winds. It is, in effect, a prologue, a wordless recitative that serves to suspend the listener’s breath mid-air, a scena aperta—Mozart could have called it— before finally giving the go-ahead to the definitive Allegro aperto when the solo violin begins the concerto in earnest. The second movement (Adagio) is a sumptuous fresco of large lyrical proportions whose pathos anticipates some of the most touching moments heard in Franz Schubert’s music decades after Mozart’s death. Performers must be careful not to overdramatize the movement’s lyrical content with the use of excessive vibrato or a passionate tone, which, though Mozart certainly intuited at age nineteen, he was not ready to commit to notation. This was perhaps the reason Antonio Brunetti did not understand this movement’s subtleties, which he called “artificialities,” and asked Mozart to write a replacement. Mozart complied with Brunetti’s request and, in 1776, composed the Adagio in E major, K. 261 scored for violin solo, two flutes (repeating again the formula used in the slow movement of the Concerto in G major just to temper the level of passion in favor of serenity), two horns, and strings. The movement is slightly shorter but, ironically, even more “advanced” than the original in the sense that it reflects a contemplative, elegiac serenity anticipating the essence of Beethoven’s Violin Romances of 1800–1801.

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At any rate, it appears that the new piece satisfied Brunetti’s request. After so much intensity, Mozart concluded the fifth and last concerto of the cycle with an authentic divertissement: a Tempo di Menuetto written with extreme elegance followed by an Allegro showcasing some exotic curiosities, the “Turkish” part of the concerto. Then, a return to the Tempo di Menuetto concludes the concerto in a surprisingly evanescent fashion. Much has been written about the “Turkish” coloration of this piece, whose music, according to Neal Zaslaw “[Mozart] had already used it in a ballet entitled Le gelosie del Serraglio (Jealousy in the Harem), K. 135a, written in December 1772 in Milan for performance with his justcompleted opera Lucio Silla, K. 135.” The listener, though, is not treated here to evocations of the exotic or musical vignettes of the Orient. Mozart does not add to the orchestra percussion instruments used in Ottoman marching bands or nontonal melodic intervals. Instead, he entices the listener with an array of dynamic subtleties like sudden fortes followed by pianos, unison chromatic scales running in crescendos and diminuendos, snapping appoggiaturas played by the double basses with their bows well pressed on the strings so to imitate the sound of a whip in a sort of cartoonish charge. In sum, this episode is pure fun to perform and to listen to with a smile. Violin Concertos No. 4 in D, K. 218 and No. 5 in A, K. 219 form an attractive contrasting pair much appreciated in the nineteenth century by celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim, who published performing editions completed by magnificent cadenzas, thus assuring the two works a very secure place in the concert repertoire and the teaching studio. Lacking Joachim’s endorsement, Concerto No. 3 in G, K. 216 suffered some neglect as it came to be regarded somewhat as less important than Concertos 4 and 5. If so, though, Concerto No. 3 is certainly more important than Concerto No. 1 in B flat, K. 207 and Concerto No. 2 in D major, K. 211, which, in recent times, have become niche items for recording connoisseurs. The second concerto (Concerto di Violino), dated in Mozart’s autograph June 14, 1775, is scored for violin solo, two oboes, two horns, and strings. Cast in the traditional three movements: Allegro moderato—Andante—Rondeau (Allegro), this concerto shows Mozart’s intent at disengaging the violin concerto form from his predecessors’ yoke, mainly the violinist composers of the Mannheim School who employed a sort of forma chiusa (closed form as opposed to the

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open form [aperta] Mozart finally succeeded in unleashing in Concerto No. 5), which called for expressivity firmly contained within the rigors of the bar line and technical passages. The writing style of Concerto No. 2 is still inhibited by the old school, although the second movement, Andante, anticipates freer lyrical passages soon to be fully developed in Concerto No. 3. The Concerto No. 1 in B flat, K. 207, indicated in Mozart’s autograph as Concerto à violino solo, is even more anchored in the Mannheim tradition than No. 2, so much so that, in 1776, Brunetti required Mozart to compose a new last movement if he wished him to play this early concerto. Again, Mozart complied with the request and penned the lovely Rondo in B flat major, K. 269. This concerto, the least performed of the group, was apparently composed in 1773 according to some Mozart authorities. The work would assume particular importance as the experimental product of a seventeen-year-old genius. A comparison between the original third movement, Presto, and the Rondo, K. 269 composed three years later, shows considerable evidence that K. 207 was indeed a much earlier work—a good reason why violinists prefer to perform the concerto with the original finale and Rondo, K. 269 as a stand-alone piece or paired with the Adagio in E major, K. 261. Sadly Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart did not compose a violin concerto later in life, a work which could have been à lá par with the great piano concertos of the Vienna period or the sublime clarinet concerto. What would a Mozart mature violin concerto have sounded like? We can only imagine, but we should look at the way he treated the violin solo in the Haffner Serenade, K. 250 of 1776, whose Rondo is so inventive that it elicited Fritz Kreisler to make a magisterial transcription for violin and piano widely performed ever since. The immortal Sinfonia Concertante for violin, viola, and orchestra in E flat major, K. 354 composed in 1779 shows an advanced use of the violin and, by extension the viola, never heard before, especially in the second movement, Andante. Mozart provided this double concerto with original cadenzas, which should constitute the model for violinists wishing to add their own cadenzas when performing Mozart’s violin concertos. Sinfonia Concertante was followed two years later by the Rondo in C major, K. 373, composed on the spot in Vienna for Brunetti when Mozart, Brunetti, and the castrato Francesco Ceccarelli joined Colloredo for some special music making in the Imperial City.

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Immediately after Mozart’s death in 1791, publishers rushed to bring out violin concertos written in Mozart’s style but sold to the public as authentic works by the master. Violin Concerto No. 6 in E flat major, K. 268 appeared to boast genuine merits, but later scholarly analyses disqualified it as authentic. The same fate surrounded Concerto No. 7 in D major, K. 271; however, a Concerto in D major nicknamed “Adelaide” took everyone by surprise in 1933 when the work’s publishers claimed that the concerto’s manuscript was discovered in France. Charming, captivating, and well written for the instrument, this concerto could have been a very early work composed by Mozart while in Paris with his mother. A “reconstructed” score was published under the editorship of Paul Hindemith and was eagerly performed and recorded by Yehudi Menuhin among others. Years later, it turned out that the “Adelaide Concerto” was a clever fabrication at the hands of French brothers Marius and Henri Casadesus, known for their forgeries of music of the past. Michael Haydn (1737–1806), younger brother of Joseph and Salzburg colleague of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, represented the antithesis of his younger colleague. He was content to spend forty-three prolific years at the service of the Bishopric of Salzburg. Apparently, Michael never complained about life in Salzburg, though Leopold Mozart often reported in his letters to Wolfgang about Michael Haydn’s addiction to alcohol and the spectacle he created while presiding from the organ at church functions in a state of stupor! Trained as a violinist, Michael Haydn held the title of concertmaster but played the viola in the orchestra and performed mostly on the organ. As a composer, Haydn’s wide reputation rested largely on his sacred works, despite more than forty symphonies and a substantial number of divertimentos. Concertos occupy only a small place in his catalog. In fact, only three concertos for violin have resurfaced thus far. It is the one in A major that deserves attention in this chapter’s context. It was composed in 1776 when Antonio Brunetti (1744–1786) was appointed concertmaster of the Salzburg orchestra. He could have performed this concerto for the first time together with the set of Mozart’s concertos composed the previous year. It is important to remember that Brunetti had been a member of the orchestra prior to his elevation to concertmaster status. He had strong ties within the Salzburg music establishment, having married the sister of Michael Haydn’s wife, who was the

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daughter of court organist Franz Ignaz Lipp (1718–1798). Brunetti was undoubtedly a virtuoso of note endowed by uncommon expressive qualities despite his allegedly deplorable personality. Michael Haydn’s Violin Concerto in A major is an excellently written work that, notwithstanding its absence from the concert repertoire, has been recorded by famous violinists including Arthur Grumiaux, thus offering the chance to appreciate a worthy companion to Mozart’s violin concertos. As Antonio Brunetti was a key protagonist of the concertos of Mozart and Michael Haydn, Luigi Tomasini (1741–1808) owes his place in music history largely to his long relationship with Joseph Haydn. From 1757 until his death, he was Haydn’s colleague, serving the Esterhazy family as first violinist and concertmaster, and it was for him that Haydn wrote at least one of his few violin concertos. Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), the first of the great triumvirate of Viennese Classicism and the putative “father” of many forms, displayed much less interest in the concerto than in other instrumental genres of the time, especially the symphony, various types of chamber ensembles, and keyboard sonatas. The texture of Haydn’s concertos, some for keyboard, two for cello, a famous one written for the trumpet, and possibly three for the violin, is not markedly different from that encountered in the concertos of musical journeymen like Wagenseil and Starzer. However, the Violin Concerto in C major, “Fatto per il Luigi” (composed for Luigi [Tomasini]), stands out for its compact Allegro moderato, which offers a clear idea about the consistent accuracy of Tomasini’s left-hand technique and, obviously, that of all violinists performing this work. The same may be observed apropos of the third movement, Presto, a bouncing affair if a bit repetitive. Nevertheless, the uniqueness of Haydn’s Violin Concerto in C resides in its second movement, Adagio, defined by H. C. Robbins Landon as “a kind of serenade . . . one of [Haydn’s] most winning slow movements of this period.” The movement is carried out entirely by the solo violin, and with the exception of a simple threemeasure introduction and a brief closing section, the accompaniment is played pizzicato. The consistency, graceful ornamentation of the melody, and the flowing lyricism—all are reminiscent of Tartini, although Haydn’s melody is more expansive and his expressive chromaticism

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richer. It is indeed an outstanding movement in the Italian tradition, a fitting tribute on Haydn’s part to the talents of Luigi Tomasini. Haydn appears to have written another violin concerto in the key of G major, often referred to as No. 2, which was composed earlier than the Concerto in C and certainly not for a violinist of Tomasini’s caliber. Haydn’s violin concertos, scored for violin solo, strings, and a desultory harpsichord, were composed between 1760 and 1769, antedating the period in which Haydn began the rapid ascent to become the most famous and sought-after instrumental composer in Europe. Now, assuming that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was aware of the existence of Joseph Haydn’s violin concertos, perhaps through Michael, one can somewhat detect their direct or indirect influence on Violin Concerto in B flat, K. 207, probably composed in 1773, and even Concerto in D major, K. 211, definitely written in 1775, Mozart’s year of the violin. I would like to close this chapter on the violin concertos of the classical era in the current repertoire with a plea that performances of these concertos be executed without the distracting and unnecessary presence of a conductor. The solo violinist is the full protagonist of these masterpieces and should be playing surrounded by a sizable group of instrumentalists, thus offering the ideal opportunity to experience this type of music exactly as it was conceived.

3 VIOTTI AND BEETHOVEN

IN GOOD GRACES

In a letter to Clara Schumann sent from Pörtschach in 1879, Johannes Brahms revealed that Viotti’s Violin Concerto No. 22 in A minor was a favorite of his and that he believed that Joseph Joachim included it in his repertoire on that account. “It is a remarkable work, showing great facility of invention. It sounds as if he [Joachim] were improvising, and the whole thing is conceived and carried out in such a masterly fashion,” Brahms added. Reflecting on Brahms’s words, German musicologist Alfred Einstein, cousin of the famous physicist Albert, wrote that scarcely anything needed to be added to them since Viotti did not stand, in the development of the Concerto form, behind Mozart, but beside him, at least in its bearing on the next generation of musicians and in particular its greatest representative, Beethoven! One may consider Viotti’s Violin Concerto No. 22 in A minor, composed in England in 1798 and first published in Paris in 1802, as the canonized linkage—as far as the violin concerto is concerned—between Mozart and Beethoven insomuch as Viotti’s is the only violin concerto of that period to have gained a solid place in the modern repertoire, despite the neglect surrounding the unique career of its author. Giovan Battista Viotti was born in 1755 in Fontanetto Po, a small village in the Piedmont region of northern Italy. In 1766, he began his studies under the guidance of Antonio Celoniat and Giovan Battista 37

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Somis, who, while in the service of the Royal House of Savoy, established a violin school in Turin (Piedmont’s capital city) similar to those established by Corelli and Vivaldi in Rome and Venice respectively. As a result of the Celoniat/Somis apprenticeship, Viotti entered and remained in the service of the Savoy Royal Chapel for ten years. During this time, Gaetano Pugnani succeeded Somis and became Viotti’s mentor until the end of 1781, when he and Viotti embarked upon a tour of Europe. The following year, Viotti debuted in Paris at the Concert Spirituel, a Masonic-influenced association of great reputation. The demanding Parisian audience and the sophisticated community of local musicians were captivated by Viotti’s artistic gifts, so much so that the artist entered the service of Queen Marie Antoinette in 1784. In 1788, Viotti turned his interests to theatrical entrepreneurship and took over the newly established Théâtre de Monsieur sponsored by the Comte de Provence who later became King Louis XVIII. This ambitious enterprise, regarded as revolutionary in both theatrical conception and management, continued to operate during the worst period of the French Revolution (1789–1793). In 1793, because of his royal connections, the Revolutionary Party targeted Viotti, who consequently fled Paris and arrived in London as a guest of two Italian celebrities, double bass virtuoso Domenico Dragonetti and violinist Felice Giardini. Invited by London’s famous impresario Johann Peter Salomon, Viotti resumed playing and composing in very congenial environments surrounded by his Masonic brethren Joseph Haydn, Muzio Clementi, and Luigi Cherubini among others. In 1798, suspected of spying for the French Revolutionary Party, Viotti was advised to leave England. He sought refuge in Schonfeldtz, Germany. There he sketched a violin method with the assistance of pupil Friedrich Pixis and penned an autobiographical pamphlet in defense of his political activities in France and England. In 1801, Viotti returned to London, where he founded a commercial enterprise dealing with fine wines. During the next thirteen years, he visited Paris regularly for business purposes while simultaneously testing the grounds in preparation of his artistic comeback in the French capital. However, in 1814, Viotti’s wine business declared bankruptcy. He was financially ruined and morally distressed because some influential friends of his had been involved in the business venture. Accompanied by his pupil and future biographer Pierre Baillot, Viotti left Lon-

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don for a brief stay in Brussels. Eventually, he returned to London once the bankruptcy scandal had passed. Once again in 1819, Viotti abandoned London for Paris where he assumed the directorship of both Opéra and Theatre Italien until 1821 when an anonymous brochure, criticizing every point of Viotti’s administration, was published in Paris. The ensuing public reaction caused Viotti’s dismissal. In October the hostile French press publicly pushed for his removal from the Parisian scene. In 1822, Viotti returned to London as a solitary guest of his faithful friends Margaret and William Chinnerys, in whose home he died in 1824—practically forgotten by the musical world. Viotti’s adventurous life and body of work have informed a consistent amount of scholarship. As a composer, he devoted himself mostly to the concerto for violin and orchestra by composing twenty-nine works in the genre that reflect changes in musical style and taste according to the times and places he visited and to the socio-political affiliations that engaged his interests. Unquestionably, though, the decade spent in Paris was the most active and successful period of his career. There he composed nineteen of his concertos and much chamber music while achieving the status of first-class violin virtuoso. A keen follower of François Tourte’s mechanical innovations aimed at improving bow construction, Viotti passed along his interests to Parisian pupils Pierre Rode, Jean Baptist Cartier, and Paul Alday, and by reflection to Rodolphe Kreutzer and Pierre Baillot. However, it was in London, where he composed Concertos Nos. 20–29, that his style reached full maturity. The London concertos were appreciated in the nineteenth century and highly considered as pedagogical tools before Joseph Joachim successfully revived the Concerto No. 22 in A minor for the concert platform. There is evidence that Beethoven was familiar not only with Viotti’s works but with the violin repertoire, styles, and technical achievements of the French violin school represented by Kreutzer, Baillot, and Rode, who worked under the aesthetical arch provided by Luigi Cherubini, a composer Beethoven held in high esteem. Beethoven was impressed particularly by the austere eloquence of Viotti’s slow movements, the graceful humor of his Rondos, and that “great facility of invention” later praised by Brahms. Seldom performed in concert but always welcome, Viotti’s Violin Concerto No. 22 in A minor was composed in London during the

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1790s. As noted above, it fell into the good graces of Joseph Joachim, Johannes Brahms, and Clara Schumann, who considered it a pure source of discreet, nonflamboyant, languid but not overly sentimental violin display better suited to German Romanticism than the Italianate histrionics of Paganini and, consequently, of their nemesis Franz Liszt. Viotti’s concerto is symphonic in concept and structure; the opening Moderato, in fact, guides through a calm orchestral introduction cast in the nostalgic key of A minor, which paves the way for the soloist’s entrance—not as the triumphant hero of the Paganini’s concertos, as we shall notice later, but as a plaintive Goethean character. Viotti’s soloist never forces his way through the movement’s narrative but emerges from within the orchestral fabric. Even the second theme, calmer than the introductory motif, is played in unison with the flute first and bassoon second in order to sound rounder and softer. The character of the second movement, Adagio, almost an extension of the Moderato, echoes not only Beethoven’s Romances for violin and orchestra but the Larghetto of his Violin Concerto as well, a plausible reason why Joseph Joachim suggested in his performing edition of the Viotti concerto that the Adagio be played with a great deal of embellishments, his intention being perhaps to make the movement more appealing to violinists and audiences. After much contemplative music— the concerto’s first two movements lasting about twenty minutes—Viotti unleashes a true proto-Romantic wave of orchestral sounds and solo virtuoso passages, which pervade the concerto’s third movement, Agitato assai. Here, aside from showing off his signature bow stroke, a dotted hocked bite performed at the tip of the bow, he presents sonorities and phrases that anticipate Mendelssohn and even Max Bruch.

THE FRANZ CLEMENT FACTOR Although Viotti’s Concerto No. 22 in A minor remains the canonized link between Mozart and Beethoven, one must take into consideration the Violin Concerto in D major Franz Clement (1780–1842) composed and performed in Vienna in 1805, one year before he premiered Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. In this regard, British musicologist Clive Brown, responsible for bringing to the fore the figure of Franz Clement and his influence on Beethoven, pointed out that “Beethoven’s and

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Clement’s violin concertos share certain similarities, especially in their technical handling of the solo instrument, with the mainstream violin concertos of their time, such as those of Viotti, Rode, and Spohr, which may broadly be categorized as belonging to the Parisian School; nevertheless, they are significantly different from them in style and content.” While I focus upon Franz Clement as a strong force in Vienna, I find it appropriate to review the genesis of Beethoven’s masterpiece by considering both French (Viotti) and German (Clement) perspectives in the composer’s first attempt at writing a concerto for the violin, which, despite its incompleteness, shows the influence of both schools.

THE CONCERTO FRAGMENT: A MISSED OPPORTUNITY Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in C major WoO 5, 1 whose autograph is at the Archives of the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna, is a first movement cast in sonata-allegro form—the time-honored compositional scheme consisting of the exposition of two or more contrasting themes, their development, and the recapitulation of the material presented in the exposition. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was composed in Bonn between 1790, when Beethoven was assistant organist and violist in the Court Orchestra, and October 1792, when he departed for Vienna to study with Joseph Haydn. This work, discovered in 1870, breaks off abruptly after 259 bars, toward the end of the development section, an instance that provoked some thoughts about whether this fragment, which bears the title “Concerto” on its front page, was an unfinished draft in score, the only surviving portion of a complete movement, or perhaps part of a work in several movements. As the conundrum continued, the first attempt to reconstruct a performing edition of this concerto was undertaken in 1879 by violinist-conductor and Beethoven acquaintance Josef Hellmesberger Sr. (1828–1893). Finally, in 1961, Beethoven authority Willy Hess published what is considered the first reliable version of this fragment in a scholarly format, and based on Hess’s assessment, Wilfried Fischer published in 1971 a practical performing edition. Although recorded several times, Beethoven’s reconstructed Violin Concerto in C never entered the repertoire, an occurrence that de-

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prives concertgoers of the “live” listening experience of a work that indeed anticipates some of the violin writing patterns Beethoven employed not only in his masterpiece of 1806, but in the two Romances for violin and orchestra composed respectively in 1798 and 1800.

ROMANCE IN G MAJOR, OP. 40 AND ROMANCE IN F MAJOR, OP. 50 Little is known about the genesis of the two romances except that Beethoven wrote them for violinist and lifelong friend Ignaz Schuppanzigh (1776–1830). These works sometimes appear in concert programs as single pieces, the F major, Op. 50 being the favorite of the two, or together, thus totaling some twenty minutes’ duration. When fortunate enough to attend a live performance with orchestra of one or both romances, the listener is immediately captivated by the noble and warm melodies emanating from these lesser-known violin works; however, their lack of contrasting elements often induces players to perform them with the addition of other shorter works like Schubert’s Rondo in A major for violin and strings. In fact, the reconstructed Violin Concerto in C major could make the ideal companion to at least the Romance in G major since they share a related tonality and the same orchestration.

TRIPLE CONCERTO IN C MAJOR, OP. 56 Another important work in which the violin figures as soloist, albeit in combination with piano and cello, is Beethoven’s Triple Concerto for piano, violin, cello, and orchestra in C major, Op. 56. The work, a stylistic homage to the eighteenth century’s French Symphonie Concertante, favors in terms of preeminence and difficulty the cello followed by the violin and the piano. It was presented in two private performances as early as spring 1804 for Prince Lobkowitz in Vienna in a program that also included the Third Symphony, Op. 55. On that occasion Beethoven presided at the piano accompanied by two members of the prince’s orchestra, violinist Anton Wranitzky and cellist Anton Kraft. However, the first public performance of the Triple Con-

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certo did not take place until four years later at the Vienna Augartner in May 1808 at the hands of Marie Bigot, piano; Carl August Seidler, violin; and Anton Kraft, cello. Beethoven’s autograph manuscript of the Triple Concerto has never resurfaced. Modern editions reflect its first edition issued in 1807 in Vienna and lately a handwritten copy of the solo violin part bearing numerous corrections in Beethoven’s hand that has come to light and is now preserved at the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna.

SCALING MOUNT OLYMPUS: BEETHOVEN’S VIOLIN CONCERTO IN D MAJOR, OP. 61 The origins of Beethoven’s magnificent Violin Concerto are surrounded by a certain degree of fogginess. For instance, recent scholarship has revealed that the composer began working on the full draft of the score in late November 1806, allowing himself some five weeks to complete the work for the December 23 premiere. The work was premiered by Franz Clement at his annual benefit concert on December 23, 1806, and published in Vienna in August 1808 with a dedication to the composer’s friend Stephen von Breuning. That same month also witnessed the publication of Beethoven’s own arrangement of the work as a piano concerto, with a dedication to von Breuning’s wife, Julie. No original cadenzas have survived for the violin version; but the piano arrangement, instigated by the London-based composer, pianist, and publisher Muzio Clementi, inspired (or perhaps Clementi requested) Beethoven to write some original cadenzas, one for the first movement involving obbligato timpani. Such haste favors, indeed, the rumors that circulated in Vienna about Franz Clement having performed the solo part “at sight and without previous rehearsal.” That being noted though, it should not be excluded that Beethoven had sketched out ideas prior to November 1806 or that he continued to “compose” while writing down his musical ideas on paper. In fact, the autograph score, now at the Austrian National Library in Vienna, contains innumerable signs of compositional labor, additional sketches, and alternative passages in the solo part entered in the blank staves as pointed out by Alan Tyson and other scholars after him.

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Despite Franz Clement’s gargantuan performing feat, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto had a mixed reception. Some critics remarked on its length, its originality, and its many beautiful passages while others lamented its lack of continuity and tiresome repetitions. A second performance in 1807 was reported by Schindler to have been more successful, but further performances in the next three decades appear to have been few and far between. The performances offered by Luigi Tomasini Jr. (Berlin, 1812), Pierre Baillot (Paris, 1828), Henri Vieuxtemps (Vienna, 1834), and Ulrich (Leipzig, 1836) stand out during this period of the work’s neglect. It was left to the thirteen-year-old Joseph Joachim to resurrect the concerto, under Mendelssohn’s baton, in London on May 27, 1844, and begin his long and fruitful association with the work, scholar Robin Stowell noted in his monograph of the concerto.

EXPERIENCING THE CONCERTO Four soft timpani strokes signal the beginning of an imaginary play in three acts about a lonesome war hero, to use a military metaphor so fashionable in Beethoven’s time, standing on stage before the orchestra with violin and bow hanging from one or both hands while his gaze searches for a mystical spot in the ceiling or sky. The Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61 by Ludwig van Beethoven begins with one of the longest orchestral introductions ever composed. Our “silent” soloist must assume composure that, although implying full engagement with the thematic and gestural material developed by the orchestra, does not seek the audience’s attention. The image of the “silent” hero eager to tell his story is of fundamental importance when experiencing this concerto; it can remain impressed in one’s mind for a lifetime. I remember vividly when, in my teens, I saw in Rome Nathan Milstein magnificently “performing” such a silent introduction. Motionless, he faced a packed house, and then it was only during the last measure of the introduction that he placed the violin on his collarbone and, with a “from the air” bow stroke, played the ascending broken octaves and reached his place on Mount Olympus. Great serenity is indeed the trope pervading the first movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, an Allegro ma non troppo cast in a modified sonata-allegro form. But the four timpani strokes heard in the

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opening measure in this case always control the feeling of serenity. In fact, these fatidic strokes are heard throughout the Allegro ma non troppo as a reminder that this movement and, indeed, the whole concerto is all about restored order. We continue to hear the four strokes during the solo played in succession by timpani, first violins, cellos and basses, second violins, and violas. The soloist and the strings follow this time by a turbulent shaking of rapid notes, then the four strokes are taken on by the whole orchestra and again in the recapitulation they are played pianissimo by the strings while underscoring the soloist’s soaring trills. Thereafter, the full orchestra leads the soloist to the cadenza, which no matter by whom—Kreisler, Joachim, and a host of other authors or indirectly Beethoven himself—based their cadenzas on those very four strokes. The cadenza resolves upon a whispered, breathtaking, hanging-on-a-thread rendition of the second theme. At this point, Beethoven dispels the magic and concludes the movement abruptly with four (again four!) chords. As the listener is still in awe of the pastoral, bucolic elements characterizing the sense of serenity of the first movement, he may ask for a clearer definition of the second movement, Larghetto, whose character appears to be even more placid than the Allegro ma non troppo. Here we find a situation already experienced in Viotti’s Concerto No. 22 where the first two movements were not too dissimilar from each other. Therefore, the violinist, our hypothetical war hero storyteller, must propose the Larghetto as an episode, a remembrance of things past that move before the listener’s ears in a well-coordinated and even predictable sequence of events, as if the Larghetto were a theme recalling the formal structure of a Baroque chaconne. Now the listener has the choice to either follow the very subtly organized musical phraseology of this movement through Beethoven’s transparent orchestration, lyricism of the music, and static harmonies, or just enjoy the piece as a lovely romance. It may depend on the persuasiveness of the interpretation, the listener’s receptive disposition at a particular time, and the benefit of multiple hearings. Furthermore, for those in possession of a developed musical knowledge, there is always the score, a great many favorite recordings, and some truly excellent analytical essays that may aid in sorting out the inner mysterious beauty of this second movement. There are no problems in experiencing the final movement as Beethoven puts aside the pensively demanding first two movements in fa-

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vor of a jolly if a bit rustic Rondo. The Rondo in general terms consists of a cyclical display of virtuosity akin to a theme and variations with the difference than in the Rondo the initially stated theme is repeated before each variation. The violin technique Beethoven displayed in this movement does not stray far from Viotti’s, Kreutzer’s, Baillot’s, or Clement’s. The hypothetical hero we identified as the narrator in the first two movements now becomes just a very skilled fiddler leading the orchestra and the audience in a rejoicing collective kind of ritualistic dance. The impact that Beethoven’s Violin Concerto continues to have on violinists and listeners is incalculable. The work’s transparent structure and the apparently uncomplicated technical demands have set new performance and listening standards in terms of purity of expression and technical perfection. Therefore, the Olympian metaphor associated with the Beethoven Violin Concerto can be paired to another metaphor invoked by Yehudi Menuhin when he discussed Paganini’s twenty-four Caprices. He said that for violinists, the art of mastering Paganini’s Caprices was as challenging as scaling Mount Everest. Mr. Menuhin was right indeed as in the world of violin playing, Mount Olympus and Mount Everest, Beethoven and Paganini, constitute the two sides of the same coin: violin mastery!

4 THE METEORIC PAGANINI AND HIS EPIGONES

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artists embody the spirit of Romanticism and its philosophy, which placed a premium on rebellion, spontaneity, intense emotion, and heroic vision, as completely as the legendary Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840). As an instrumentalist, he created the personage of Paganini, the romantic violinist who became synonymous with what was against police regulations, always struggling to overcome the split between subject and object, the self and the world, and the conscious and the unconscious. He, like an opera star, played the role he wished. Paganini’s life and wanderings, the subject of endless fascination, have been chronicled, embellished upon, studied, and documented in a variety of styles, according to the times and the social milieu during which they were written. Today, he is viewed not only as a legendary personage but as a troubled soul afflicted by paranoia, miserable health, and morose attachment to his only son, Achille; to his friend Luigi Germi; and to his profession. His approach to music was always illuminated by a desire for challenge and discovery. Paganini had violin strings especially made for him, caliber being very important for scordatura, the altering of the strings’ tuning that facilitated the production of natural and artificial harmonics, a whistling kind of effect. Paganini had bows made longer than usual, with hair particularly tense for a better rendition of ricochet bowings, measured bounces of the bow obtained in a single stroke, and

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parlato effects, a style of bowing where emphasis is placed on every note in imitation of the syllables of a word. Paganini spent countless hours in violinmakers’ shops—especially at Vuillaume’s in Paris—learning about the art of making an instrument sound great and the secrets of the trade, which he later exploited to great financial gain. He used a flatter bridge and other professional devices peculiar to his physicality and playing style. He also reached virtuosity in playing the guitar. “It is beneficial to my left hand,” he curtly answered curious interlocutors when asked why. He loved to outstretch his left arm on the viola to see if he could make the notoriously recalcitrant instrument sing like his violin. Was the viola just another challenge, perhaps? After all, such challenges made a tremendous impression on his contemporaries to the point that countless imitators and even impersonators contributed to the Paganini mania in a carnivallike fashion. For many violinist-composers, though, Paganini was a genuine source of inspiration. In fact, they did not hesitate to pay homage to their idol and “master” by writing and performing concertos that showcased their “lesson learned” or their ephemeral infatuation, as we will see later in this chapter. Paganini’s artistry was, in general, highly praised; rarely does one find dissenting comments. His intonation was regarded as perfect; his expressiveness unique in terms of variety of nuances; and finally, his tone was found to be extremely pure although not as rich as that of some other famous violinists of the time. Paganini’s technique, his most mesmerizing asset, was always delivered with daring assurance so as to make his execution both emotionally moving and bewildering. The combination of extreme expressiveness and virtuosity was indeed the main goal of Paganini’s strong will—a will that had ruled over his exceptional natural gifts since his formative years. Paganini once told Julius Max Schottsky, his most important biographer, that he was “always enthusiastic about his instrument and that he made special efforts to experiment with new technical devices that could marvel the audience.” Such an attitude was corroborated by Paganini’s comment regarding the illustrious French violinist Charles Philippe Lafont, who played very well but “did not amaze.” As a composer, Paganini reached a remarkable symbiosis between simple melody and transcendental virtuosity in his six concertos for violin and orchestra as

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part of the architectural structure of the work, for instance, the many flourishing melodies, which rather than mere emulation of bel canto were indeed melodies intended to be “sung” on the violin solely because the instrument was his medium. Yes, there is no question that the artist’s technical wizardry in a certain sense lowered his status as a composer; however, any judgment on Paganini in our time, despite the accuracy of research data at our disposal, will always be hampered by the absence of the main ingredient, Niccolò Paganini himself. The roots of Paganini’s innovative technique have been identified in the works of Pietro Antonio Locatelli, Pierre Gavinies, Antonio Lolli, Niccolò Mestrino, Michel Woldemar, Federico Fiorillo, and others. However, at close scrutiny Locatelli’s daring acrobatics, Niccolò Mestrino’s extensive use of high notes, or Rodolphe Kreutzer’s Concerto No. 9 in E minor, whose first movement contains a passagework of thirtynine measures on the G string, are only variable experimentations; they do not represent the constant ingredient that Paganini alone was able to develop as his artistic signature.

THE VIOLINIST’S CONCERTO In Paganini’s time, his Concerto No. 1 in D major, Op. 6 was often performed in the key of E flat using scordatura, a device that allowed the violin strings to be raised up a semitone, thus enabling the soloist to achieve more brilliancy and tone projection, especially when performing “harmonics.” Composed in the years 1817–1818, the Concerto in D major is officially Paganini’s first and bears the opus number 6 simply because it was published by Paganini’s son, Achille, in 1851, as the sixth of a group of compositions he selected for publication starting with the celebrated twenty-four Caprices for solo violin as Op. 1. This concerto, first published in 1851, went through numerous editions including those of Ferdinand David issued in 1874 and 1886. However, turn-ofthe-century virtuosos like August Whilelmj took large liberties with the original text by reducing the concerto to a single movement, as did Fritz Kreisler, who re-harmonized and re-orchestrated Paganini’s work, adding a pinch of fin-de-siècle Viennese flavor. The work’s everlasting popularity among violinists is mythical; to play Paganini’s Concerto No. 1 in D major, Op. 6—a lengthy tour de

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force some thirty-five minutes in duration—means being a master at showcasing perfectly anything left hand and bow arm can perform on the violin; thus, anything short of absolute perfection would result in a parody. Scored for an orchestra of two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, bassoon, two French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, percussion, and strings, the concerto unfolds as follows: after a long and dramatic orchestral introduction written in robust Rossini style, the soloist begins with a most heroic proclamation of freedom, a gesture that has become emblematic of Romantic violin playing. It was such a daring takeoff on the E string that made many composers think of other ways to begin their concertos. Only Mendelssohn was able to dispel the Paganini myth decades later by starting his violin concerto very softly on the E string after barely one and a half measures of orchestral introduction. Paganini’s Allegro maestoso is cast in traditional Allegro sonata form and follows the rules of composition meticulously yet inventively as he alternates acrobatic cascades of double stops in thirds and risky shifts to high positions with a healthy, full–throated cantabile previously heard in the orchestra during the introduction. Then, the integration of the movement’s main theme with surprising thematic developments continues until the full orchestra breaks in with a rumbustious reprise of the material heard in the introduction. It ends abruptly to perorate the soloist’s strong-willed recitative, followed by a new cantabile theme interrupted by the recitative and retaken this time by an extraordinary display of technical bravura. The return of the second theme provides the soloist with a brief respite before engaging head on in another technical whirlwind concluded by the orchestra’s call for the cadenza, an affair that customarily must be even more difficult that the first movement as a whole. It is assumed that Paganini improvised his cadenzas since no indications were ever provided about the extent of such particular exploits. The second movement, Adagio, has all the characteristics of a grand scale opera “scene.” Here Paganini had ample opportunities to dish out his natural compositional gifts for melody, a great opportunity for displaying the beauty of one’s tone and elegance. Finally, the Rondo, Allegro spiritoso, unleashes relentless cascades of technical fireworks focusing particularly on bow technicalities like the novel use of ricochet,

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flying staccato bowing strokes, and a supreme left-hand feat: entire passages played in double harmonics through the simultaneous use of three and four fingers. Paganini’s Concerto No. 2 in B minor, Op. 7, a seldom performed work, bears a more contemplative tone than its precedent. Technically very demanding and not particularly rewarding, Paganini’s second concerto is endowed by a last movement written with singular creativity— the celebrated Rondo della Campanella (Bell Rondo). It is called so because of the clever use of the triangle which evokes the tone of a tiny bell during delicate passages. From its first appearance in print, the Rondo della Campanella gained immediate popularity as a stand-alone piece through countless memorable performances and adaptations to almost any instrument, including the perennial piano transcription of Franz Liszt. The second concerto in its three movements never reached the popularity of the first, which assumed the role of Paganini’s violin concerto par excellence.

TERRA INCOGNITA The next group of Paganini’s violin concertos belongs more to the world of recording novelties than to the concert stage. In fact, a live performance of any of the works highlighted below may constitute a rare event. Concerto No. 3 in E major was completed in Naples in the late autumn of 1826. It seems, though, that Paganini had already performed an abridged version of it in Milan as early as 1824. He then performed the remaining two movements in London in 1832. For many years, the concerto was performed exclusively by Paganini’s great-grandniece Andreina Paganini, who, accompanied at the piano by her sister Giuseppina, played the work during the first quarter of the twentieth century in an arrangement prepared by violinist Romeo Franzoni and composer Giusto Dacci. These gentlemen worked closely with Paganini’s son, Baron Achille (1825–1896), in sorting out Niccolò’s manuscripts and preparing some of the selected material for publication. However, upon Achille’s death, the publishing project came to a standstill and Concerto No. 3, among other works, never went to press. After half a century of oblivion, the concerto reappeared in 1970, when Paganini’s heirs conceded performing rights to violinist Henryk Szering, who performed it

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in London and Milan in October 1971 after recording it in January of the same year. The concerto remains unpublished. Completed in Germany in February 1830, Concerto No. 4 in D minor received its first performance in Frankfurt on April 26 of the same years. This was one of Paganini’s favorite works, and he performed it many times. The concerto was considered lost until an “acephalous” orchestral score (i.e., missing the solo part) was discovered under most unusual circumstances by Italian music antiquarian Natale Gallini of Milan. It should not be surprising that Paganini omitted the solo part on some of his scores. Fear of having his works copied, especially during extensive touring periods in foreign lands, compelled Paganini to use caution. Through a stroke of luck, Gallini found a copy of the missing solo part among the papers belonging to the celebrated double-bass virtuoso Giovanni Bottesini. The score was promptly reconstructed and revived in Paris on November 7, 1954. The violinist was Arthur Grumiaux, who also recorded the work at about the same time. Although this concerto has been performed and recorded by Salvatore Accardo, Ruggiero Ricci, and Gidon Kremer, it remains unpublished. The composition of Concerto No. 5 in A minor began in Germany shortly after the completion of Concerto No. 4. It consisted only of the solo part with a few annotations on the accompaniment. Because of its incompleteness, Paganini never performed the piece. The above-mentioned Franzoni and Dacci prepared a piano accompaniment of this concerto, and violinist and pedagogue Marco Anzoletti did the same. In 1959, Italian musicologist and foremost authority on Paganini, Federico Mompellio, provided the concerto with a new piano accompaniment and a full orchestral score. The work was then premiered in Siena on September 3, 1959, by violinist Franco Gulli, who recorded it shortly after. The Violin Concerto No. 6 in E minor was probably composed in 1815, preceding the Concerto No. 1, a reason why this concerto is often referred to as No. 0. It was performed first in Milan and then in Genoa on Friday, September 8, 1815. Paganini scholar Pietro Berri discovered this concerto in London in 1972. What he found, though, was a manuscript for violin and guitar entitled “Grande Concerto di Niccolò Paganini,” which, following the process of authentication, was blessed by an

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unusual series of publishing efforts, something that the more important concertos, Nos. 3, 4, and 5, lacked.

ONE MORE THING: THE VIOLA! The title Sonata per la gran-viola e orchestra, an Introduction, Theme, and Variations, composed and premiered by Paganini in London in 1834, has been puzzling students of Paganiniana for quite some time, their major concern being what the artist intended by “gran-viola” and what viola he had, in fact, used in performing this piece. The mention of this viola appears for the first time in a letter Paganini wrote to his friend, confidant, and administrator of his vast fortune, Luigi Germi, on February 28, 1833. The passage reads, “Should I be in need of your very large viola to be used in London, would you send it to me? I would name such an instrument ‘controviola.’” Having received an affirmative answer from Germi, Paganini wrote back, this time offering instructions about the actual shipping of the viola to the Austrian Embassy in London through the courtesy of his banker, the Baron of Rothschild. Furthermore, Paganini asked Germi to include in the package some of the longer bows made by a bow maker in Naples according to his specifications. The gran-viola is mentioned again in another letter to Germi dated London, October 29, 1833. It reads, “It should be convenient that I return to London by the month of April [1834] in order to let the granviola be heard. Could you come to London also?” Paganini wished the company of his best friend, the rightful owner of the viola, in London, for the premiere of the sonata. Finally, in another letter to Germi, again from Paris, dated December 14, 1833, Paganini remarks, “I have given instructions in London for retrieving the gran-viola from customs.” This is the last time the gran-viola is mentioned. Paganini did premiere his Sonata per la gran-viola e orchestra in London on April 28, 1834, in the Hanover Square Rooms. Following the event, the London Times reviewer wrote the following: Last night Signor Paganini introduced a performance on the viola, which was the first time he played this instrument in public. . . . There was nothing in the change to justify the expectation which seems to have been raised on the subject. Some of the passages on

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the lower strings had an exceedingly rich and mellow effect and the arpeggios were very beautiful, but the upper notes were not so clear and flexible, nor were the very rapid divisions, through the greater extension of fingers, so completely under his command as on the violin. Altogether, the repetition of the experiment is not what a strict regard to Paganini’s fame would recommend. The violin does all that the viola can do that is worth hearing, and it does more. Paganini . . . should seek no change or only such changes as will enable him to achieve something greater and better in his heart, which is impossible. The room was not very filled, but the audience was a musical one and we never heard the Signor play better or receive more applause than he did last night.

Paganini gave two more concerts outside of London but did not find the critics any more favorable than those in London. That Paganini performed on the Germi controviola is a certainty because of a letter written by the English violinist Charles Severn, who participated in the event. He wrote to W. Edge Sr. on July 15, 1874: My Dear Sir . . . had I been aware that you were writing of this great man, I could have furnished you with a good many anecdotes of Paganini at whose last concerts in London I played, and quite close to him! I played from the same double desk with him when he played his variations for the Tenor, so large an instrument that his arm stretched out quite straight. What has become of this Tenor Solo?

Another publication, the Journal des Artists, on June 29, 1834, corroborated the largeness of this particular instrument by printing, “He has long played with the idea of developing an instrument with the tones of the human voice. He has succeeded and need fear no competitor, for it will be impossible to play it because man’s arms are not long enough.” In the meantime, Paganini had become the proud owner of another viola, a 1731 Stradivari. Consider a passage from a post script in a letter he wrote to Germi from Boulogne sur Mer on August 29, 1834: “I don’t remember if I told you that in London I purchased the most famous and beautiful viola by Stradivari!” Paganini purchased this viola from the dealer George Crosby in the spring of 1833. This viola is part of the quartet of Strads formerly in the possession of the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., and now in a Japanese collection. Most Paganini biographers are inclined to think that this

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1731 Stradivari was the viola with which he played the sonata, thus the attribute “gran” viola, as in most beautiful viola. Such was not the case because this particular Stradivari viola was an instrument of normal measurements, 16 and 3/16 inches. If Paganini had wished to play the sonata on it, why bother Germi to ship his large instrument from Genoa to London and back? Paganini needed to astonish his audience; his performance had to appear supernatural. Remember what he said about Lafont: “He is a great violinist but does not astonish!” Performing on a normal-size viola, which at a distance might not have seemed much larger than a violin, was therefore out of the question!

EPIGONES Some preeminent violin virtuosos were influenced directly or vicariously by the most charismatic violin virtuoso of the nineteenth century. Although their compositions and violin concertos were popular during their careers, they have disappeared from the repertoire and been relegated in modern times to sporadic recorded performances and historical revivals. Karl Guhr (1787–1848) was afflicted by a uniquely rigorous and psychologically obsessive case of artistic idolatry. His Violin Concerto No. 1 in F major, Op. 15 was composed while he literally “stalked” Paganini from place to place during the virtuoso’s German tour of August and September 1829. Guhr’s Concerto comprises a prolix Allegro maestoso, an Andante graced by some melodic charm, and a final movement too reminiscent of Paganini’s most flashy passages to show any signs of originality. That said, Guhr’s merit resides in the publication of his quasi-scientific treatise in which he very enthusiastically examined the artistry of the great violinist and made available for the first time some of Paganini’s works, which Guhr was able to write down after hearing Paganini performing them several times. Karol Lipinski (1790–1861), a protégé of Louis Spohr’s, traveled to Italy in 1817 to meet Paganini and study “his” way. As a result, the two artists struck up a friendship and even performed together the following year in Piacenza. Further meetings took place in Poland in 1829, where some bad publicity in local newspapers tainted their otherwise excellent relationship. Lipinski was a formidable violinist who showed

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great promise as a composer. His Three Capriccios, Op. 10 for solo violin, dedicated to the illustrious Italian colleague, clearly reveal how Paganini’s gestures were revived by Lipinski’s individual imagination. His Concerto Militaire in D major, Op. 21, composed in 1833, was, on the other hand, a sort of choreographic work, which received great acclaim by the public at large. Interesting for a variety of reasons is the Milanese Antonio Rolla (1798–1837), son and pupil of Alessandro. Alessandro Rolla (1757–1841), regarded by many as Paganini’s teacher, has been the subject of detailed studies in recent years. However, it was with Antonio that Paganini maintained a sincere friendship. He played duets with him and affectionately followed his career in Dresden where, in 1823, Antonio Rolla succeeded Giovan Battista Polledro in Dresden as concertmaster. He died at the age of thirty-nine. The style of his music, somewhat a mixture of Kreutzer, Polledro, and Paganini, is very evident in his Premier Concerto, Op. 7. From this point onward, it is possible to observe Paganini’s legacy perpetuated by violinist-composers whose works often surpass in difficulty Paganini’s own. Think, for instance, of Charles de Beriot (1802–1870), a protégé of Giovan Battista Viotti who studied in Paris with Pierre Baillot. Among de Beriot’s many compositions, his ten violin concertos are of remarkable interest, especially his second, Op. 32, which reflects Paganini’s impact to the core, de Beriot’s elegant traits notwithstanding. The Norwegian Ole Bull (1810–1880) heard Paganini in Paris in 1833 at a concert he attended with his mentor, Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst. After that event the unmistakable stamp of Niccolò Paganini marked Bull’s music and performing style, especially in his Fantaisie et variations de bravoure sur un theme de Bellini, Op. 3, a work first published in 1843. Notice that in Var. II (without accompaniment), Bull requests that all quadruple chords be played simultaneously, a specialty of his since he devised a flat bridge for playing chords. While in Vienna in 1828, Ernst (1814–1865) auditioned for Paganini and received the master’s encouragement. In 1837, the two artists performed together to great acclaim. Regarding this event that took place in Marseille, Ernst wrote to his parents: “It has become a common opinion that I ‘sing’ on my violin with the greatest expression while Paganini is superior in technical wizardry.” Ernst’s music surpasses Pag-

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anini’s in terms of difficulty, especially with his Six Polyphonic Etudes, regarded as the most difficult works ever conceived for the instrument. Ernst’s most popular work was his Violin Concerto in F sharp minor, Op. 23, subtitled Allegro pathétique. Ernst considered himself to be the legitimate artistic heir to Paganini almost to the point of obsession. But if anyone deserved to be called the artistic heir to Paganini, Camillo Sivori (1815–1894) had all the right to such a claim. Born in Genoa, Sivori actually studied with Paganini at the age of nine. His debut took place in Genoa in 1827, and from 1841, his career flourished even in the Americas, where he spent four years. Sivori wrote two concertos and many sets of etudes. As a performer Sivori was not nearly as charismatic as his teacher. He was a sensitive musician always attentive to what was happening in music during his time. Sivori premiered the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in England in 1846 and the String Quartet by Verdi in Paris in 1876 upon the composer’s special request. Musically speaking, Antonio Bazzini (1818–1897) is perhaps the most deserving figure of all. He started his career with Paganini’s blessing. Paganini heard him play in 1836. Schumann’s appreciation of Bazzini as a violinist and composer has been quoted many times and proved prophetic when, in 1864, Bazzini gave up his virtuoso career to devote himself to composition (he wrote many chamber and orchestral works and one opera, Turanda, for “La Scala”). Paganini’s influence is evident in the youthful Grand Allegro de Concert, Op. 15, a work Bazzini performed all over Europe. Henri Vieuxtemps (1820–1881) studied with de Beriot and was heard by Paganini in Vienna when Vieuxtemps performed the Beethoven Concerto. The two artists had several encounters, which have been amply recounted by Vieuxtemps in his memoirs. Although Vieuxtemps wrote a Hommage à Paganini, Op. 9, Paganini’s influence is more obvious in his Gran Concerto, Op. 10, composed in 1839–1840, a work that firmly established Vieuxtemps as a virtuoso-composer. Vieuxtemps’s Six Etudes de Concert, Op. 16 reveal a more sophisticated approach to pure technique, failing, however, to make a contribution to its development. Henri Vieuxtemps’s and Henryk Wieniawski’s violin concertos will be reviewed in next chapter. I wish to remind the reader that the violinist-composers mentioned above have been taken into consideration only because of certain pecu-

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liarities that make them “descendants” of Paganini. Paganini’s legacy, however, cannot be summarized by a set of rules; it was an “awakening” of extraordinary power that left a permanent mark on the Romantic era and after. The artists mentioned here were not great composers; they were perhaps “distinguished minors” who wrote music with profound sincerity and devotion. However, they were also great teachers, and so their legacies found their way into our time—perpetuating the Paganini “lesson” they learned.

5 AT THE HEART OF GERMAN ROMANTICISM Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Bruch

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the furor of the Paganini mania described in the previous chapter, there were violinists/composers who did not recognize him as the revolutionary virtuoso of his time but rather as a narcissistic showman or just a pathetic human being. Louis Spohr (1784–1859), celebrated German violinist and fertile composer of operas and instrumental works, stayed away from Paganini’s influence and at times addressed him in somewhat less than respectful terms. Spohr’s artistic formation was achieved in a much different aristocratic environment than Paganini’s. He never took chances, remaining a conservative throughout his life, and only a few times did he concede to the demands of the general public. Spohr is important in this regard for what he wrote about the Italian virtuoso following concerts in Kassel in 1830. After praising Paganini’s left-hand technique, intonation, and dexterity on the G string, Spohr commented: “In both his compositions and general performance I noticed a strange mixture of something extremely genial and infantile lack of good taste, therefore I was attracted to his art and from time to time repulsed. After having attended a few of his performances I have no longer the desire to hear him again.” Spohr’s eighteen violin concertos, the subject of specialized studies and recordings, are indeed the anthological continuum that informs the violin concerto repertoire throughout the nineteenth century. The com59

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posers discussed in the next two chapters owe Louis Spohr a huge debt of gratitude; from Mendelssohn, whose Violin Concerto in D minor composed at age thirteen is a telling example of Spohr’s influence, to Brahms’s Joachim-inspired masterpiece. Felix Mendelssohn’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in E minor, Op. 64 has always been regarded as the most perfect concerto for violin and orchestra ever composed. Brilliance of instrumental technique, idiomatic writing, and exemplary balance between soloist and orchestra are the unmatched assets of this concerto. The composer’s inspired work, however, reached its present form only after a painstaking series of corrections, additions, and deletions mostly worked out with the vital cooperation of the violinist-composer Ferdinand David (1810–1875), the work’s dedicatee, its first interpreter, and Mendelssohn’s understanding friend. The rediscovery in recent times of Mendelssohn’s autograph score of the concerto, a second manuscript score bearing all the definitive changes, and some preliminary sketches, offer the contemporary violinist a look at the five-year creative process that culminated in the masterpiece known today. There is a story, though, behind the discoveries mentioned above, which is worth telling because of its political intrigues.

WHY KRAKOW? A FORTY-YEAR BLACKOUT Many treasures that were lost sight of during the last war later reappeared—perhaps not always in the hands of their former custodians but at least available once more to art, science, and scholarship. Other treasures were destroyed, and there is proof of this. There is, however, another and tantalizing category, that of art works and the like whose existence is strongly suspected but which have remained elusive for more than three decades. Such has been the fate of a particular batch of music manuscripts that were formerly in the Music Manuscripts Department of the Preussische Staatsbibliothek in Berlin.

These words were written in 1976 by Peter J. P. Whitehead, a member of the staff of the Natural History Department of the British Museum, who, once involved in the search for a uniquely scientific treatise pre-

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served in the Prussian State Library, stumbled across the saga of some “lost” music manuscripts. Whitehead became fascinated and obsessed with his discovery and did not let go until his curiosity was fully satisfied in the early 1980s. Due to the most unusual circumstances surrounding the destiny of these manuscripts during their forty-year pilgrimage from Berlin to Krakow, perhaps a summary of the story, which has given play to so much speculation, would be helpful. It took a surprise attack by the British Royal Air Force on Berlin during the night of April 9, 1941, to prompt the curators of the Preussische Staatsbibliothek to devise a quick and efficient evacuation plan for the entire contents of the library. It was an enormous undertaking, for the music manuscripts alone totaled 59,301. On October 27 and November 5, 1941, by orders of Dr. Wilhelm Poewe—the man regarded as the “complete Prussian functionary,” member of the Nazi party, and the chief administrator of the library—twenty-nine evacuation sites were selected, and concerning the music, 505 crates measuring 2 by 2 by 2 and 1/2 feet were shipped by train to Schloss Fürstenstein, a fivehundred-room castle located in Silesia, fifty-five kilometers from Breslau. The crates did not advertise their contents. They were marked on the outside with a number and the insignia “P.S.B.” (Preussische Staatsbibliothek). The numbers matched those on the evacuation slips issued for each crate. The master copies of the slips remained behind with library administrators while a carbon copy accompanied each crate to the evacuation site. During the war, the master copies were stored first in the Under der Linden building in Berlin and later transferred to Luckau, sixty kilometers south of Berlin. To verify the safety of the music crates, Dr. Poewe made three special trips to Schloss Fürstenstein, on May 5, 1942, March 23, 1943, and finally on April 28, 1943. However, during his last visit, something must have worried Poewe because he ordered a division of crates. He selected fifty boxes of music manuscripts and rare printed editions estimated to be 196 works by twenty-two composers and had them moved to the Benedictine Monastery in Grüssau (a safer place?) some twenty kilometers to the west. The material was then divided again and stored partly in the organ loft of the church of the monastery and partly behind the altar of the parish church in the village (St. Joseph).

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Lower Silesia was not only selected as an evacuation site for valuables. It became the center for accumulating bombed-out businesses, government offices, and many dispersed people, numbering half a million by the spring of 1944. Once the crates left Berlin, an official veil of secrecy descended upon the whereabouts of the manuscripts. It became a secret whose knowledge was the prerogative of a few. For example, as late as 1945, even an authority like conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had continued his career under the Nazis, was convinced that the manuscripts had perished (as he was told) during the war. In late spring of 1945, the Russians liberated Lower Silesia on their way to Berlin, where they arrived on May 2. In July of 1946, the Supreme Commander of the Soviet Occupation Troops in Germany, Marshall W. Sokolowskij, issued an order calling for the return of all books and manuscripts found in the Russian Zone to East Berlin. In February 1947, the Allied Control Council passed Law No. 46. As a result the Russians ensured the return of all library materials in their zone to the newly formed Public Scholarly Library, which, in 1954, assumed the name of Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in East Berlin. Material found in the western zones, under British, French, and American jurisdiction, was returned to the new Staatsbibliothek at Dahlem, West Berlin. The boxes stored at Grüssau, however, were not returned. Rumors, more persuasive than ever, were circulated again that the Grüssau monastery had been destroyed by fire at the end of the war. Some of the monks in charge of the monastery’s affairs were still alive, and despite their vows of silence, someone, out of guilt or sheer pressure, divulged information, probably to Church authorities in Rome, that there was no fire at Grüssau and that the manuscripts were removed once more by Russian soldiers of the Red Army or Polish military to an unknown destination toward the “East,” meaning either the Soviet Union or Poland. Once scholars the world over had a sense that perhaps there was hope that the manuscripts were safe, individuals as well as ad hoc organizations initiated a series of research projects. The Grüssau collection was no minor affair. It contained the manuscript scores of Mozart’s Così fan tutte (Act 1), The Marriage of Figaro (Acts 3 and 4), and the Jupiter Symphony; Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge and his seventh, eighth, and ninth symphonies (in whole or in part); numerous Bach cantatas;

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Bruckner’s sketches for his eighth and ninth symphonies; Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and many manuscript scores of works by Brahms, Haydn, Schubert, and more. Of the organizations interested in the search, the National Arts Foundation of New York became extremely important. Founded in the spring of 1949 by Dr. Carleton Sprague Smith with the full approval of President Harry Truman, the National Arts Foundation engaged an international team of art investigators who operated under Smith’s leadership. Its charge was in “seeking to verify the existence of all the autograph manuscripts of the great German composers from Bach to Brahms.” The Grüssau “secret” had begun to show some cracks. On September 29, 1950, Frankfurt’s Die Neue Zeitung announced that “Carleton Smith, director of the National Arts Foundation of New York, was informed by the Benedictine monks in Rome that according to the Benedictines of the Abbey of Grüssau, Lower Silesia, now in Polish occupied territory, the manuscripts of Beethoven’s ‘Ninth Symphony’ and Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’ had been found again.” The shocking news, although Polish and Soviet authorities received undocumented information, hinted at a possible bluff on the part of Smith’s research team. Smith obviously dismissed the allusion; he had learned from Father Andreas Michalski, who was at Grüssau in 1942, that Michalski was told by Father Nikolaus von Lutterotti, in charge of the Grüssau monastery during the critical years and dead in 1955, that the boxes were not removed from Grüssau until about May 1947. Incidentally, that was just two months after Law No. 46 ordering mandatory restitution went into effect. Therefore, the notion that the Grüssau manuscripts could be somewhere in Poland became an intriguing lead for both independent scholars and Dr. Smith’s team. Peter J. P. Whitehead of the British Museum, for instance, started a systematic search throughout Polish libraries in hopes that they had some news of the fate of the Grüssau boxes. However, Whitehead reached a dead end when Smith revealed in The Sunday Times (July 6, 1975, p. 32) that he had actually examined twenty-eight of the Grüssau boxes at some unspecified place near Krakow, Poland. In one box he saw parts of the lost manuscript scores of Mozart’s Figaro; Beethoven’s seventh, eight, and ninth symphonies; and so on.

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This time, too, the directors of both the East and West Berlin Libraries, Dr. Karl-Heinz Köhler and Rudolf Elvers, expressed doubts about Smith’s “find,” especially since he was not willing to say more about the event he witnessed. Perhaps the entire affair was assuming the connotation of a “state secret,” especially on the part of Polish authorities. It seemed more and more plausible that the Polish government with its full knowledge and active participation appropriated the Grüssau manuscripts. Had the manuscripts become a type of state property? The Poles might have begun by hiding them from the Russians during their joint liberation of Lower Silesia and ended up hiding them from the rest of the world. The decision to take and keep the manuscripts could have been Karol Estreicher’s brainchild. Estreicher was the principal connoisseur and historian of Polish art. From his selfimposed exile in London during the German occupation of Poland, he monitored the Nazis’ systematic destruction and looting of the Polish cultural heritage. In 1944, his book, Cultural Losses of Poland, inventoried in overwhelming terms what the Germans had taken from Poland. Needless to say, Estreicher was Carleton Sprague Smith’s main collaborator and the staunchest “hunter.” Estreicher, thus, in consultation with Poland’s chief experts on cultural re-vindication, could have organized a temporary takeover of German cultural property as “securities or guarantees” until the Polish valuables taken by the Germans during the invasion of Poland were duly returned. In 1977, the manuscripts of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Third Piano Concerto and Mozart’s Magic Flute, as well as works by Mendelssohn and others, were returned to the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek. The rest of the Grüssau manuscripts were not. They were committed to the Biblioteka Jagiellonska (Jagiellonian Library) in Krakow, where two scores of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto were included among these much talked-about treasures, which also included Mozart’s first four violin concertos. The first of the Mendelssohn scores was the original autograph and the second a fair copy of the work made by Mendelssohn’s copyist, Eduard Amadeus Henschke, which contains all the emendations worked out by Mendelssohn and David including the cadenza. The availability of the concerto’s original score, once published in facsimile, has led some violinists to perform (and record) the concerto as first flown out of the composer’s pen. Undoubtedly, the experiment is historically important and of great interest to scholars; however, one

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has to keep in mind that those emendations, deletions, and additions were painstakingly made by the composer for good reasons. Cast in the delicate key of E minor, the concerto begins suavely with the soloist entering in the second measure. The violinist threads on the E string a melody that serves as the contour of a well-engineered web capturing a series of episodes. Although Mendelssohn indicates the movement to be played Allegro molto appassionato, passions must remain discretely protected from any overt or inadvertent overflow caused by excessive bow pressure and/or vibrato that may upset the extreme interwoven elegance of the first and second themes and the transparent orchestration sustaining them. The cadenza, placed in the middle of the movement, was one of the great additions to the original version, which indicated only a brief series of arpeggios. One may guess that this cadenza as we know it could have been contributed by Ferdinand David or was certainly inspired by his artistry. A thematic recapitulation following the cadenza gives way to a Coda marked sempre più presto that, instead of concluding affirmatively in the key of the tonic, evanesces into placid chords, out of which emerges the lonely sound of a bassoon holding the note B. The B soon resolves to C and establishes a 6/8 pulse, the tempo of the Andante, the concerto’s second movement. This dreamy Andante is an extended romance or song without words, to use Mendelssohn’s terminology, interrupted by a measured tremolo double stops passage that pays homage to fashionable violin left-hand technique. The second movement, Andante, ends very softly with the strings holding a C major chord, which without interruption lets the soloist play a very succinct intermezzo, Allegretto non troppo, from which springs the final movement, Allegro molto vivace in the full luminosity of the E major key. In the entire violin concerto repertoire, this is the violinist’s finale whose performance distinguishes the great from the greatest. Silvery quick tempo is of the essence, and it is obtainable only through perfect synchrony and economy of motions between left hand and bow arm. It is the ultimate synergetic piece of violin music: perfection, lightness—not as synonymous of carefreeness but as the elimination of anything superfluous in one’s playing, a sort of cleansing bath from so much heavy-handed virtuosity marring the violin world of the time. The ideal performance of this finale provokes the immediate reaction of the listener and engages his or her experience to the highest level. Performing this movement slightly under tempo, thus

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adding weight, fails such immediate audience engagement, and playing it too fast, as some unfortunately often do, may transform the piece into a gymnastic exploit.

SCHUMANN’S: A POLITICALLY LOADED CONCERTO Schumann’s Violin Concerto in D minor was composed and orchestrated within a four-week period—from September 3 to October 3, 1853— then, on October 7, Clara Schumann wrote in her diary that Robert “has finished a highly interesting violin concerto. He played a little of it for me; yet I dare not say more about it until I have really heard it. The Adagio and the last movement were at once quite clear to me; but the first movement was not entirely so.” On the occasion of Schumann’s visit to Hannover at the beginning of the following year, Joachim played the work twice for the composer at an orchestral rehearsal. The reading did not satisfy Schumann, who returned to Düsseldorf with the intention of submitting the work to a complete revision, a task he never completed. After the composer’s death, Clara Schumann charged both Joachim and Brahms to make some essential revisions in the concerto. They refused, arguing that, even if Clara had approved of their revisions, their alterations would have compromised Schumann’s own work. Clara accepted her friends’ decision and presented the manuscript to Joachim, in whose possession it remained until the violinist’s death in 1907, after which the Preussische Staatsbibliothek acquired it. Joseph Joachim, although he favorably viewed Schumann’s previous work for violin and orchestra, the Phantasie in C major, Op. 131, never liked the concerto and spared no words in letting others know his opinion: It must be regretfully stated that it betrays a certain decline, from which spiritual [geistige] energy tries to free itself. Individual passages, (how could it be otherwise!) give evidence of a profound creative spirit; but the contrast with the work as a whole is all the more disappointing, therefore, such a work ought not be printed, or performed in public, since it would add nothing to the composer’s laurels!

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Joachim’s edict notwithstanding, Schumann’s Violin Concerto was published in 1937, under the editorship of Paul Hindemith, and premiered in Berlin on November 26 of that year with violinist Georg Kulenkampf and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Karl Böhm. This historical and politically charged performance took place before Nazi authorities Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, and Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda, who eagerly proclaimed to the world that Nazi Germany had indeed found Schumann’s work to be the elusive “Aryan” violin concerto destined to replace the “Jewish” Mendelssohn concerto, public performances of which were no longer allowed throughout the Reich. Thumbed down by the Jewish Joachim, hailed by the Nazis, and unjustly shunned thereafter, Schumann’s Violin Concerto has managed to gain a special place in the violinist’s heart similar to the special love one has for an unwell child. Schumann’s Concerto is unwell indeed. Recorded several times, it disappoints audiences in live performances despite the crusader’s stance taken by some brave soloists. That being said though, it is worthwhile getting familiar with this unfortunate work by listening to a favorite recording and basking in the hauntingly beautiful slow movement.

MAX BRUCH, THE GRAMOPHONE, AND AMERICAN WOMEN! As committed as violinists have been since their student days to a love relationship with Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26, it is a wonder why music teachers, their teachers, and most present-day teachers did not and do not take notice of the remarkable fact that Max Bruch composed five violin concertos in addition to the Scottish Fantasy and other shorter violin pieces. These works, astoundingly well-written, enrich the violin repertoire and expand the horizon of players in search of lesser-known, large-scale Romantic works. In the pages ahead, I shed some light on Max Bruch’s five concertos, with emphasis on the last, Konzertstück in F sharp minor, Op. 84, composed in 1911 and premiered in the United States by the great American violinist Maud Powell.

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Although cast in three movements, Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26 lacks a first movement composed in the time-honored sonata form that includes the formal cadenza. Instead, Bruch begins his concerto with a Vorspiel (Prelude), a substantial work meant to precede without interruption the concerto’s core, the Adagio. The Vorspiel, Allegro moderato, opens with five measures of soft orchestral introduction leading to an ample bravura improvisation that allows the soloist to display an elaborate G minor arpeggio starting at the very bottom of the violin’s range, its open G string. The wind instruments play two more measures, then the solo violin reappears by proposing another flourishing arpeggio, leading this time to an urgently stated reprise of the orchestral introductory measures heard at the beginning of the movement and preparing the soloist for the Vorspiel’s first theme, consisting of virtuosic fortissimo double stops followed by forceful passages across the fingerboard that culminate with a series of down-bow chords to conclude with an expressive largamente. The orchestra, urged on by the rhythmic pulsations of cellos and double basses, prepares the solo violin to play a very romantic and noble second theme. A short development dense with technical passagework alternated with impassioned lyricism brings us back to the Tempo I, which shows solo violin and woodwinds in a dialectic paraphrase of the second theme that should have culminated with the traditional, hence expected, cadenza. Bruch changes course, though, and leads us through Un poco più vivo, a substantial, robust orchestral intervention whose color and contrapuntal stance bear the unmistakable stamp of Johannes Brahms’s scoring. Ultimately, the reprises of the opening flourishing arpeggios and the initial orchestral statement peter out the Vorspiel by melding it to the Adagio, the concerto’s second movement and the heart of the entire composition. Romance is the essence of Romantic music with strong narrative elements, and Max Bruch was a supreme master of the form as proven by this Adagio, a romance that outpours lyrical passion along Mendelssohn’s lines. The movement’s first theme begins on the D string, where the violin’s most suave tones are to be found, and concludes on the G string with a peroration in E flat major, giving the orchestra just enough time to put in motion the undulated accompaniment for the soloist’s presentation of the second theme. Then, a dotted little motive first played by the flutes inserts itself into the dialogical development of the whole movement with the second theme taking the lead in bringing

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soloist and solo instruments of the orchestra to a climax. Ultimately, the first theme, now played throatily on the G string, is followed by the second theme, whose dynamic markings call for double piano to double forte in the span of a few measures. The Adagio concludes in a whispery fashion. The orchestral introduction to the Finale, Allegro energico, emerges from the whispered last chord of the Adagio. It builds up tension in preparation for the very aggressive entrance of the solo violin that displays full radiance of the G major key—aggrandized by the violin’s natural acoustical qualities—with chords and double stops on the A and E strings. This creates an interesting instrumental parabola featuring the timbre qualities of all four strings of the violin in the course of the three movements (G string in the Vorspiel, D string in the Adagio, A and E strings in the Finale). The overall flavor of this Finale is decisively Brahmsian with more than a touch of Hungarian élan, no doubt the outcome of Joachim’s influence on the concerto’s final version. The Finale, a favorite movement among generations of violinists, is one of the most rewarding pieces ever written for the instrument. Bravura and bursting passionate phrases, passages on the G string marked con forza, and enthusiastic interplay between soloist and orchestra bring out the best of any soloist and plenty of cheers from audiences. Bruch’s Concerto No. 1 has gained its place in the repertoire, sitting solidly between the concertos of Mendelssohn and Brahms. Max Bruch’s Second Violin Concerto did not fare as well as its predecessor for reasons that can be only partially explained. Completed in 1878, the Violin Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 44 was premiered that same year at the Crystal Palace in London, with Pablo de Sarasate as soloist and Bruch conducting. Bruch dedicated the concerto to Sarasate, who made this work a great success at first. As time passed, though, and Sarasate’s fame declined, the concerto was performed less frequently. Bruch loved his Second Concerto and felt disappointed at its falling into oblivion. Ewald, Bruch’s son, recalls his father admonishing a young virtuoso who wanted to play the G minor concerto for him: “The G minor concerto again! I couldn’t bear to hear it even once more! My friend, play my Second Concerto or the Scottish Fantasy for once.” Instead of following the traditional (fast-slow-fast) concerto format, Bruch’s Second Concerto is developed along the lines of a large-scale dramatic Ballade steeped deeply into German Romanticism as its per-

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sistent recitatives allude to a hidden literary narrative. Endowed with some truly beautiful melodic ideas, the concerto’s first movement, Adagio ma non troppo, begins with a Brahms-inspired poetic theme, which, after very succinct development and the solo violin’s technical passages in thirds and sixths, introduces a nostalgically lyrical second theme punctuated by remote dotted rhythms evoking the accompaniment to a funeral march. The orchestra then takes command of the discourse, blasting forth a full rendition of the first theme followed by the solo violin’s abbreviated reprise of the double stops passage and a re-presentation of the second theme. The second movement, Allegro moderato, consists of two sets of cadenza-style recitatives deployed before entering the turbulently passionate Allegro that, instead of developing into an expected symphonic interplay between solo and orchestra, returns to a reprise of the recitatives to close the movement. The third movement, Finale (Allegro molto), makes up the bulk of the concerto in the form of an agitated Rondo whose slower sections again reveal some very tenderly beautiful melodies. Ultimately, the Coda, a long passage in staccato sextuplets, brilliantly concludes this epic movement. In modern times, Heifetz and Menuhin were among the earlier promoters of the Second Concerto. Occasionally, it receives a performance or two; however, it is still regarded by most violinists and concert programmers as the stepsister to the G minor concerto. The Violin Concerto No. 3, Op. 58 is much in the style of Brahms and, like the first concerto, was dedicated to Joachim. With time, Joachim had become particularly fastidious and pedantic regarding the many new works dedicated to him. He was the most favorite composers’ violinist of the day. Therefore, he was automatically granted power to veto or approve works written for him. It is well-known, for instance, that Joachim gave Antonin Dvorak a very hard time with the Violin Concerto in A minor. Something similar happened with Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 3. Perhaps Joachim felt that his age was not in his favor as he considered launching a new work of large proportion. Perhaps it was Bruch’s attitude; Joachim complained about it in a letter to Clara Schumann from Berlin dated May 4, 1891: “Bruch has many troubles, he is very plucky, and a new concerto which he has written during the last few months, and which I am to play on May 31 at his benefit in Dresden, will do him Credit.”

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After its premiere, the concerto received a few performances and then disappeared. Even the publisher, Simrock, perhaps unhappy that the work did not generate the money Bruch’s first concerto had, did not bother to issue a second printing of the work. Today, very few violinists play this concerto. In 1901, at the request of Pablo de Sarasate, Bruch composed a fourth violin concerto, which he called Serenade, Op. 75. The idea of a four-movement concerto bearing an archaic title perhaps suggests a work of neo-Baroque pedantry in the manner of Max Reger or homage to the young Brahms of the two orchestral serenades. This did not help the work’s popularity. It met the same fate as the Third Concerto. The Fifth Violin Concerto, Op. 84, written in 1911, has a history of its own. First of all, it has only two movements, Allegro appassionato and Adagio. Bruch called it Konzertstück. Though written for violinist Willy Hess, it was the celebrated American violinist Maud Powell who gave the concerto’s first performance on June 8, 1911, at the Norfolk Festival in Connecticut. Despite Maud Powell’s talents and effort, the new piece received a tepid response. Maybe America was not the best place for premiering a work of this sort, and since Bruch was known only for his celebrated G minor concerto, continuous comparison between the two works is evident in the chronicles of the period. For instance, prior to the first performance with orchestra, the Konzertstück was heard privately with piano accompaniment. A chronicle of this event was reported in The Musical Leader of June 8, 1911. It reads: Maud Powell, who is to play for the first time on any stage the new concerto by Max Bruch, gave a private hearing of this work last week before rehearsing it with Mr. Mees, who is to conduct it. The concerto has but two movements and needs a third to round out what is as it stands a delightfully musical and appealing composition. It sounds as though it might be the work of a former day, which the old master has put into shape and freshened without throwing out of proportion by the attempt to over-modernize. The second movement shows Bruch’s tendencies to the Gaelic, as he has done so frequently and so successfully heretofore, built as it is upon the old Irish song “The Little Red Lark,” and developed with all the delightful and poetic imagination of that genial talent.

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The work was finally heard in New York City in a recital setting, which took place at the Lyceum Theatre on October 31, 1911. Here are some of the reviews: Musical Observer: The program included the latest composition for the violin by the veteran Max Bruch, a so-called Konzertstück in F sharp minor. This was the first performance of this work in New York and it attracted a large audience composed of music lovers, violin players of every denomination, and special admirers of Maud Powell. Her playing of this composition was admirable, although it cannot be said that the number, as a whole, added any additional glory to the composer of the famous G minor Concerto. New York Tribune: Bruch’s Konzertstück can scarcely be set down as a worthy companion piece to Bruch’s concertos, but it shows association at least with the Scottish Fantasy by utilizing a Celtic melody, Irish or Scotch as one chooses to think. This part of the new piece is effective and moving, but as a whole the work sounds like a page written and discarded long ago, perhaps even before the Scotch Fantasy was written.

From these comments, we see that the new work was received with some reservation. The lack of a third movement and the insinuation that the concerto was put together with old material became the main criticism. Maud Powell tried to remedy the first problem by writing to Bruch asking him to compose a third movement for the concerto, but he refused her request. Regarding Bruch’s use of old material, Powell put the matter to rest once and for all. She wrote: “I think the slow movement Bruch wrote in England, and the first movement when he was 20 years old. He simply put them together. Their publication is recent, but not their inspiration. I am sure.” Maud Powell’s ultimate act of love for this piece was to record part of it on June 16, 1911, just eight days after its world premiere performance. She played the very first note of Max Bruch’s ever recorded— and this happened with the most neglected of the master’s concertos. Ironically, today, Bruch’s Concerto No. 1 in G minor is one of the most recorded violin concertos in the history of the gramophone. Max Bruch was shocked when he heard about Maud Powell’s recording. Apparently he wrote to a friend, “She appears to have played the Adagio shortened by half, into a machine (!!). I really gave her a piece of my mind

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about this.” The recording was never released, and to this day, the original plates have not been found. Max Bruch’s autograph of the Konzertstück, in the violin/piano version, is now part of the Mary Flagler Cary Music Collection preserved at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. Mary Flagler Cary purchased it from antiquarian Otto Haas probably in the 1950s. The whereabouts of the original score are unknown. The same collection also includes the original orchestral score of Bruch’s Concerto No. 1, which was purchased through a series of curious circumstances as reported by Christopher Fifield in his biography of the composer. He wrote: When he retired from his final post in Berlin in 1911 he [Max Bruch] decided to sell the original manuscripts to raise some capital. Interest in purchasing it came from the violinist Ysaye and also from a group in America anxious to donate it to the National Library in Washington. Neither venture came to anything and the manuscript remained with the composer. In April 1920, six months before his death, he allowed the American sisters Rose and Ottilia Sutro—two pianists much appreciated by Bruch for the performance of his Fantasy in D minor for two pianos Op. 11 [and the commissioners of Bruch’s Concerto for two pianos and orchestra]—to take the manuscript back with them to the United States where they were to sell it and send the money back to Bruch, by now in dire straits through the combined exigencies of old age, inflation, and the aftermath of the First World War. Bruch’s youngest son Ewald wrote an account of the incident in 1970: “I was rather skeptical about the matter, but my father reassured me: ‘My boy, soon I shall be free of all worries when the first dollars arrive.’ The unsuspecting man just smiled. My father sustained this good faith until his death in October 1920. He had neither received the promised dollars, nor had he seen the score of his G minor Concerto again. “In December 1920 my brother, sister and I received the ostensible proceeds from the score: we were paid out in worthless German paper money. Where from, we could not find out—some bank somewhere paid us the worthless money. For years experts tried to find out the whereabouts of the score in America, but in vain. The Sutro sisters abruptly rejected every request for information, and hindered any inquiries. About twelve years ago, I received the address through friends, of a German-American music publisher, who apparently

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knew the current owner of the manuscript. He replied politely that a short while before it had been sold through him, and the present owner had sworn him to silence regarding his possession of the score. The Sutro sisters are no longer alive. They took the secret of this outrageous deception, the victim of which was my poor father, with them to the grave. That is the fate of the score of the G Minor Violin Concerto by Max Bruch.”

A happier ending to the story lies in the actual whereabouts of the score. The Sutro sisters, San Francisco heiresses, had indeed kept the manuscript for nearly thirty years and had not fulfilled their promise to Bruch. In 1949, they sold it to New York dealer Walter Schatzki, who, acting on behalf of Mary Flagler Cary, then placed it in her considerable collection of rare books and manuscripts. Upon her death in 1967, the Mary Flagler Cary Music Collection was donated by its trustees to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, where it has been since 1968. Max Bruch’s autographs of the first and last violin concertos are now united as museum pieces, representing the symbolic head and tail of a most fascinating story in the violin concerto repertoire.

6 BRAHMS’S VIOLIN CONCERTO AND THE END OF AN ERA

The paternity of the Romantic violin concerto can be attributed to Louis Spohr (1784–1859), sidestepping perhaps Wagner’s pronouncement that labeled the violinist/composer great but lengthy, pedantic, and sentimental—an assessment whose traces one may find scattered throughout Spohr’s fifteen violin concertos, the very body of works that, ironically, assured him a conspicuous place in the history of nineteenthcentury music. Rarely performed in modern times, Spohr’s violin concertos make up an extraordinary lyrical anthology of the capabilities the violin can offer when played well, so much so that others, including Mendelssohn and Paganini, used Spohr’s lyrical effusions to spring forth their more progressive ideas. Beside the sporadically performed Concerto No. 8 in A minor, Op. 47, “In Form of a Lyrical Scene,” composed in 1816 as a sort of antidote against both the preponderant Paganini and Italian operatic manias, the Concerto in E minor No. 7, Op. 38 is a fuller representation of the composer’s lyrical gifts. He deployed then alongside abundant left-hand and bow-arm technical passages without ever falling into gratuitous crowd-pleasing pyrotechnics. Spohr’s “lesson” was well-received by Ferdinand David, who influenced the creation of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, and by Joseph Joachim, whose efforts at writing his own concertos informed, among others, Bruch, Schumann, and Brahms when composing their works for the violin. It would be among those “other composers” that one might find some hidden gems. As a first 75

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example, the Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 28 by Karl Goldmark (1830–1915) was first performed in Vienna in 1878. This concerto, very well-known to violinists, is studied along curricular lines placed somewhat between Mendelssohn and Bruch, and as a preparatory study to Brahms. However, Goldmark’s is a concerto that conforms uneasily to modern performance requirements. Stubbornly, it demands a playing style that has remained frozen in time because—one may argue—its granitic structure, beautifully drawn melodic lines, and rhythms leave very little room for individualization. The concerto’s three movements are too integrated into the logical formality of the whole construction that culminates into a fully developed fugue, a rather unusual way to end a solo concerto. In sum, the Goldmark is a much talked-about concerto in professional circles but rarely heard in live performance. Among the succinct number of compositions by Henryk Wieniawski (1835–1880), his Violin Concerto No.1 in F sharp minor, Op.14, written in 1853, was clearly inspired by Paganini and Vieuxtemps. Replete with technical difficulties, it boasts a second movement, Preghiera, that anticipates some of Bruckner’s spatial moments as the solo violin expands its melody on the G string over chords held by the brass instruments. With his Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 22, composed in 1862, Wieniawski adopted a much less technical approach in favor of more musical values. The concerto, a favorite of the violin concerto repertoire, is written in three short movements, Allegro moderato—Romance—Allegro con fuoco/Allegro moderato (à la Zingara), a triptych with a touch of Franz Lehar to be performed with impeccable grace and technical prowess. It delights audiences who may demand thereafter to hear the soloist play something of more substance, like a movement from a Bach Sonata or Partita. Henri Vieuxtemps (1820–1881) composed eight violin concertos very much echoing Paganini’s flair for acrobatic audacity, offering little in terms of novelties but making his ponderous concertos rhetorical affairs highlighted by a few original moments like the Scherzo from the Violin Concerto No. 4 in D minor, Op. 31, written in 1850. This is a movement (the concerto is in four movements) of considerable charm with a hint of Berlioz-like sarcasm. In the same daring virtuoso genre, Karol Lipinski (1790–1861) composed a Concerto militaire, Op. 21 that reveals ingenious elements of parody.

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Joseph Joachim (1831–1907), the most influential violinist of his time and the godfather to many important violin concertos, was also a noteworthy composer. Sympathetic in turn to the music of Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, and Wagner, ultimately it was in Johannes Brahms that he found a truly kindred spirit. Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77; the Double Concerto, Op. 102; and lots of chamber music owe their existence to the two musicians’ collaboration. Joachim ceased composing early in his career; however, he continued revising his third violin concerto, which he published in 1884, twenty years after its composition. Joachim was serious about composition. His orchestral works Overture to Hamlet, Op. 4; Overture to Henry IV, Op. 7; and Overture “In Memoriam Heinrich von Kleist,” Op. 13 bear testimony of a conflicted genius who struggled to get out of his mind the great works he performed in order to let his own inspiration emerge. There is no doubt that Joachim’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in D minor “In the Hungarian Manner,” Op. 11 is the most eloquent instance of this creative liberation. Composed in 1854 and dedicated to Johannes Brahms, this socalled Hungarian Concerto was the product of influences, which Joachim owed to the national music of his native land and the varied impressions of his youth that “strengthen him in his predilection for the distinctive melodies, harmonies, and rhythms of the Magyar folk songs and dances,” as Moser wrote in his biography of Joachim. Indeed, the fiendishly difficult Hungarian Concerto presents a grandiose first movement marked Allegro, un poco sostenuto, followed by a Romanze (Andante) of such beauty that it prompted Brahms to endorse it: “I like your Adagio very much. There is such charm and friendliness in it. The whole thing flows along so tranquilly and one part evolves from the other so beautifully that it is a joy.” The Finale alla zingara (Allegro) is filled with difficult and complex violin idioms whose flavor the listener may recognize later in the finale of the Brahms concerto. Brahms and Joachim enjoyed performing this concerto together on various occasions.

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THE BIRTH OF A MASTERPIECE In 1979, the Library of Congress issued a monumental facsimile edition of the autograph score of Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77 to commemorate the centenary of the concerto’s first performance and publication. This edition also paid homage to the generosity of famous violinist Fritz Kreisler, who in 1948 donated the Brahms’s autograph score in his possession to the Library of Congress. As noted in the previous chapters, the existence and availability of autograph manuscripts supersede all other sources of a given piece of music, not only for their inherent philological value but for the human qualities emanating from the “stroke of the quill” that often reveal the intensity of the composer’s thoughts. In the case of Brahms’s Violin Concerto, the stroke of the creator’s pen is detected through layers of deletions, additions, changes, and afterthoughts that trace the laborious work process. Brahms used different colored inks and pencils throughout the score to differentiate the functions of his graphic markings according to the following calligraphic scheme: 1. Brown ink was used as the primary graphic foundation of the first draft. It reveals variations in the speed of Brahms’s strokes, the pressure applied upon the pen, and the changing density of the ink itself. 2. Bold markings were applied with a soft blue pencil to emphasize the typical markings a conductor makes on the score to improve the visibility of dynamics, instrumental cues, and rehearsal letters. 3. A hard gray pencil was used for making chances in the orchestration. Brahms, prompted by Joachim’s suggestions, penned them. 4. Much like the bold blue markings, the soft red pencil additions appear to retrace the gray pencil revision of the solo violin part and some dynamic markings as if they were pending decisions. 5. A soft orange pencil was used for some bold markings. Possibly Brahms went through the manuscript with an orange pencil or crayon before committing it to publication, thus marking particular points for his publisher’s consideration.

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6. The dark red ink additions, entered by Simrock’s editor Robert Keller, mostly represented revised passages for the soloist as suggested by Joachim. Such an unusual panoply of details constitutes a collaborative creative process similar to the Mendelssohn-David artistic partnership discussed in chapter 5. The dense correspondence between Brahms and Joachim serves to connect the dots throughout the making of this concerto. Brahms’s collected correspondence includes two volumes of letters exchanged with Joseph Joachim. Thirty-three missives and postcards written between August 21, 1878, and June 26, 1879, were related to the concerto. These letters can be divided into two batches: those written before the concerto’s premiere of January 1, 1879, and those written thereafter until October 1879, when the piece was published. On August 21, 1878, Brahms sent Joachim a number of violin passages, a clear signal that he was serious about composing a violin concerto. In fact, the following day he mailed to Joachim the solo violin part of the first movement and the opening of the finale of a violin concerto in four movements. He added a note saying that he would be satisfied if Joachim could just comment on passages that were difficult, awkward, or plain impossible. On August 24, the violinist replied with enthusiasm, wishing to see the concerto’s full score and to discuss the matter with the composer in person. By mid-October Joachim, writing from Berlin, said that he had organized an orchestral reading of the piece with high hopes for a performance at Leipzig’s Gewandhaus on New Year’s Day. Brahms’s November reply from Vienna showed some hesitation as he confided to Joachim that he had substituted the middle two movements (Adagio and Scherzo) with a “feeble adagio,” thus recasting the concerto into the traditional three movements. Finally, Brahms decided to go ahead with the idea of having the concerto premiered in Leipzig, and on December 12, he assured Joachim that the orchestral parts were going to be ready by the first of January. The premiere performance of the concerto took place as scheduled but fell short of expectations. Apparently, Joachim was underprepared and ill at ease; Brahms, who conducted the orchestra, was tense and nervous; the public was unresponsive—and the critics were cool. Reactions to the performance in Vienna on January 14 were not any more

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encouraging, and even the conductor, Joseph Hellmesberger, could not resist the coinage of a witticism that remained memorable for years to come: “Brahms’s is not a concerto for, but against, the violin.” Such an outburst of negativity induced both the composer and interpreter to put the concerto through a stringent process of revisions well chronicled in the remaining Brahms/Joachim correspondence. A letter dated January 24, 1879, informs that Joachim was preparing for his annual tour of England, where he planned to introduce the new concerto. Brahms promised to mail Joachim the full score with the request that all changes be marked in red in the orchestral and the solo violin parts, leaving the score unmarked. On February 8, Joachim returned the solo part of the concerto and took a second copy to London, where a performance was set for February 22 at the Crystal Palace. This time the concerto was received with acclaim, followed by another clamorous performance at the Philharmonic on March 5, where Joachim played the piece from memory. Brahms then requested that the score and parts be returned to him in separate packages for safety. At the end of March, Joachim returned the parts but not the score as he wished to discuss with the composer in person the many changes he had made. On August 10, Brahms wrote to Joachim asking to join him in Aigen (near Salzburg) a few days later. Having brought along the proofs of the concerto’s violin and piano reduction, Brahms and Joachim played the Concerto and the Sonata in G major, Op. 78 for Clara Schumann and friends Elisabeth and Heinrich von Herzogenberg who were in town for the occasion. During these days, composer and violinist agreed on the final version of the solo violin part and corrected the proofs accordingly. Later, Brahms alone corrected the proofs of the orchestral score. The concerto was finally published in October 1879 with a dedication to Joachim. This correspondence between composer and performer suggests the existence of one full score, one violin and piano reduction, possibly two solo violin parts, and many orchestral parts, all bearing the markings of numerous revisions. The early solo part that belonged to Joachim is now in Berlin, and a second, nonautograph solo part intended for the engraver was recently acquired for the Library of Congress by the Heinemann Foundation. A foreword by Jon Newsome and a critical essay by Yehudi Menuhin precede the edition of the full score, now available in facsimile as described above. Comparative essays, beginning with Boris

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Schwarz’s published in The Musical Quarterly in 1983, continue to probe the many hidden treasures embedded in Brahms’s masterpiece.

EXPERIENCING BRAHMS’S CONCERTO The first movement, marked Allegro non troppo, connotes a broad orchestral exposition eighty-nine measures in length that does not have an imperative beginning like Beethoven’s and most of the concertos observed thus far. Brahms’s concerto seems to have already begun, sweeping the listener along with a floating, gentle melody built on the tonic chord and played softly by bassoons, violas, and cellos; reinforced by two French horns; and concluded with the addition of two more French horns and double basses. This polyphonic sound wave continues to inflate and deflate, causing a sense of manipulated undulation as rhythms and meter engage in conflicting statements, a familiar trend in Brahms’s music. The wavy discourse, though, is interrupted toward the end by a very rhythmic, dotted passage that builds up the crescendo leading to what was to become the most forceful solo entrance in the violin concerto literature. Sustained by timpani, two French horns, and later by punctuations occurring in the strings, the soloist has only a few measures to assert his or her magisterial control over the intense drama that permeates the whole first movement. It is indeed a musical invocation. Brahms and Joachim had refined their propitiatory hymn to such a perfection that the strenuous twenty-three-minute-long movement never fails to exult composer, player, and listeners in a communion of intents. Joseph Joachim wrote a splendid cadenza for this movement, hard to substitute despite a wealth of exemplars—some of great interest and inventiveness including one composed by Ferruccio Busoni. The concerto’s second movement (Adagio), the “feeble” Adagio Brahms substituted to the original central two movements, turned out to become the most memorable slow movement in the whole of violin concerto repertoire. Puzzling at first as it is the oboe that plays the opening theme, the violin’s solo entrance is characterized by a sequel of embellishments played above the stated oboe theme, which continues through transformations displayed along an increasingly engaging ternary form, which traditionally comprised the development of two themes (A—B), a brief transition, and the return to the first theme (A)

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followed by an optional Coda (Italian for tail). These formal traits are easily recognizable in Brahms’s Adagio despite the dense dramatization of some episodes. Taken as a whole, this essentially pastoral movement provides performer and listener with a respite strategically placed between the colossal first movement and the festively ringing Finale (Allegro giocoso ma non troppo vivace). Cast in the traditional Rondo form, Brahms’s Finale extends and refines in a matter of speaking Joachim’s finale of his Hungarian Concerto, by inserting subtle elements of “controlled” Hungarian folk music. In fact, the composer’s indication ma non troppo vivace suggests that the piece be played in the spirit of a Hungarian dance rather than as a quasi-orgiastic Rondò alla Zingarese as he specified in the last movement of his Piano Quartet no. 1 in G minor, Op. 25. The concerto’s spectacular last movement brings to a close not only the greatest violin concerto ever written but an entire era that juxtaposed the creativity of many great minds in the worlds of music, literature, and the sciences that changed the course of Western civilization.

ANTONIN DVORAK’S CONCERTO-IN-WAITING Perhaps it was not a coincidence that, days after the January 1, 1879, premiere of the Brahms Concerto, publisher Fritz Simrock encouraged thirty-eight-year-old Czech composer Antonin Dvorak to try his hand at a violin concerto, a task he enthusiastically accomplished between July 5 and the first half of September 1879. At the beginning of December, Dvorak sent the finished score to Joseph Joachim, to whom he dedicated the work. Dvorak anticipated smooth sailing for his concerto, now in the hands of the most powerful violin virtuoso of his time. It was not so; Dvorak’s Violin Concerto stumbled upon difficulties, and Joachim never performed it in public. In 1874, Dvorak was granted the newly instituted Austrian State Stipendium for young, poor, and talented artists in the western half of the empire, a prize he also won in 1876 and 1877. At the first trial, the jury was composed of Johann Herbeck, the director of the Court Opera; Eduard Hanslick, the powerful critic of the Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse; and Johannes Brahms, who was invited to replace an ailing Herbeck. Dvorak’s submitted portfolio included a large amount of orchestral,

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choral, and chamber works, which impressed Hanslick and Brahms. Brahms took the Czech composer to heart and offered support beginning with an introduction to his publisher Fritz Simrock and later to Joseph Joachim, who included Dvorak’s String Sextet in A major, Op. 48 and the String Quartet in E flat, Op. 51 in a private performance at Joachim’s house on July 29, 1879, with the composer present. Thereafter, these two works received numerous public performances, and the sextet was given its first London performance at St. James Hall Monday Pop on February 23, 1880. Notwithstanding his appreciation for Dvorak’s chamber works, Joachim returned the score of the violin concerto to the composer with a list of negative comments regarding the formal structure peculiarities of the first movement; the orchestration, which he found to be constantly too heavy; and the “overwhelming” Czech flavor that permeated the last movement. Joachim’s observations were duly taken into account, and the composer was able to write to Simrock on May 9, 1880, that he had reworked the entire score, “without missing a single measure.” Again, Dvorak submitted the revised score to Joachim, who this time replied after more than two years, suggesting a series of alterations in the solo parts he had made in the summer of 1882. Finally, in November, Dvorak and Joachim gave the concerto a reading with the orchestra of the Berlin Hochschule. That reading was the closest to a public performance Joachim ever gave to the Dvorak Violin Concerto! Joachim’s behavior raises questions regarding his increasing cantankerousness and possible fatigue caused by the artistic patronage he was compelled to bestow upon too many new works and composers. Or perhaps human preferences played a role other than merit in the Joachim-Dvorak dynamic. The violinist’s paranoia and pathological jealousy, which culminated with the collapse of his marriage to famous singer Amalie Schneeweiss, were known traits in the Joachim, Brahms, and Clara Schumann circle. In fact, they put a severe strain on his friendship with Brahms. Dvorak’s mixture of Brahmsian texture with a melodic content of a very distinctive Czech character annoyed Joachim, who perhaps feared that the concerto he was to patronize could have not gained full acceptance in the German-speaking world. Worst yet, did Joachim detect in Dvorak’s work echoes of the revolutionary movements that shook the Austrian Empire in 1848–1849? As speculations of this sort abounded, a very talented young Czech violin virtuoso ap-

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peared on the scene ready to become the apostle of the freshly published violin concerto: Frantisek Ondricek! The concerto’s premiere took place in Prague on October 14, 1883, with Moric Anger conducting the National Theatre Orchestra. One of the most famous examples of a concerto-in-waiting in the history of the genre took off to a great start. Violinists hold Dvorak’s Violin Concerto in great esteem; they consider it a rich reservoir of human emotions ready to be rekindled with each performance. Unlike the Goldmark Concerto, Dvorak’s remains exuberantly young and refreshing from start to finish. The first movement, Allegro ma non troppo, begins with a call played in unison by the orchestra to which the solo violin answers plaintively from afar. A second, more imperative unisonous call receives the same answer from the soloist, but this time it sounds closer. Thereafter, the orchestra begins its proper introduction as if it were an overture to an imaginary tale about a youth, possibly a warrior, whose gestural saga fades in and out of the narrative, a common happening—explicitly or not—in Dvorak’s music. Formally, the movement does not follow the time-honored sonata form with its developments and tonal predictability, factors that may make it difficult to settle on expectations for a first-time listener. There is no cadenza to speak of. Instead Dvorak provides the violinist with extended passages at the end of the movement played along with obbligato instruments as they search for ways to insinuate themselves into the second movement’s opening theme, Adagio ma non troppo. This movement is central to the concerto’s narrative as set by the first movement. Yet the idea of a large-scale Adagio for violin and orchestra was not new for Dvorak, who, in 1873, composed a gorgeously “Bohemian” Romance in F minor, Op. 11 based on the Andante con moto of the String Quartet in F minor, op. 9 (1873), so he knew very well how to build up a great Adagio. If the youth in our hypothetical story needs a homecoming, it is in this movement that episodes of longing, victories, and sorrows are recounted and magisterially highlighted by Dvorak’s orchestration. Take, for instance, the impetuous use of the solo French horn as it reacts to the solo violin’s second theme, or the military trumpets advancing through a mesmerizing poco stringendo that morphs gradually into a distant dirge ending soon in an orchestral Tutti of a decisive Brahmsian flavor. The movement concludes with two French

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horns stating the principal theme accompanied by the strings while the solo violin indulges in aerial arpeggios landing on a triple piano tenuto chord, a very discreet shush before the Finale, Allegro giocoso ma non troppo. This Finale in rondo form is, in effect, a furiant, the typical Czech fiery dance characterized by syncopations and shifting metric accents in which the entire cast of characters in our story comes together in a general dance marked by virtuosity, contrasts, subtlety in orchestration, and thematic choices propelled by a tremendous vitality. To tone down the attribute “giocoso” with a cautionary “ma non troppo” means to play it not wildly but elegantly, with style. In fact, this entire movement can be intended as the ultimate stylization of a Czech folk dance—a factor that could have irked Joachim’s sensitivity a bit as he requested Dvorak to keep his Czech nationalistic enthusiasm under control. Did Dvorak really oblige the great violinist? Not enough, perhaps, as Joachim never performed the concerto in public. As an aside, Dvorak had a sort of dry run for this movement in early 1879 when he composed Mazurek, Op. 49, a very exciting short work for violin and orchestra dedicated to Pablo de Sarasate.

THE BOY FROM PAMPLONA The great Spanish violin virtuoso Pablo de Sarasate (1844–1908) was, next to Joachim, the inspirer of many concertos for violin and orchestra, from Wieniawski’s second concerto to Max Bruch and Camille SaintSaëns. His playing style was Joachim’s opposite: light, precise, and captivating, especially when performing his own works, for example the evergreen Zigeunerweisen (Gypsy Airs) or Carmen Fantasy. A master at depicting the exotic, Sarasate became the world ambassador of nationalistic messages with which composers entrusted him, works including Dvorak’s Mazurek, Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, and Eduard Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, Concerto russe, and Fantasie norvégienne. But it was indeed the Symphonie espagnole, in effect a concerto for violin and orchestra, which cemented forever the names of Eduard Lalo (1823–1892) and Pablo de Sarasate. French composer Eduard Lalo was also a violinist of repute who wrote a number of works for violin and orchestra inspired by Sarasate, beginning with a Concerto in F major, Op. 20 (1873); followed by

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Symphonie espagnole, Op. 21 (1874); Concerto russe in G minor, Op. 29 (1879); and the smaller Fantasie norvégienne (1878); Romance-sérénade (1879); Guitarre, Op. 28 (1882); and Fantaisie-ballet (1885). Surpassing by far the delicate Concerto in F and the syrupy Concerto russe, the Symphonie espagnole is considered a masterpiece because of its perfect balance between soloist and orchestra, constantly charged rhythmic articulation, sentimentality oscillating with burning passion, and the grand formal structure of the whole composition. Symphonie espagnole presents the violinist with a terrific vehicle for showing off supreme technical virtuosity and beauty of sound. Is Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole considered as a superficial piece? The answer is no, but given its high level of importance in the violin concerto repertoire, one may think about it as the opposite of the Brahms Concerto in terms of density of content. Structured in five movements, Symphonie espagnole boasts a rich orchestration: piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, snare drum, triangle, harp, and strings, a necessary sonic apparatus for depicting a wide range of Iberic tapestries. The first movement, Allegro non troppo, begins with a peremptory four-measure fanfare. The soloist enters with a bien rythmè unaccompanied statement that quickly slides into a languid (forte appassionato) Habanera. The orchestra restates the initial motive, and the games begin. The whole first movement is a lengthy, relentless bullfight-like event, which our toreador/violinist ends victoriously by inflicting upon the orchestral beast a final blow of the bow. The second movement, Scherzando, is indeed a very charming, evanescent Scherzo during which the soloist, cheered by the audience after the triumphal match, offers smiles and flowers to favorites in the audience. In this movement, the orchestra functions like a huge guitar accompanying extremely volatile violin playing whose glitzy passages are minutely notated. The third movement, Intermezzo, Allegretto non troppo, often omitted by some performers, is a sort of afterthought, a behind-the-scenes Habanera played by the soloist’s alter ego for the toreador’s benefit. With the fourth movement, Andante, we should have arrived at the expected slow portion of the piece. Instead, Lalo treats us to another behind-the-scenes intermezzo, this time a seductive, much embellished romance whose gypsy flavor will be much more convincingly offered by Sarasate himself a few years later in his Carmen

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Fantasy. Eduard Lalo was a consummate composer who knew how to save the best for last. The fifth movement, Rondo (Allegro), of his Symphonie espagnole is no exception. A highly surprising orchestral introduction begins with faraway triplets (the tempo indication is 6/8) tinkled by harp, winds, and triangle (that shimmering sound we have not heard in a violin concerto since Paganini’s Rondo della campanella), joined by a buoyant bassoon and gradually and repetitiously by the rest of the orchestra. Then the soloist plays a motive marked gaiment that has become iconic of the violin literature since, a huge point scored in favor of Lalo. This Rondo follows its formal sequence of events alternating slower, sentimental sections like the Poco più lento that recalls the Habanera heard in the Intermezzo and a very extensive and exceeding brilliant coda. First performed by Sarasate at the Cirque d’hiver in Paris on February 7, 1875, Symphonie espagnole was an immediate hit, and the published music became a must have/must play for every violinist, including the young Russian Iosif Kotek, who met with Tchaikovsky in Switzerland in 1878.

WINTER DREAMS Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 is so iconic that if one should dream of playing the violin, surely Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece would come to mind first. Just think about the many motion pictures whose soundtrack features this concerto and its strong psychological power to underscore—diegetically and nondiegetically—romantic situations, artistic eccentricities, and even morbid temptations. Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky’s life was a continuous emotional rollercoaster. Stability remained elusive, and perhaps he never sought it since his creativity always ran at full speed after a crisis. His last work, the Symphony no. 6 “Pathetique,” was composed while experiencing the deepest of many homosexual crises, this time involving his own nephew, Vladimir Lvovich “Bob” Davidov. The creation of the violin concerto, on the other hand, placed Tchaikovsky at the center of the happiest of his homosexual crashes. A young violinist by the name of Iosif Kotek (1855–1885) was the concerto’s source of inspiration.

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It happened in the small Swiss village of Clerens in 1878, when Tchaikovsky sought solace from the collapse of his catastrophic marriage to Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova. Now in very high spirits in the company of his openly homosexual brother, Modest, he awaited the arrival of the handsome young Joachim pupil Iosif Kotek. They experienced a great deal of pleasure playing Eduard Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, whose “freshness, lightness, piquant rhythms, beautifully and admirably harmonized melodies” inspired Tchaikovsky to write a violin concerto. It progressed rapidly. The first movement enraptured Kotek and Modest, and the finale created a furor among them. The Andante was rejected and a new one written. Without Kotek, “I’d have been able to accomplish nothing,” wrote Tchaikovsky. The concerto was very happily completed on April 11, 1878, and would have been dedicated to Kotek; however, Tchaikovsky, pathologically self-conscious about his male relationships, thought that such a dedication would have led to public “exposure.” Thus, the concerto was dedicated to the premiere Russian violinist of the time, Leopold Auer, who refused to play it on the grounds of finding its writing unviolinistic. It was not until 1881 that young virtuoso Adolf Brodsky premiered the concerto in Vienna on December 4, 1881, and became the official dedicatee of one of the most beloved violin concertos ever composed. A calm, brief introduction, marked Allegro moderato, paves the way for the soloist to make his or her very comfortable entrance by playing two notes on the G string—A and B flat—followed by an ascending arpeggio and a heartfelt recitative, a motive that will never be heard again. Like a quick testing of the waters, the motive checks the responsiveness of the instrument; the suppleness of the vibrato, which signals the left hand’s level of tension; the steadiness of the bow; and other idiosyncratic elements necessary to a safe performance, a tremendous flight of the composer’s fancy lasting some twenty minutes. Next, a lush interval of a major sixth A to F sharp also on the G string elates the listener’s spirit, ready for the Moderato assai, the concerto’s passionate declaration of love. A chromatic passage then leads to a sweeping chordal repetition of the main theme. Stormy bravura episodes finally settle down to introduce the second theme, con molto espressivo, played on the D string, where the violin’s warmest of tones are always to be found. Again, the composer works out this theme in a variety of ways, from tormented to furious, expressed through daring technical

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passages leading to the full orchestral return of the main theme: a hairraising, glorious moment! In his typical repetitious style, Tchaikovsky elaborates on the main theme, symphonically giving the soloist a few moments of respite before embarking upon a series of treacherous variations marked molto sostenuto il tempo, moderatissimo, cautioning not to brush off the notes roughly but with extreme elegance and subtle rubatos that build up to a second orchestral explosion of the main theme. Again, symphonic treatment of the material, this time interrupted by resonant chords of the soloist, leads to Tchaikovsky’s own cadenza—a “classic” of the violin concerto repertoire. This cadenza, though, is not followed by the traditional concluding orchestral tutti. Instead it leads to a reprise of the main theme and another series of soloist versus orchestra developments including the second theme. Tchaikovsky takes soloist, orchestra, and listener through the most strenuous coda ever written, a breathless tour de force, which, in the end, lets a persistent D major chord pound mercilessly into everybody’s chest. After such a grand show of force, the second movement, Canzonetta (Andante), is a charming bon-bon played con sordino and sensually proposed by the solo violin in amorous complicity with the woodwinds. The dream, though, is short-lived as a sudden, razor-blade fortissimo chord fires off the Finale, Allegro vivacissmo. The soloist enters with a cadenza whose ending ushers in a typical Russian Hopak to be tossed off with absolute left-hand precision and magisterial, if not magical, staccato bow strokes. The next episode, Poco meno mosso, is a rich hornpipe theme lasciviously rendered on the G string contrasted by a delicate Molto meno mosso and a very sentimental Poco a poco rallentando that gradually takes us back to Tempo I. Brilliant passages contrapuntally treated, a section often cut in performance, finally brings us to a rattling dialogue between soloist and orchestra that concludes the concerto with exhilarating bravado verging on the bombastic.

BACK TO PAMPLONA This chapter has been devoted to a handful of violin concertos composed at the dawn of the twentieth century. They were the bearers of progressive ideas that germinated the advent of Modernism. However,

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now I begin with a retrospective view of some violin concertos composed in the 1880s, which despite their roots in the Romantic tradition have reached a solid place in the repertoire: Camille Saint-Saëns’s Violin Concerto no. 3 in B minor, Op. 61 and Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, Op. 46, both composed for Pablo de Sarasate. Camille Saint-Saëns (1855–1921) was a towering presence in the musical and literary world astride two centuries. Much interested in advanced discoveries in the sciences and astronomy, he chose to remain oblivious to currently evolving musical styles because they were in conflict with his inborn classicism filtered through Romantic lenses. A virtuoso pianist since childhood, Saint-Saëns sought advice for his many violin works from the finest violinists active in Paris and, in 1858, wrote an outrageously difficult Violin Concerto in C major performed and published twenty years later as Violin Concerto No. 2, Op. 58. The work, very rarely performed in public in modern times, is derivative of Vieuxtemps, although the second movement, Andante espressivo, shows the soloist accompanied by the harp in archaic fashion as if it were part of the incidental music at a medieval play. Concerto No. 1 in A major, Op. 20, composed at the request of Sarasate, was premiered in Paris by the Spanish virtuoso on April 4, 1867. It is a short work in one movement of about ten minutes in duration to which the composer added—not to create a more complete work but rather to please or appease an impatient Sarasate—the Introduction and Rondo capriccioso, Op. 28, which, to this day, retains fame as one of the most popular violin works of all times. Again, it was Sarasate who rose to a new challenge when in 1880 Saint-Saens dedicated to him the Violin Concerto No. 3 in B minor, Op. 61. This concerto starts with the orchestra playing a whispering tremolo for only four measures, then the solo violin is catapulted into what has become one of the most spectacular entrances of the entire repertoire: a provocative, accented, and passionate five notes played on the G string and shifting from C sharp to D to A sharp to B to F sharp and again to B one octave higher, then the five notes are played again, this time reaching the D one tenth higher, followed by rhythmic figures heading back to F sharp. Thereafter, the movement continues passing through a benign skirmish between soloist and orchestra. Saint-Saëns’s opening gesture has become the ultimate testing ground for a violinist’s ability to calculate the exactitude of position shifting and for testing the

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resonating power of the violin’s G string. It amounts to that kind of “violin music” one often indulges a bit when trying out an instrument. In general Saint-Saëns’s Allegro non troppo is modeled after the Mendelssohn concerto, whose crystalline melodies and neat technical passages it very much echoes. The second movement, Andantino quasi allegretto, is a lovely Siciliana or pastoral that brings to mind some of Bizet’s delicate incidental music. The soloist engages the woodwinds in frequent dialogues and concludes with measured arpeggios played by artificial harmonics in unison with solo woodwinds. It is an uncomfortable task for the violinist because the artificial harmonics, played with the first finger pressing the string and the fourth barely touching it, tend to sound flat, creating intonation problems. A melodramatic accompanied cadenza-recitative marked Molto moderato e maestoso creates a moment of suspense before the orchestra attacks the third movement, Allegro non troppo, with an incisively rhythmical snap that infuses the whole movement with electric vitality, making the piece one of Saint-Saëns’s best remembered moments. A commentator wrote once that Saint-Saens was “the only great composer who was not a genius.” This is a fair enough observation, but it is also true that he wrote an enormous quantity of music out of which many great pages, from the whole opera Samson and Delilah to the Organ Symphony to the cameo Le cygne, could be easily singled out. The Violin Concerto No. 3 ought to have a place among them. Having obtained much success in performing Max Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 2, Pablo de Sarasate elicited another violin concerto from the German composer, the Fantasia for the Violin and Orchestra with Harp, freely using Scottish Folk Melodies, composed during the winter of 1879–1880. Apparently inspired by the works of Walter Scott, the piece, now commonly known as Scottish Fantasy, presented a set of descriptive scenarios inspired by the text and melodies borrowed from the Scottish folklore. For instance, the somber first seven measures were said to depict an old bard who contemplates a ruined castle and laments the glorious times of old. Then, still in the mellifluous key of E flat minor, the solo violin interjects some gradually passionate recitatives leading the ample orchestral introduction to the presentation of the first folk tune, “Auld Rob Morris.” This richly scored paraphrase gives the violin solo paired with the harp a splendid opportunity for offering a clear taste of Scottish folk music. The ensuing second move-

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ment, Allegro and Dance, reflects its Scottishness not only through the fiddling air “The Dusty Miller” but also through the pedal-point open fifths in the bass, which imitate bagpipes. However, it is in the third movement, Andante sostenuto, that Bruch’s lyricism soars high as the violin solo and its faithful harp muse on the tune “I’m Down for Lack of Johnnie.” The work’s Finale is aptly marked Allegro guerriero, a spirited, warlike theme and variations that push the soloist to the brink of technical possibilities. The music of this most picturesque Finale, based on the song “Scots Wha Hae,” was, according to legend, sounded by Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Bruch’s biographer Christopher Fifield wrote: The Scottish Fantasy was conceived in a free style (hence the rejection of the title Concerto in favor of Fantasy), and the virtuosity of the solo part, in particular its double stopping, equals if not exceeds the technical demands of the concertos. Rich in melody, lush in orchestration, alternately lyrical and rhythmically energetic, it serves as a model for Bruch’s work at the peak of his creative power. In spite of its title the composer himself often referred to it as a concerto, and instances of the title Scotch Concerto can be found in early concert programs.

REGRETS I close this chapter by mentioning two more violin concertos, which represent a sort of fin-de-siècle paradox: the concerto that Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) wrote in 1896 and the one composed by Richard Strauss in 1882 at the age of eighteen. Busoni, the great pianist and composer and one of the most provocative thinkers of his time, approached the writing of a violin concerto for his friend Henri Petri with the intention of offering not an anti-Romantic piece but reflections on a style that stemmed from Beethoven filtered through Busoni’s known penchant for the comedic. The result was an eclectic work equivocally received by violinists who could not comprehend the many subtleties underscoring Busoni’s ideas. Richard Strauss composed his Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 8 as part of his curriculum of studies. When it came time to compose a solo concerto, he selected the violin in homage to his violin teacher Benno

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Walter. In his violin concerto, Strauss looked back at the old Spohr/ Vieuxtemps models while being very attentive to correctness of form and orchestration. He created a work riddled with technical difficulties (because a concerto had to be difficult) while gaining little in return. Young Strauss’s tryout was profitable, though his strong personality clearly began to emerge in the First Horn Concerto and the Burlesque for Piano and Orchestra, which appeared in 1885–1886. One can only imagine what a violin concerto by the mature Strauss would have sounded like. Just think about how superbly he treated the solo violin in the tone poems, Ein Heldenleben in particular, and Le bourgeois gentilhomme. Nowadays, the violin concertos of Busoni and Strauss appear rarely on concert programs even under the labels of “historical curiosities” or “forgotten works” by celebrated composers. The truth is that they don’t belong to any category; they are simply fruits out of season.

7 IN THE AFTER-BRAHMS: MONSTERS AND LEPRECHAUNS

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the request of celebrated violinist/pedagogue Carl Flesch (1873–1944) to make some cuts, Max Reger replied, “No, that is impossible, my violin concerto is and shall remain a monster.” At fifty-four minutes, Max Reger’s Violin Concerto in A major, Op. 101 is the longest in the violin concerto repertoire. Elgar’s follows at forty-nine and the original version of the Sibelius at forty. On the other hand, Alexander Glazunov’s Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 82 (1904), in four movements without interruption, is about twenty minutes long as are other concertos composed between 1904 and 1917. The reason for such disparity in length? The notion that composing a violin concerto early in the twentieth century implied either an aggrandizement of Brahms’s masterwork or a radical move away from its shadow, a difficult task that involved a number of composers. Max Reger (1873–1916) began the composition of his monumental violin concerto in Kolberg in 1907 and completed it on April 23, 1908. It was dedicated to his friend and great violin virtuoso Henry Marteau (1874–1934), who performed it for the first time on October 13 of the same year in Leipzig with the Gewandhaus Orchestra, Arthur Nikish conducting. Championed thereafter by violinists like Georg Kulenkampf and Adolf Busch, Reger’s concerto has never had a place in the repertoire but lives in a niche of its own, a mythical status appreciated 95

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solely by a special breed of violinists and composers. Very difficult to penetrate at first hearing, this concerto remains, paradoxically, easier to perform than to listen to. However, in recent years younger adventuresome and excellent soloists have taken on the challenge of “taming” Reger’s “monster” and gaining an appreciative audience for it, a fact that invites exploration of Reger’s reasons for composing it. Here is what he wrote to his publisher on June 9, 1907: I am confident that this violin concerto is imbued as it were with the “classical” sensibilities of our time, and that it contains no “crazy ideas”. There is no technical “nonsense” to be found in the solo violin part; what becomes apparent is an ideal of scoring that may be described as “transparent”. . . . I hope I have ensured that the soloist, who is allocated so much cantilena, will be able to concentrate on “singing” and need not “scratch”! The style is symphonic throughout to be sure. Of course I have also considered the virtuoso element for the soloist, however not in an exaggerated fashion. Instead I have placed the emphasis on a strong melody, and done the same in the two allegro movements.

What did Reger mean by “classical sensibilities of our time” and by the absence of “crazy ideas”? Possible answers can be found in his rebuttal of Hugo Riemann’s diatribe “Degeneration and Regeneration in Music” published in the Deutscher Musikerkalender für 1908. In his article, Hugo Riemann, the father of modern musicology and Reger’s primary teacher, attacked the new generation of composers by calling them misguided, out-of-control radicals who disrespected the masters of the past. Reger’s rebuttal to his revered teacher was scathing and passionate, especially when Riemann accused modern composers of “piling up technical difficulties only to awaken the interest of the musical élite.” Reger minced no words in his reply: Bach’s music was in its time considered unplayable on account of the piling up of technical difficulties—people said that only Bach could play his works. Furthermore: did not Grandfather Haydn, now about 110 years ago, seriously advise the young Beethoven against publishing the three Op. 2 piano sonatas, because—they were too hard to play. Here too, are “difficulties of technical execution”! Poor Beethoven! Weren’t even Beethoven’s greatest creations—the last sonatas and string quartets—considered unperformable for nearly a whole

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generation? And Brahms! I myself know how, when I was young, people groaned and cursed over the difficult accompaniments of Brahms’ songs. Poor Brahms, if you read “Degeneration and Regeneration in Music” (German Music Almanac, 1908), you would become conscious of your gross sins against the Holy Ghost of German musicology! What Prof. Dr. H. Riemann further charges against us modern is the old story, that remains always new, even as it has constantly been proved false. (After all, our modern polyphony, for example, should be called “modest,” if one considers what monstrous polyphony the old masters of the Netherlands used in their works.) . . . Have the musicologists really forgotten that Bach in his time appeared so “incomprehensible” that he was known as a virtuoso rather than as a composer? What abuses of all sorts did not the darling of God, Mozart, have to endure? Was it not said that Mozart’s music was too “overworked” and orchestrated too “noisily”? And how did German criticism behave toward Beethoven? Did not the majority of Beethoven’s contemporaries consider him totally insane? I cite here a judgment on the great Leonore overture: “Rhapsodies of an incurable madman!” . . . And Brahms: were not the first performances of all his symphonies received with icy coldness? And Bruckner and Hugo Wolf? Could not E. Hanslick write, regarding Bruckner, these lovely words: “This music stinks!” And when one compares the abundant criticisms against Beethoven, against Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner, H. Wolf, with what Prof. Dr. Riemann attempts to add with his accusation against the devilish moderns, one finds a notable similarity: it is the struggle of the man who can no longer keep up, against the boisterous progressives! But hail, hail to those who are so “evaluated,” in just the way that people used to evaluate the great immortals! That is the incomparable honor of us disciples, that we, unsickened by the consumptive pallor of gray theory, can plant our trees in the ever-blossoming woods of German art with fresh daring and with thrust in the Germanic spirit.

For Max Reger, it was all about the renewal of the German spirit as he once again proclaimed by brandishing his fist: Has not Wagner in all his works, Richard Strauss in Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, Death and Transfiguration and even Ein Heldenleben, already become classic? (Please throw stones at me!). Have not an

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incalculable number of the best modern musicians gathered with the most honorable enthusiasm around our soiled, much-spat-on banner? Are all these people so blinded, that they cannot see the daylight of true art???

The violin concerto he had just completed became his act of devotion to the restoration of the classic sensibilities of his time and yet under the banner of radical progressivism. What about Johannes Brahms, though? Was not Reger’s concerto built upon the blue prints of Brahms’s masterwork? He had this to say: What assures immortality for Brahms is not his “leaning” on the old masters, but the fact that he knew how to generate new and unsuspected psychic moods, by virtue of his own spiritual makeup. In that there rests the root of all immortality—never in leaning on the old masters, for implacable history always sentences to death, in just a few decades, those who merely lean.

This being said, it is hard to fathom Reger’s meaning of the “crazy ideas” he had avoided in his concerto. Perhaps he referred to the dissolution of traditional forms as practiced, for instance, by Ernest Chausson, who in 1896 turned his ideas for a violin concerto into a Poème for violin and orchestra, or perhaps he meant the Glazunov concerto. It is important to keep in mind how sacrosanct form was for Reger. Let us investigate now the meaning of “technical nonsense.” Reger’s concerto is very difficult indeed, but not more than Tchaikovsky’s to whom Reger’s stab was probably addressed. The technical difficulties demanded by Reger are always pertinent to the peculiar musical phraseology that forms the structure of each movement. They are never intended for mere virtuosic display. Now, as far as his claim of “transparent scoring” is concerned, we must be careful in taking Reger at his word since the issue of transparency in his music often conflagrates into a chromatic soundscape (i.e. tonal ambiguities) in which performers and listeners must swim in order to stay afloat. Reger’s score calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two trumpets, four French horns, three timpani, and strings—not particularly heavy by late Romantic standards. The particular cushioning function provided by the amalgam of bassoons and French horns at strategic moments offers more a sense of levitation than sinking. In sum, the soloist is never

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overwhelmed by the orchestral texture but rather the enormous amount of simultaneous melodic and harmonic developments that take place under and above the solo lines. Yes, in this concerto the violin “sings” according to the composer’s assertions but not along expansive memorable melodies; it “sings” fragments generated by other fragments for long stretches as if in search of an elusive renewal of the original ideas. Reger is correct when he says that the violinist does not have to “scratch” in his concerto. In fact, there are no opportunities in the score for repetitive “scratching” in the form of awkward runs of double, triple, or quadruple stops. Here again, Reger throws a dart directed at Tchaikovsky, Brahms, or even the Bruch of the Scottish Fantasy so popular at the time. Although Carl Flesch’s request for reducing the concerto’s length was outright rejected by the composer, in 1921, five years after Reger’s death, violinist Rudolf Kolisch and Arnold Schoenberg prepared for performance a version of the Reger concerto rescored for violin solo, flute, clarinet, French horn, two violins, viola, cello, double bass, and harmonium and shortened by seven minutes and seventeen seconds; a magic exercise in weight subtraction, which, although of great interest to scholars, defied the very idea behind Max Reger’s sense of Bachian monumentality. Should a sporadic live performance of the Reger violin concerto appear on a concert program, do not shy away from it; seek it out eagerly for a unique listening experience.

PASSIONS, REGRETS, AND LONGING Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto in B minor, Op. 61, dedicated to and premiered by Fritz Kreisler in London’s Queen’s Hall on November 10, 1910, “catches the listener by the throat,” as one critic very aptly put it, possibly implying that in order to experience it one has to fall in love with the concerto’s music first and remember about having fallen in love with someone second. Passions, melancholia, regrets, and longing are bundled together. In truth, there is no sunny outlook following the listening of this piece but rather a feeling of exhaustion, the urge to walk away from things past with a sigh of relief for being older, wiser, and thankful for the reverie the listening experience has provided.

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Fritz Kreisler, perhaps more of a Romantic than Elgar himself, enjoyed telling his gullible audience that he never practiced the Elgar concerto. He just played it as if he were reading it for the first time, a good way to understand the mysterious spirit of the music without the pedantry of analytical process, he thought. Well, read between the lines here because the Elgar concerto is technically very difficult and could not have been read at sight in public even by Kreisler. In fact, the great virtuoso played the concerto privately for Elgar and groups of friends on several occasions before the premiere. On the other hand, Elgar’s is a concerto about which analysis conveys very little but plenty of ambiguities. For instance, the first movement, Allegro, starts with the traditional orchestral introduction, which announces a two-part main theme; the first part is stately and vigorous while the second, slightly understated, is somewhat anxious and yet complementary to the first. A true contrast occurs with the appearance of the second theme proper, played by second violins, violas, and cellos divided in octaves and echoed by the solo clarinet—a very tender, simple theme portentous of further developments. To conclude the introduction, a convulsive amalgam of thematic material ushers in the soloist with a phrase marked molto largamente and nobilmente. It is the stately theme heard at the beginning of the orchestral introduction, which now assumes an improvisatory behavior characterized by virtuoso passages while the orchestra alternately plays the main theme’s second part and the second theme. Things calm down gradually to a point of evanescent stillness waiting for the solo violin to play the second theme in a whispery, velvety tone marked pianissimo dolce and semplice. The presentation of the second theme gives way to a game of passions, regrets, and perhaps even confessions. By the time his violin concerto came to fruition, Elgar already had some heavy masterpieces like The Dream of Gerontius, In the South (a Tone Poem/Overture), the Enigma Variations, and the huge Symphony No. 1 under his belt. The compositions were all drenched in symbolism and extra textual overtones, which have always stimulated the curiosity of Elgar’s biographers eager to identify the receivers of the composer’s secret messages. Well, the composer himself had no problem in calling the violin concerto a work written in “partnership” with Mrs. Alice Stuart Wortley (Lady Stuart of Wortley), a family friend who became his muse and idealized lover. Their relationship never plunged into a

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physical and adulterous affair, a situation neither would have been able to afford, but certainly, the voluminous correspondence between the two and, above all, the music of this entire concerto show no limits to their daring thoughts. The second movement, Andante, is an extended vocalise full of embroideries that brings to mind a flowery courtship scene of a somewhat Wagnerian flavor with no foreseeable conclusion. And then the solo violin launches imperiously into the third movement, Allegro molto. For page after page laden with technical wizardry, the solo violin buzzes around its object of desire until the full orchestra puts a brief stop to it. Then the soloist gets reenergized by resorting unexpectedly to a quotation from the Brahms violin concerto followed by contrapuntal intricacies that finally die out to let the most original portion of the concerto emerge: the Cadenza accompagnata (a cadenza played with accompaniment). Unique to the violin concerto repertoire, Elgar’s cadenza is much more than the traditional exhibition of bravura. It is the true repository for the secretly enshrined soul of him or her or both as the composer hinted at in some of his letters. Let us read an abstract as quoted by Michael Kennedy: He wrote to Alice Stuart Wortley on 16 June [1910]: “here is one of your own flowers. I have just been walking around between work: it goes well & I have made the end serious & grand I hope & have brought in the real inspired theme from the 1st movement. I did it this morning . . . the music sings of memories & hope.” Three days later, again to her: “the work goes on and the pathetic portion is really fixed.” Four days later: “I am appalled at the last movement & cannot get on—it is growing so large—too large I fear & I have headaches. . . . I go on working & working & making it all as good as I can for the owner.” He wanted her to be present when [violinist W. H.] Reed was to play through the first movement and finale in Plâs Gwyn on 30 June. To Schuster, on the eve of this play-through, he wrote: “This Concerto is full of romantic feeling—I should have been a philanthropist if I had been a rich man—I know the feeling is human & right—Vain glory! . . . You will like the cadenza which is on a novel plan I think—accompanied softly by a few insts. &—it comes at the end of the last movement—it sadly thinks over the 1st movement.”

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Aside from its overwhelming subtext, Elgar’s cadenza is a poetic masterpiece of violin writing, technically not excessively difficult but extremely nuanced as a true improvisation should be. The accompaniment is provided by a triple piano murmur provided by the quartet of French horns and soft timpani over a continuous tremolando pizzicato of the strings, an effect, the composer explained, obtainable by “thrumming” with the soft part of three or four fingers across the strings like “the sound of a distant Aeolian harp flutters under and over the solo.” Elgar’s dreamy cadenza ends by quoting the beginning of the solo in the first movement. After only two measures, it morphs into the opening figures of the finale, which ignites the concerto’s protracted, glorious conclusion.

COLLIDING ICEBERGS The twentieth century’s most frequently recorded and performed violin concerto was born from the collision of a massive iceberg and an icy public and critical reception. The “wreckage” that remained afloat, though, became the violin concerto we all learned to love. Allegory aside, Jean Sibelius, a gifted violinist who mastered the Mendelssohn Concerto and decided not to pursue a virtuoso career in favor of composition, produced only one concerto relatively early in life. By then, he had established himself as the musical voice of Finland, a country thirsty for political independence from the Russian Empire and from Swedish cultural/linguistic hegemony. A monumental work for vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra entitled Kullervo was Sibelius’s choral symphony. It shook Finnish spirits and gave way to other well-known compositions drenched in nationalistic symbolism, such as En saga, The Swan of Tuonela, Lemminnkäinen, Karelia, and, ultimately, the quintessentially patriotic Finlandia. After trips abroad, Italy especially, the desire to be challenged by formal types of compositions became imperative for Sibelius. He wrote his first and second symphonies and then a concerto for violin first performed in Helsinki on February 8, 1904, by violinist Viktor Novácèk and the Helsinki Philharmonic Society Orchestra conducted by the composer. However, Sibelius’s intention to write a violin concerto went back as early as 1899. It was revived in 1902 and finally materialized in the

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autumn of 1903 when the press announced that a violin concerto by Sibelius dedicated to famous German virtuoso Willy Burmester was forthcoming. In fact, by the end of 1903, Sibelius had sent Burmester— whom he met in Berlin in 1902—the concerto’s violin and piano reduction unmarked by any explicit dedication. Carl Adolf Wilhelm Burmester (1869–1933), a pupil of Joseph Joachim noted for his superb tone and arrogant character, spent time in Helsinki occupying the position of concertmaster of the orchestra and concertizing across the Scandinavian countries with his wife, the pianist Naema Fazer, sister of Helsinki music publisher Konrad Fazer. Burmester exercised some control over Finland’s musical matters and represented to Sibelius a viable bridge for his music to follow the worldly virtuoso. Virtuosos, though, are usually needy, temperamental individuals requiring tactful handling, a quality or capacity Sibelius did not possess. He could not accommodate his patience to Burmester’s demanding concert schedule so he entrusted the concerto’s world premiere to the Hungarian Viktor Novácèk, an ordinary professional violinist teaching at the Helsinki Music Institute. As a costly consequence, the premiere resulted in a dismal failure and Willy Burmester never performed the Sibelius concerto! What Novácèk and Sibelius offered on that February 8, 1904, was not the concerto as we know it today. It was indeed a monster of a composition lasting some forty minutes and riddled with technical difficulties, awkward transitions, and an inconsequential second Bach-like cadenza in the first movement. The solo part was poorly executed, the audience remained disappointed, the critics skeptical, and a contemptuous Sibelius withdrew the concerto to give himself time to think the matter over and perhaps come up with a revised, slender, less meandering version. He did so, and on October 19, 1905, violinist Karl Halír and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under Richard Strauss offered the first performance. The concerto slowly became more popular during the decades that followed. The turning point came in the 1930s, when Jascha Heifetz recorded the work and made it world-famous. Sibelius kept the concerto’s original score safely among his papers while forbidding its public performance. In 1990, though, the Sibelius family reached the stunning decision to make the “old” manuscript available to violinist Leonidas Kavakos, the 1985 winner of the Jean

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Sibelius International Violin Competition, for its world premiere recording on the BIS Label. The style of the concerto’s revised version is no longer “rude” but eternally glorious in its dark Finnish milieu. The first movement, Allegro moderato, lets the violin solo enter suavely after a three-and-a-halfmeasure pianissimo murmur in imitation of the Mendelssohn concerto. The theme expands to the higher positions and reenergizes itself on the G string, ushered by the choral sounds of clarinets, bassoons, timpani, and double basses. The soloist takes full flight. Vibrating virtuoso passages under the watchful eyes of the brass and timpani roll on until a soaring series of broken octaves leads to the second theme played by the bassoons accompanied by those so-called St. Petersburg triplets so dear to the Russian composers of the Rimsky-Korsakov school. The orchestra regurgitates this second theme, waiting for the violin solo to reenter at the Molto moderato e tranquillo in what appears to be a calming gesture, which quickly turns into one of the most dramatic and passionate moments of the violin concerto literature: Sibelius’s erotically urgent quest for love and luminosity, a passage in octaves that proves the stamina (and good taste) of any violinist as he or she demands a response from the principal viola. Then the orchestra takes over with its darkest of tones for a long section while the soloist prepares for the cadenza. As in the Mendelssohn, the cadenza in Sibelius occurs in the middle of the first movement, offering the impression that a conclusion could be at hand. It is not so in this concerto. The composer elaborates multiple times the material already presented, alternating quasi-stagnant to tumultuous episodes propelled rhythmically by the now ever-soprominent St. Petersburg triplets. The soloist, meanwhile, fences off difficult passages until the end of the movement. For the sake of comparison, the original version of this movement was forty-three measures longer (including the Bach-like cadenza mentioned above) than the revised version. The second movement, Adagio di molto, begins with a delicate web played in thirds and in turn by clarinets, oboes, and flutes before the soloist enters with a warm theme taken from the Max Bruch repertoire; however, instead of indulging in lyrical expansiveness as Bruch would have had it, Sibelius soon plunges into his characteristic dark mood full of ever-advancing syncopations. The soloist’s entrance brings calm albeit through passages in double stops that compound triplets to synco-

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pated duplets, a very beautiful moment that fans an extended section of detached triplets of almost Beethovenian sublimity. The movement ends in a whispered morendo (fading “dying” away). The tempo of the finale, Allegro ma non troppo, has always puzzled violinists, a factor that, counterintuitively, makes the piece more difficult to execute when taken slower than Sibelius’s suggested metronomic tempo (108–116 to a quarter beat). In fact, in terms of violin bow technique, the entire gesture of this movement is based on the old Viotti bow stroke (see chapter 3): dotted hooks played with a strong bite near the tip of the bow spread above an inflexible rhythmical background provided by timpani and strings with their bouncing bows. The result is a sort of ritualistic dark dance of which we see only shades whose physiognomy becomes occasionally evident through explosive lightning bolts in the form of sparkling violinistic technical wizardry. The mind boggle as Mephistophelean horses gallop through a Nordic winter land with no end in sight but the inevitable: total collapse by exertion. The Sibelius violin concerto cannot end but in triumph.

A LONE ICEBERG Carl Nielsen’s Violin Concerto, Op. 33 was conceived in Bergen, Norway, in the summer of 1911 and completed in the composer’s native Denmark the following December. It was both a work of love and labor. Written for his son-in-law, the Hungarian violinist Emil Telmányi— well known to violinists for his 1954 recording of Bach’s solo Sonatas and Partitas by using a specially arched bow of his own invention— Nielsen’s concerto, in the composer’s words, “had to be good music, and yet always making allowances for the activity of the solo instrument in the best light, that is rich in content, popular and dazzling without becoming superficial.” Divided into two parts of about twenty minutes each: (1) Prealudium—Largo—Allegro cavalleresco; (2) Poco adagio— Rondo—Allegretto scherzando, the concerto is virtuosic, boasting technically hazardous passages and cadenzas that do not present a particularly innovative violinistic writing. However, it is in Part 2 that Nielsen transforms the concerto into a type of “Divertimento concertante” for violin and obbligati instruments, anticipating aspects of Paul Hindemith’s Kammermusik (1922–1927) and certain quirky angularities

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present in the neo-classical Stravinsky from Pulcinella (1919) onward. Nielsen’s concerto shifts the genre definitely toward Modernism. It is unfair to pair it or, worse, compare it with the Sibelius concerto except for reasons of geographical proximity and monumentality. Nielsen’s Violin Concerto has never been popular, though performers hold it in high esteem.

BRING ON THE LEPRECHAUNS! Barely twenty minutes long (half the duration of the Nielsen), Alexander Glazunov’s (1868–1936) Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 82 is one of the most popular pieces of the concerto repertoire and the composer’s best-known work. Written in 1904 for Leopold Auer, it was premiered to popular acclaim by the great violinist in St. Petersburg on February 15, 1905. The notion that a violin concerto sprouting from the same ground that worshipped Tchaikovsky’s could offer such a variety of rich thematic, rhythmical, and colorful ideas in a compressed format not too tainted by Russian mannerisms took everyone by storm. The concerto became the darling of St. Petersburg and quickly made the rounds of the globe starting with Misha Elman, who offered the British premiere in 1906. The concerto is structured in a continuous movement divided into four episodes: (1) Moderato; (2) Andante sostenuto; (3) Tempo I; (4) Allegro. The soloist begins right away with a gorgeous theme on the G string sustained by the iconic “St. Petersburg triplets.” This main theme, instead of developing, steps temporarily aside to make room for a second melody (dolce tranquillo) of a very delicate, sensuous character followed by an extremely nuanced dialogue between orchestra and soloist, sparse technical passages, and the recapitulation of the main theme darkly played by viola and bassoon. The solo violin “improvises” a sublimated arpeggio sliding onto a surprisingly beautiful theme on the G string (Episode 2—Andante sostenuto). This melody is similar to the one heard at the beginning but much more intense as it is cast in the mystifying key of D flat, which through a passionate passage in doublestops (sixths) accompanied by the harp morphs enharmonically and climaxes into the key of A major—a great point of synchronization with whatever your imagination may lead you to: an operatic, ballet, or cine-

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matic (Korngold did learn a lot from Glazunov and Strauss) love scene. The intervention of the harp guides the soloist through meandering pathways, which are not tonally centered, therefore, Glazunov avoids any tonal resolution and returns to the concerto’s first heard main and second themes played by violas and bassoon in a chromatic fugato version. Meanwhile, the soloist prepares for a fearsome technical flight marked Più animato that ends up conjuring with the orchestra in a heavy contrapuntal episode. Then, it dilutes itself in the unexpected cadenza, a masterpiece of unaccompanied violin polyphonic writing. Here, there is no “Tutti” waiting to welcome back the soloist into the orchestral fold, but a pedal point provided by cellos, basses, four horns, and timpani underscoring the soloist’s fluttering double trills. Pageantry opens the fourth episode, Allegro, a colorful tournament in the form of episodic variations spanning the gamut of chivalric joviality and sentimental coquettishness that includes a passage during which the soloist strums the four strings of the violin like a guitar before engaging into a breakneck rush to the finish. While the Glazunov concerto continued to dazzle audiences across Europe, a young Hungarian pianist-composer poured his heart out on a sheet of music paper. From July 1907 to February 5, 1908, Béla Bartók (1881–1945) composed a violin concerto for the love of his life, the beautiful and gifted Hungarian violinist Stefi Geyer (1888–1956), a star pupil of Jeno Hubay. The concerto is in two movements: Andante sostenuto and Allegro giocoso. Its structure resembles more a rhapsody than a traditional concerto. In fact, the two movements were supposed to represent a musical portrait of Stefi. Bartók intended to send Stefi a diptych as his love gift for safekeeping. Indeed, Stefi Geyer kept the manuscript score of the concerto, rejected Bartók’s declaration of love, and never performed “her” concerto nor returned the manuscript to the composer. At her death forty years later, she bequeathed it to Swiss conductor/philanthropist Paul Sacher with the request that he and fellow Swiss violinist Hans-Heinz Schneeberger perform it. They did so at Basel on May 10, 1958. Was theirs truly a world premiere, though? Partially, because the concerto’s first movement, Andante sostenuto, was published by Bartók in 1912 (he did save a copy for himself after all) as the first of Two Portraits for Orchestra, Op. 5, the second piece being a transcription of the last of Fourteen Bagatelles for piano, Op. 6 composed in 1909.

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Bartok’s First Portrait, subtitled “Ideal,” became known as a large movement for violin and orchestra, a very rewarding programming boon for any concertmaster. So the 1958 Basel novelty was, in reality, only the concerto’s second movement, Allegro giocoso, a copy of which Bartók did not preserve. Incongruously listed by the publishers as Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. posthumous, this piece appears sporadically on concert programs, often mistaken as the forerunner of the great violin concerto of 1938 now labeled as No. 2. The Andante begins with the solo violin playing an extended melodic arch that starts with an arpeggiated interval of major seventh (Stefi’s Leitmotiv we learned later from Bartók’s correspondence) offering a breathy sense of uplifting. The solo motivic line continues in a somewhat canonical fashion when the first stand of the first violins joins in followed at a brief distance by the second stand, the first stand of the second violins, and other string players until the woodwinds leading the rest of the orchestra reach a very fulfilling reiteration of the opening Leitmotiv. The luscious chromatic web, now denser and tighter, begins to dissolve gradually, leaving the soloist (Bartók’s own love-pleading voice) to introduce very softly a further proclamation of the Leitmotiv, this time accompanied by two harps. At the end, the soloist remains alone holding a breathless High C sharp that timidly but naturally resolves upon a D. Bartók will use this type of chromatic web-like concept characterizing the concerto’s first movement again in the opening movement of his String Quartet No. 1, Op.7 (1908); this time, though, the mood is terse, dirgelike, symbolizing Stefi’s rejection, a pain the composer manifested in other works of the period. The concerto’s second movement is perhaps not as original as the first. It combines charming elements of the grotesque with lyrical passages of great beauty. We are indeed in the presence of a tremendously gifted young composer who could not contain his passion for Stefi Geyer and his affinity for Richard Strauss’s music and Till Eulenspiegel in particular. When a composer writes in a score indications like sognando (dreaming), who is supposed to be the instruction’s recipient? Is the composer himself dreaming while composing the passage in question, the interpreter who reads the indication, or the listener who is supposed to be the ultimate beneficiary of the composer’s vision? Likely the dream reaches a collective status through the medium of a great

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performance. The next three violin concertos composed in 1916 are about dreams, random dreams, daring dreams, good dreams, from Prokofiev’s youthful exuberant exhibitionism to Szymanowski’s priceless exoticism to Delius’s magic potion capable of turning Max Reger’s chromatic lead into gold.

RANDOM DREAMS Polish violinist Paul (Pawel) Kochanski (1887–1934) was the inspiring force behind the earlier violin concertos of Prokofiev and Szymanowski. In Prokofiev’s case, the idea of composing a violin concerto following the successes accorded to his first two piano concertos, the ballet Chout, and the “barbaric” Scythian Suite occurred after attending a performance of Szymanowski’s Three Myths for violin and piano played by Kochanski in 1916. Prokofiev set to work on two movements of what he intended to be a Concertino for violin and orchestra—a jovial, sarcastic, sentimental journey into perhaps the life of a clown. He then added a melodic sketch composed the year prior when he was in love with librettist Nina Meshcherskaya—an affair that, according to Prokofiev’s diaries, went awry. That sketch formed the basis of the now recast Concerto in D major No. 1, Op. 19, first movement, Andantino, marked sognando (like a dream or as in a dream). The soloist introduces the melody after two measures of tremolo played by the violas. It stretches for a while until it is passed along to the violas while the soloist creates a second dreamy commentary by playing detachè (a steady, pressured bow stroke) triplets, which turn imperious as soon as the violins assume ownership of the melody. A concise developmental section then leads the soloist to a second quirky, jumpy theme, which Prokofiev marked narrante, meaning “telling” as in a story. Eventually, though, the story is about two forceful technical passages punctuated by strings and winds and interrupted by a brief interlude played by flutes and clarinet accompanied by the soloist performing pizzicato (plucked) quarter notes. The long, technically demanding section concludes with three measures of violent “strumming” across the violin’s four strings (memories of Glazunov, perhaps) and a serpentine passage of scales that empty themselves out on the open G string from where a two-voiced passage leads to the evanescent tremolos heard at the beginning of the movement.

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They prepare the dreamy atmosphere for the flute to play the main melody embroidered by the solo violin in its very high register, by the harp, and toward the end by the clarinet. This movement’s concluding episode is one of the most delicate and cherished moments of violin concerto literature. The second movement, Scherzo (Vivacissimo), is the modern equivalent of celebrated nineteenth-century violin Scherzos from Bazzini’s La ronde des lutins to Vieuxtemps’s Scherzo from his Fourth Violin Concerto. Very cleverly orchestrated, Prokofiev’s movement travels at a very fast tempo and must be pulled off by the soloist like a magic puff extracted from an illusionist’s hat. It is a stupendous opportunity for the virtuoso violinist to turn magician—exactly as Prokofiev, a master of show-off business, intended it. Those who have not listened to this concerto before may never suspect that the quasi-grotesque, tip-toe motive opening the third movement, Moderato, would generate one of Prokofiev’s most seductive themes. It sounds like a troubadour’s love song delicately accompanied by the harp. More than a theme and variations as in Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, here there is a theme and episodes—short, bizarre dreams like the Allegro moderato in which the solo violin and the bassoon tease the melodic line played by the violas. Then, accompanied by the clarinets, the solo violin melts into a most languid sequence played in major and minor thirds. The following episode, Più mosso (Moderato, come prima), has the soloist play “warm-up” scales up and down the fingerboard like a buzzing insect performed over winds and harp. The scales evolve into more forceful passages that are technically very challenging, but then the concluding episode, Più tranquillo, shows the flute playing the tip-toe quasi-grotesque motive heard at the beginning of the movement while the soloist is relegated to play trills in the very high region of the fingerboard until all dissolves into nothingness. Paul Kochanski never premiered Prokofiev’s lovely Violin Concerto No. 1 as planned. The advent of the Bolshevik Revolution shattered the Old Russian world. Prokofiev ended up in Paris where violinist Marcel Darrieux, a Kussevitsky associate, premiered the concerto seven years after its completion. Tepidly received, Prokofiev’s violin concerto was soon vindicated at the hands of Nathan Milstein and Joseph Szigeti, who secured for it a very solid place in the repertoire.

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DARING DREAMS One could think of the Szymanowski Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 35 as a Poem for violin and orchestra like those composed by Chausson, Ysaye, and Respighi, or a musical mosaic drenched in poetic allusions with or without a preset program, or just a set of magical soundscapes—anything but a concerto built on traditional form and harmonic structures. Karol Szymanowski’s was a very complex mind. He produced difficult, enigmatic, excessively passionate music like that of other composers rooted in the visionary world of Alexander Scriabin. The point to be emphasized is that Szymanovski’s First Violin Concerto, composed in 1916, is different from any work in the genre written up to that time. It is a concerto whose performance requires overwhelming orchestral forces comprising three flutes (piccolo), three oboes (English horn), three clarinets, bass clarinet, three bassoons (contrabassoon), four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, timpani, percussion (multiple players), celesta, piano, two harps, twelve first violins, twelve second violins, eight violas, eight cellos, and six double basses. Yet, the violin solo emerges out of this opulent score very clearly through the composer’s superbly idiosyncratic use of the extreme high regions of the violin’s fingerboard and harmonics. Karol Szymanowski (1882–1937) conceived his concerto in one movement; however, a division in five episodes could be detected in terms of levels of emotions and tempos. Take, for instance, the orchestral introduction depicting a fairy tale world that reminds one of certain sonorities peculiar to the Stravinsky of Firebird (1910), Debussy’s Khamma (1912), and some anticipation of the atmospheric rarefactions encountered in the music of Pierre Boulez many years later. This introduction, though, reveals nothing as the soloist sneaks in with filigrees of sound emanating from the instrument’s very high register. Then again the orchestra resumes its crackling, magical sounds until the solo violin reenters this time with a more “realistic” thematic material marked molto tranquillo e dolce, which culminates in a turn of phrase closely resembling (in the orchestration as well) a passage played by solo cello in Respighi’s Pines of Rome (1924). A second episode, Vivace assai, scherzando, shows a substantial array of passionate virtuosity that stops abruptly to be followed by a static, opaque moment before proceeding to the third episode, Tempo comodo, Andantino, which can be consid-

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ered as the equivalent of the traditional concerto’s central movement. This highly nuanced section contains pages of ardent musical eroticism unheard of since Strauss’s Salome (1905). The fourth episode brings forth a Vivace scherzando in which Szymanowski’s writing style appears a little more traditional, boasting a lighter scoring as the composer slides into his own reverie by remembering or wanting us to remember Camille Saint-Saens’s Havanaise, in itself a study in nostalgia for some hypothetical faraway place. Episode 5 offers a very pertinent and beautifully written cadenza by Paul Kochanski, followed by a brief summation of the gestures heard throughout the piece. Then the ending is rather similar to that of the Prokofiev concerto—complete dissolution into nothingness. Like Prokofiev’s, Szymanovski’s concerto was premiered six years after its composition, not by its dedicatee Paul Kochanski but by Józef Oziminski, with the Warsaw Philharmonia conducted by Emil Mlynarski on November 1, 1922.

PROPHETIC DREAMS It has been said that the music of Frederick Delius (1862–1934) is an acquired taste, a statement contradicted by many who affirm that one either likes it at first hearing or the sound of it remains once and forever distasteful. I am very fond of Delius’s endlessly proliferating sensuousness of sound, exacerbated chromaticism, and stupefying simple diatonicism when he chooses to employ it. Delius’s Violin Concerto, composed in 1916 for great British violinist Albert Sammons, is a seldomheard masterpiece of lyricism and exquisite violin writing. As a matter of narrative in this chapter’s context, Delius’s concerto dilutes the thickness of Max Reger’s concerto by reducing its chromatic essence to almost one-third in terms of total duration. Reger’s and Delius’s violin concertos are no doubt antipodal yet created on the same principle of continuous melody of Wagnerian memory. Delius’s less-than-twenty-four-minute concerto is cast in one movement and divided into three sections scored for two flutes, oboe, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four French horns, two trumpets, three tenor trombones, bass tuba, timpani, harp, and strings. It begins with a discreet, two-measure harmonic paving for the soloist to state the

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concerto’s main theme, a quasi motto heard many times thereafter and in various harmonic guises. It alternates with a second theme of pastoral character, then jointly leads to a conclusive arpeggiated sudden stop. The solo violin then begins its extensive plaintive second section, which contains many beautifully crafted moments that create a true British autumnal poem full of longing and nostalgia. An extensive accompanied cadenza (a salute to Elgar, perhaps?) concludes this section with a reprise of the concerto’s opening motto alternating with the pastoral theme, then we hear more cadenza-like passages before rousing triple forte perorations in the orchestra suspend the discourse over a silent pause. At that point the soloist delicately breathes life onto a sort of Minuet (Allegretto) in 6/8 time bearing a faint Elizabethan musical flavor that continues as a set of variations, each presenting different figures in a hypothetical dance. Finally, the dream-like sequence dissolves into a poetic soliloquy when the solo violin plays, once again, the concerto’s opening statement fading gradually away in the distance. Delius composed his violin concerto in the year 1916; what a prophetic farewell to a world about to change forever.

8 PILLARS OF MODERNISM Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Berg, and Bartók

In this chapter, the violin concertos of Igor Stravinsky (1931) and Béla Bartók (1938) bookend a discussion about the contributing factors that made very few, among many violin concertos, reach a permanent place in the Modernist repertoire. Modernism in music encompasses a broad range of creative ideas whose beginning and ending periods do not coincide with those of the other fine arts, history, or literature. For instance, the majority of writers on the subject point to Claude Debussy’s Prelude á l’après-midi d’un faune—an orchestral work composed in 1894 after Stéphane Mallarmé’s symbolist poem by the same title—as the catalytic composition that paved the way toward ushering in the Modernist movement, notwithstanding the strong hold late Romanticism and its derivatives had on the cultural and social milieu of the West until the end of World War I. See, for instance, the successes of genres like Operatic Italian Verismo represented by Mascagni, Leoncavallo, and Puccini; the Impressionism, musically codified by Debussy’s own works; and the emerging of formless energies emanating from the neo-primitive works in the visual art and the earthshaking repercussions in music provoked by Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (1913). Furthermore, the cult for anything technological strongly imposed through an array of Futurist manifestos culminated vociferously in Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noise (1913). At the same time, the symphonies of Gustav Mahler 115

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(1860–1911) in Europe and the works of Charles Ives (1874–1954) in America became prophetic of postmodernist trends that included popular music, the use of preexisting compositions, and outright elements of collage. As -isms of all types ran concurrently, they created aesthetic and ideological camps whose adherents were all too eager to establish new forms of authenticity. Of course, in times of chaos there is always a call to order. People came to terms, almost as a safe refuge, with Neoclassicism and its aim to express purity of form and with the stability provided by the enforced inexpressiveness of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). Both movements—highly successful the former, limited to the early 1920s the latter—offered periods of constructive repose and reflection that, like the proverbial calm before the storm, preceded the creative outbursts of some of the twentieth century’s greatest composers: Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Alban Berg, and Béla Bartók. The violin concertos at the top of these composers’ creative agendas form the core of this chapter, which also takes into account the seldom-performed violin concertos Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith composed in 1924 and 1925 under the aesthetical rubric advocated by the New Objectivity movement. Kurt Weill (1900–1950) reached worldwide fame through his musical theater pieces spanning the 1928 Die Dreigroshenoper (The Threepenny Opera) on Brecht’s text and Lost in the Stars, his last Broadway hit written 1949. However, it was in the 1920s that the composer produced a corpus of outstanding instrumental works, including the Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, Op. 12 written for Joseph Szigeti. This concerto, occasionally performed as a historical curiosity, represents an excellent bridge connecting the exotic effusions of Szymanovski and the grotesque sentimentality of Prokofiev discussed in the previous chapter to a streamlined abstract diatonic style flirting with atonality and the Stravinsky of L’histoire du soldat (1917). The same observation is valid for the ever-prolific Paul Hindemith (1895–1963), whose Violinkonzert, also known as Kammermusik No. 4, Op. 36, No. 3, is part of a set of seven works for multiple instruments abstractly called Kammermusik as a kind of twentieth-century equivalent of J. S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Hindemith’s 1925 Violinkonzert, not to be confused with the largerscale concerto composed in 1939, is a most interesting composition that pits the solo violin against a large chamber orchestra comprising two

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piccolos, E flat clarinet, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, trumpet, trombone, percussion, violas, cellos, and double basses. The absence of violins in the orchestra offers the soloist a particularly piquant role similar to that in Kurt Weill’s concerto and the instrumental ensemble Stravinsky employed in L’istoire du soldat.

THE DEVIL’S VIOLIN A pianist, Stravinsky claimed unfamiliarity with solo violin writing and the need to partner with virtuosos like Paul Kochansky, Samuel Dushkin, and Joseph Szigeti. Yet he was the first composer to treat violin playing in an innovative fashion that included awkward left-hand intervallic stretches, rapid mordents and trills, biting grace notes, and rhythmically percussive bow strokes as the score of L’histoire du soldat (1917) eloquently shows. L’histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale) is a theater piece conceived by Swiss writer C. F. Ramuz after a Russian folk tale. The story “to be read, played, and danced” by three actors and one or multiple dancers is accompanied by an instrumental ensemble composed of clarinet, bassoon, cornet, trombone, percussion, violin, and double bass. The Devil, the story’s animus, lures his victims through the unorthodox sound of his violin. The piece was premiered in Lausanne, Switzerland, on September 28, 1918, under Ernest Ansermet’s baton. Thereafter, Stravinsky’s love affair with the violin continued through the many concertante roles he assigned to it in the neoclassical ballet score Pulcinella (1919); Concertino for String Quartet (1920); the suite for violin and piano drawn from Pulcinella’s score for Paul Kochansky’s use (1925); Violin Concerto in D (1931); Duo Concertant for Violin and Piano (1932); Pastorale for Violin with oboe, English horn, clarinet, and bassoon (1933), transcribed with Samuel Dushkin from an earlier vocal piece, Suite Italienne (1934); another version for violin and piano of Pulcinella transcribed by Dushkin; and finally the Divertimento for Violin and Piano (1934) after the ballet Le Baiser de la fée based on themes by Tchaikovsky. There are affinities between the violin writing for L’histoire and certain aspects of Giuseppe Tartini’s violin sonatas. Take for instance, The Devil’s Trill, the title Tartini gave to a sonata that employed the use

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of continuous trills and mordents played alongside melodic lines. Tartini, who besides being a great violin virtuoso was an accomplished mathematician and philosopher, recounted that he wrote The Devil’s Trill after having dreamed of the Devil playing it, hence the title and the “diabolical” characteristics of its writing. However, was Stravinsky familiar with Tartini’s work? Undeniably, he was as The Devil’s Trill had become a warhorse in the repertoire of all violin virtuosos, Fritz Kreisler’s especially. In fact, he had published earlier in the century an even more “diabolical” arrangement of Tartini’s piece. Stravinsky’s newly found violin sound, much imitated since by Modernist composers, reached full maturity with the Violin Concerto in D composed in 1931. Samuel Dushkin premiered it on October 23 of the same year in Berlin with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer. The concerto is in four movements—Toccata, Aria I, Aria II, and Capriccio—lasting about twenty-two minutes and requiring an orchestra of one piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, E flat clarinet, two clarinets, three bassoons (contrabassoon), four French horns, three trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, timpani, eight first violins, eight second violins, six violas, four cellos, and four double basses. The Toccata begins with a two-measure strident chord, a “Motto,” played by the solo violin and pizzicato cellos and double basses. The violinist is immediately challenged by Stravinsky’s opening chord as it demands a resonant double stop interval of eleventh (octave being normal and tenth a virtuosic stretch). Then the movement starts in earnest with two trumpets playing one third apart joined by the oboes in pursuit of the completion of a scale-like passage with the help of bassoons while the solo violin prepares for its “official” solo entrance on the G string marked sempre ben cantando, which consists of the trumpet theme heard at the beginning. The soloist’s theme is accompanied by cartoonish pounces played by trombones and bass tuba over the bassoon gurgling a series of sextuplets. The effect results in a rather comic dialogue that ends with the solo violin performing a descending scale stumbled by choppy grace notes. Then the soloist lands on the second theme, a jovial affair to be played au talon (at the frog [of the bow]). Stravinsky, though, is not satisfied with the presentation of the second theme by itself, so he superimposes on it the opening theme brilliantly played by the flutes, thus creating a recurring motive heard throughout the move-

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ment. In fact, such a motive is overtaken by the solo violin and developed in a very complex contrapuntal structure based on the repeated use of the same pitch contours. Eventually this “foggy” section clears up when the full orchestra plays the theme loud and very staccato followed by episodes that combine ostinato figures and contrapuntal games played by the solo violin and the instruments of the orchestra in chamber music fashion. The games’ ending gives way to a convulsive interlude scored for strings alone in which Stravinsky gnaws a bit at the sonorities created by Bartók in his string quartets. A very diatonic Tutti reestablishes the D major key and begins the movement’s recapitulation. The second movement, Aria I, opens with the identical Motto that began the Toccata followed by a brief pause that lets an ample melody flow through this movement, an ornamented arioso involving the solo violin and selected instruments treated in canonical duets and trios spiced up by some truly inventive neo-Baroque flourishes. Compact Tuttis interrupt the games and signal the division of the Aria’s tripartite formal structure (ABA). The return to part A (the beginning without the Motto, that is) is preceded by a brief accompanied cadenza-like passage. The much abbreviated reprise of the Aria concludes with an acrobatic duet played by solo violin and clarinet. A more elaborate version of the Motto opens the Aria II, the concerto’s real slow movement, a page of great Bachian beauty almost solely accompanied by strings and a testimony to Stravinsky’s superior ability to write something better than any other composer in any style—be it neo-primitive, neo-classical, or late dodecaphonic. One would have wished Stravinsky had indulged a little longer in this movement, but then his sense of proportion would have been lopsided despite the fact that, legend goes, he was emotionally moved every time he heard this movement being played. Capriccio, the concerto’s fourth movement, dispenses with the Motto in favor of a rattling flurry of scales leading to a battery of up-bow rapid flying staccato notes teasingly punctuated by three bassoons. We are then treated to a number of unfolding ballet pas played (danced) by the solo violin and the solo instruments of the orchestra in pairs or in groups. These episodes, one more cleverly conceived and orchestrated than the next, constitute a review in miniature of Stravinsky’s ballet music repertoire. Choose a favorite number at any given hearing, like

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the pas de deux between solo violin and French horn in which the violin part is marked leggiero scherzando and the French horn’s dolce cantabile. The recapitulation of the opening rattling scales opens another series of ballet movements, including one scored for the solo violin in duet with the leader of the first violins section and the rest of the strings. It creates the impression that the soloist has found an alter ego among its peers in the orchestra—a very inventive rehashing of concerto grosso peculiarities. The ensuing Subito più mosso calls for soloist and orchestra to position themselves on point (lots of sharp trills and staccatissimo notes everywhere) for a last round of classical ballet before plunging the whole ensemble into the devilish final pages that recall very closely the ending of L’histoire du soldat. What an unpredictable déjà vu! George Balanchine took full advantage of the agonistic qualities of this score and choreographed it twice, in 1941 under the title of Balustrade and in 1972 simply entitled Stravinsky Violin Concerto.

IN AND OUT OF THE “COLD” In 1944, Sergei Prokofiev released a book of memoirs in which he reflected on his wandering life and the connotations his music had assumed over the decades spent between Imperial Russia, the West, and the Soviet Union, where he died the same year as Joseph Stalin. He wrote: I would like to . . . characterize the fundamental lines of my creative development up to this point. Above all there was the line of the classics, which could be followed back to my earliest childhood, to the Beethoven sonatas that my mother used to play. This line conditions many neoclassical forms (sonatas, concertos), many imitations of eighteenth-century forms (gavottes, my Classical Symphony, and especially my sinfonietta). The second—the “modern”—line began with my encounter with Taneyev, when he reproached me for the “harshness” of my harmony. . . . Chiefly this led me to strive for a harmonic language of my own, and later to the expression of powerful feeling ( . . . Suggestion Diabolique, Sarcasms, the Scythian Suite, . . . my Second Symphony). . . . The third line is the “motoric,” perhaps derived from Schumann’s toccata, which, when I first heard

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it, made a violent impression on me (Études op. 2, Toccata op. 11, Scherzo op. 12, the scherzo of my Second Piano Concerto, the toccata in my Fifth Piano Concerto, the steadily intensifying repetition of certain melodic figures in the Scythian Suite, the Pas d’acier, and some passages in the Third Piano Concerto). This line is perhaps the least important. The fourth line is the “lyrical.” It appears above all in reflective, meditative moods and not always in connection with melody. . . . This line became recognized much later than the others. For a long time it was thought that I had no lyrical gift, and because of this lack of encouragement it developed slowly. But in the course of time I cultivated this side of my creativity more and more. I would prefer to limit myself to these four lines and to conceive the fifth one, which many people ascribe to me—the “grotesque”— simply as a deviation from the other lines. . . . My music should rather be called “scherzo-like,” or described with the three words that express the different gradations of the scherzo character: capricious, cheerful, and mocking.

Capricious, cheerful, mocking with a touch of the grotesque are attributes one can certainly detect in Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto in G minor, Op. 63, but there is much more for the listener to experience in the last work Prokofiev wrote in 1935 before returning to the Soviet Union. Prokofiev cast his concerto in the three-movement classical mold, kept the composition within the boundaries of twentyfive to twenty-six minutes’ duration, and employed an orchestra of quasi-Mozartean strength: two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two French horns, two trumpets, percussion (side drum, bass drum, triangle, cymbals, castanets), and strings. In the opening movement, Allegro moderato, the solo violin enunciates the main theme unaccompanied starting on the violin’s lowest note—the G open string—out of which it carves a melody consisting of the arpeggiated G minor triad ending with a twisty chromatic doubleneighbor motion (D—E flat—C sharp—D). The orchestra’s lower strings respond canonically, but then at the Poco piú mosso marking, the solo violin runs away with a mechanical crunching of sixteenth notes, shifting from key to key to finally rest upon the orchestra’s four undulating measures that usher the second theme marked Meno mosso. This is a theme of uttermost tenderness that from the solo violin finds its way to the French horns and back to the solo violin echoed by

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the oboe. The theme then submerges itself into the thickness of the motion-driven development typical of Prokofiev’s piano concertos. The recapitulation briefly states the main theme, first through mechanical run, then in a slightly elaborate fashion followed by more motoric action and an unexpected return to the main statement. Ultimately, the main theme appears in the form of a coda that contains bizarre moments in which the soloist strums the violin’s strings alternatively with the righthand fingers and the bow. The second movement, Andante assai, is the gem of this concerto and one of the most beautiful slow movements of the entire violin concerto repertoire. Conceived upon classical models (think of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata), the extensive melodic line flows lyrically, accompanied by pizzicato triplets (we are in 12/8 time) doubled and punctuated by the clarinets. At the change of key, from E flat to B major, the theme is taken over by the violins while the soloist plays a countermelody of great beauty. At the Più animato, the solo violin engages in delicate embroideries until the return of Tempo I, where the thematic material soars to a quasi-stereophonic effect played contrapuntally by clarinet, bassoon, solo violin, and strings. This breathy section is followed by an ethereal one in which the solo violin plays very softly rapid thirty-seconds notes over accented triplets in the strings and a moving melodic line provided by trumpet and French horns. This long, static section leads to a new theme in 4/4 time marked Allegretto. It is a simple intermezzo before the reprise of the main theme Andante assai, come prima. Here the quasi-stereophonic effect experienced before reaches its apogee, but it is reined in by a repetition of the ethereal section, which at the end turns forcefully lyrical. Then a surprise: the solo violin plays pizzicato the triplets heard at the beginning of the movement as an accompaniment to the main theme played gravely in unison by clarinets, French horns, cellos, and double basses while the bass drum marks the beat. This effect apparently could sound sinister if it did not serve to leave the door wide open for the pompously quixotic third movement, Allegro, ben marcato, to stomp on stage. The nomadic spirit permeating Prokofiev’s second violin concerto is reflected in its various places of gestation between France and Russia. Its Madrid premiere took place on December 1, 1935. The concerto’s dedicatee, Robert Soetens, was the soloist, and Enrique Fernández Arbós conducted the Madrid Symphony Orchestra. A sweet and pi-

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quant Spanish flavor, castanets included, colors the musical narrative of this third movement, whose rhythm resembles that of a heavy-footed waltz. Its steps keep on falling out of alignment as Prokofiev alternates meters of 3/4 to 3/4+2/2 measures to passages in 7/4, forcing the solo violin to perform sections that, although technically not too difficult, sound laborious. Like a grotesque merry-go-round, the solo violin leads the listener through a series of brief episodes, which include a Ravel-alluded languid waltz melody contrasted with a motoric passage whose rhythm may tend to slip away if not held in place by the bizarre pounding of the bass drum. In fact, the instrumental blend of bass drum and low strings trailed by winds and upper strings push the solo violin increasingly toward an exhaustively tumultuous section whose last three measures become the equivalent of a sarcastic “We All Fall Down.”

TO THE MEMORY OF AN ANGEL Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and his pupils Alban Berg (1885–1935) and Anton Webern (1883–1945) represent the so-called Second Viennese School, assuming a first school included Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Schoenberg’s teaching was based on the tenets of “serialism” or the twelve-tone (dodecaphonic) system. It derailed the time-honored tonal system and its hierarchical rules in favor of a technique that considered each of the twelve tones (half steps or semitones) comprised in an octave of equal sonic entities with which a skilled composer could create original works of art. All things considered, though, the twelve-tone system (serialism) presented the composer with even more stringent rules that its predecessor. The history of Western music shows that changes occur through the slow evolutionary perception of musical language. Early in the twentieth century, tonalities established by keys through their major-minor duality became hardly recognizable. Chromaticism, the continuous fluctuation of tonal keys (the reader may recall certain characteristics detected in Max Reger’s violin concerto mentioned in the previous chapter), the use of excessively “fluid” tonalities employed by the composers of the impressionist school, and the consequent dispersion of tonal centers referred to as atonality functioned somewhat as the direc-

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tive of a new musical narrative often perceived as irrational. These were contributing factors that led Schoenberg, who had moved beyond Wagner and Reger, to formulate a new system whose adoption mandated the full renunciation of all systems past. Western music was “modal” before evolving into “tonal,” and it was “monodic” (as in Gregorian Chant) before becoming “modal” through the development of polyphony (more than one melody heard concurrently) and the adoption of scales derived from the old Eastern Church modes. Alban Berg was a composer endowed with immense lyrical gifts manifested through use of serialism. He expressed human feelings in ways that alluded to common values in the form of fragments extracted from military marches, waltzes, folk songs, and other references. His opera Wozzeck (1914–1922), the Kammerkonzert for piano, violin, and thirteen wind instruments (1923–1925), the Lyric Suite for string quartet (1925–1926), the concert aria Der Wein (text by Charles Baudelaire) for soprano and orchestra (1929), and his second opera, Lulu (1929–1935), composed concurrently with the violin concerto, are enormous reservoirs of musical, literary, and cultural allusions including multimedia experimentations, such as the silent film projected in Lulu. These characteristic “concessions” to familiar cultural codes made Berg’s music more palatable than Schoenberg’s and Webern’s. Diametrically opposed to Prokofiev’s second violin concerto’s playfulness stands the violin concerto composed in the same year by Berg, a concerto that more than any other altered the genre’s landscape forever. This violin concerto’s utmost ambiguities, intended as an enrichment of its creative resourcefulness, engaged and continues to engage artistic interpretations emerging from the availability of new textual readings of the score and from an ever-growing audience appreciation. The concerto’s ambiguities span its structural tonal/atonal/serial harmonic conception and the much-discussed overt or secret programs it bears. Then, of course, there is the matter of the violin—the vessel chosen by Berg to express his thoughts. The genesis of Berg’s violin concerto reflects an uncommon predicament. The composer needed to pay homage to a dear friend, the very influential Alma Mahler (1879–1964)—Gustav’s widow and wife of architect Walter Gropius, whose nineteen-year-old daughter, Manon, had tragically passed away on April 22, 1935. Berg also had the prosaic task to fulfill a commission proffered by American violinist Louis Kras-

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ner, who requested of him the composition of a violin concerto. Such was the extraordinary coincidence that saw a tragic human loss transfigured by the birth of a composition destined to celebrate life and death. Alban Berg died on December 24, 1935, and his concerto’s world premiere took place in Barcelona on April 19, 1936. Louis Krasner was the soloist, and Hermann Scherchen conducted the orchestra. The concerto, dedicated to “The Memory of an Angel” (Manon Gropius), is untraditionally structured in two parts, each divided in two sections: Andante—Allegretto and Allegro—Adagio, involving a solo violin and an orchestra of two flutes (piccolo), two oboes (English horn), three clarinets (alto saxophone), bass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four French horns, two trumpets, two trombones, bass tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings. Berg’s biographer Willi Reich described the concerto’s overall narrative in relatively simple terms, which, although approved by the composer, leave the listener anxious to learn more about this work’s intricacies, ambiguities, and special meanings. Let us read Willi Reich’s observations as a preliminary exploration before discussing the many experiential reaches disseminated throughout the score of Berg’s violin concerto: Insofar as a transcription into words is possible at all, the “tone”—a favorite expression of Berg’s—of the whole work may be described as follows: delicate Andante melodies emerge from the rising and falling movement of the introduction. These crystallize into a Grazioso middle section and then dissolve back into the waves of the opening. The Allegretto Scherzo rises from the same background; this part captures the vision of the lovely girl in a graceful dance, which alternates between a delicate and dreamy character and the rustic character of a folk tune. A wild orchestral cry introduces the second main part, which begins as a free and stormy cadenza. The demonic action moves irresistibly towards catastrophe, interrupted once— briefly—by a reserved point of rest. Groans and strident cries for help are heard in the orchestra, choked off by the suffocating rhythmic pressure of destruction. Finally: over a long pedal point—gradual collapse. At the moment of highest suspense and anxiety, the Chorale enters, serious and solemn, in the solo violin. Like an organ, the woodwinds answer each verse with the original harmonization of the classical model. Ingenious variations follow, with the original Chorale melody always present as a cantus firmus, climbing “misterioso” from the bass while the solo violin intones a “plaint” that gradually strug-

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gles towards the light. The dirge grows continually in strength; the soloist, with a visible gesture, takes over the leadership of the whole body of violins and violas; gradually they all join in with his melody and rise to a mighty climax before separating back into their own parts. An indescribably melancholy reprise of the folk tune “as if in the distance (but much slower than the first time)” reminds us once more of the lovely image of the girl; then the Chorale, with bitter harmonies, and this sad farewell while the solo violin arches high over it with entry after entry of the plaint.

The violin concerto begins with four ascending and descending arpeggios composed by four notes each at intervals of fifth alternately played by the harp (slightly colored by the sound of clarinets) and by the open strings (G-D-A-E) of the solo violin. Thus, Alban Berg’s violin concerto begins ethereally in a most organic fashion as the open strings of the violin vibrate in the air untouched (uncontaminated) by a human hand. The arpeggios are repeated ten times each at a higher dynamic level, creating a gradually anxious atmosphere that finally culminates in a five-note melodic progression played by one double bass accompanied by syncopated chords provided by violas and bassoons. The solo violin then soars high with the presentation of the twelve-tone series that forms the concerto’s spine while the mellow French horns take over the syncopated accompaniment. After the restatement of the fournote melodic progression, this time heard in the cellos with syncopated accompaniment of trumpets and trombone, the solo violin plays a descending variant of the twelve-note series followed by brief, delicate statements played alternately by flute and solo violin and graced by the combined timbres of harp and tam-tam superimposed upon a wavy motion of viola and bassoon. This episode leads to a developmental section marked a tempo, un poco grazioso in which the solo violin plays flautando, an effect produced by applying minimal pressure on the strings stricken by a fast up-and-down motion of the bow. Then, as the instruments of the orchestra engage gradually in dense counterpoint, the solo violin emerges through complex gestures to finally reach a section marked molto più tranquillo. This section consists of a tremolo in double stops followed by a delicate flourish and a series of ascending hooked grace notes. They lead to an abbreviated recapitulation with the solo violin playing the previously heard five-note melodic progression now accompanied by syncopated winds, harp, and strings until dissolv-

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ing into the rarefied atmosphere evoked at the very beginning of the concerto. The open strings of violas and cellos then echo the four ascending and descending arpeggios played by the harp. Solo violin, bass clarinet, bassoon, harp, and violins transition smoothly into section two of Part 1, which is indicated Allegretto (Scherzando). This section, a Scherzo (with two trios), begins with the clarinets playing fragments of a Ländler in thirds and sixths, which is quickly taken over by the solo violin while the strings provide a plucked accompaniment evoking, perhaps, the sound of a zither. The Ländler, though, morphs into a Viennese waltz followed by a folk tune Berg characterizes as “rustic.” These three elements of preexisting popular music contract and expand until the arrival of a Subito un poco energico (quasi Trio I), as Berg called it. This is another waltz-like gesture that calls for some virtuoso passages in the solo violin part leading to a double forte rhythmic high point that reminds one of Ravel’s La valse. This episode subsides upon connecting with the Meno mosso (Trio II), a large-scale, very virtuosic set of passages that bring the piece back to the Quasi Tempo I, in the form of an impassionate reprise with variants of the Scherzando that reminisce about the Viennese waltz, now played by the solo violin in artificial harmonics (whistling-like effect). Then, a very emotional rendition of the Viennese waltz evolves into another sweeping La valse moment before collapsing and ending the section on a suspended chord. In Part 2, Allegro, ma sempre rubato, frei wie eine Kadenz (free as a cadenza), the composer wrote in the score. In fact, the Allegro begins with a violent, rhythmical gesture established by a strong rhythmical figure, identified in the score by the composer as Hauptrhythmus (principal rhythm), which drives the entire section. The solo violin emerges with improvisatory cadenza-like passages punctuated by the orchestra as if it were an operatic recitative preluding to the (a tempo) molto ritmico section in which four French horns seize the episode like raging lions. They blast out the principal rhythm in counterpoint with the orchestra while the solo violin rhapsodizes almost in an irrelevant manner while its sound is overcome by brass, winds, and percussion. Then, it is the solo violin’s turn to take over the principal rhythm and give life to a chain of triple-stopped, very aggressive chords. Meanwhile, clarinets and bassoons, joined by the velvety tone of the alto saxophone, seem to hover above the struggling solo violin as if it were prey. Well, in truth Berg does write morendo (dying) at the conclusion of the phrase

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and requests that the next episode be played poco col legno (with the wooden part of the bow), thus producing a vitreous, otherworldly tone. This passage, marked tranquillo ma non strascinare (tranquil but without dragging), is scored in a diaphanous manner for solo violin, flute, oboe, and harp, but when the alto saxophone intervenes, the music becomes revitalized as the solo violin attempts a lift through ascending grace notes quickly reined in by the French horns. At that crucial point, the solo violin embarks upon a very challenging accompanied cadenza, almost like an apotheosis. The cadenza is a work of unusual polyphonic complexity that induced illustrious violinist Max Rostal to propose a rewriting of it. The purpose was to clarify the original voice-leading process. In fact, Berg himself provided the score with alternative ways of performing or understanding the cadenza’s difficult notation by invoking the aid of other instruments. The return of Tempo I (Allegro rubato) consists of a fierce battle between solo violin and orchestra. The catastrophic collective sound reaches a climax of singular power marked in the score as HÖHEPUNKT (Climactic Point). Thereafter, the sound gradually dissolves as it turns into a B flat major Bach chorale (the Adagio section of Part 2). Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chorale “Es ist genug!” (It is enough!) from Cantata BWV 60 (1723) was chosen by Berg for its harmonic possibilities and for its text, which he wrote along the notes every time the Chorale was quoted. Hence, the Adagio begins with the solo violin playing, almost “chanting” Bach’s Chorale as the contrabassoon and violas, joined later by bassoon and second violins, decorate it contrapuntally. The chorale is then heard in its original Bach harmonization performed organ-style by an ensemble of five clarinets, an episode Berg marked Poco più mosso, ma religioso. The following A tempo sees the chorale’s full text played antiphonally by the solo violin and the clarinets ensemble. Ultimately, the solo violin accompanies or rather comments upon the clarinets with a series of arpeggiated chords like a nostalgic evocation of the chorale’s melody. Next, we hear the first variation of the Bach quotation; the four French horns, the raged beasts heard in section one, now tamed and spiritualized, play very softly Berg’s serial harmonization of the chorale in counterpoint with harp and strings. Ultimately, the solo violin joins in the contrapuntal dialogue, but its protagonist role is soon incorporated in the violin section, a situation that remains as such throughout the second variation of the Bach quota-

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tion, which reaches moments of intense passion climaxing fortissimo in what Berg marked in the score as HÖHEPUNKT des “Adagio” (Climactic point of the Adagio). Thereafter, the solo violin regains its own voice and iterates the twelve notes of the concerto’s dodecaphonic series, beginning the Molto tranquillo portion of the section. Again, quoting the verses of the chorale, Berg starts a long descent toward the coda, one of the most unique, spiritual, and ecstatic pages ever composed in the history of Western music. The solo violin holds a celestial high note (B natural) while the violins followed by the double basses “whisper” the arpeggiated open strings figure with which the concerto began.

IN THE GRAND MANNER Béla Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2 was pivotal in revitalizing the violin concerto as a genre just as those composed by Stravinsky and Berg did. In a sense, though, Bartók took a step back to reflect on a stylistic mannerism widely popular in the nineteenth century, the so-called Grand Manner that consisted of gestural expressions emanating from both artist and instrument. In the early twentieth-century violin world, the Grand Manner was personified by Belgian violin virtuoso Eugene Ysaye (1858–1931), who placed much nobility and unmatched eloquence into violin playing. Bartók’s Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, Op. 1 (1905), a piece he performed throughout his career as pianist, reflected aplenty the Grand Manner of Franz Liszt. He evoked such a style in his violin concerto, a work that indeed glorified the violin and the violinist for whom it was written. Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 2 is not the repository of encrypted messages. It was not created to commemorate an event and contained no direct quotations of Magyar, Bulgarian, Romanian, or Arab folk rhythms and melodies, which were so much a part of the composer’s ideology, creativity, and craftsmanship as discussed later apropos of the rhapsodies for violin and orchestra. This violin concerto is a pure instrumental feast much closer to Stravinsky’s than the concertos of Prokofiev and Berg, notwithstanding the latter offering the violin on a silver platter by beginning his concerto with just the sound of its open strings.

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Berg quickly buried his soul deep inside the violin and humanized it through heavy allusions to suffering agony and ecstatic spirituality. Bartók, on the other hand, used his violin concerto to solve instrumental technical problems and compositional challenges while fulfilling a request from a dear friend of his, the violin virtuoso Zoltán Székely (1903–2001), a former student of Jeno Hubay (1858–1937), another exponent of the Grand Manner. By 1938, when the concerto was completed, Bartók had explored the possibilities of string writing more than any other contemporary composer: two violin and piano sonatas (1921 and 1922), string quartets nos. 1–5 (1909–1934), Music for Strings, Celesta, and Percussion (1936), and the two Rhapsodies for violin and orchestra composed in 1928 for Joseph Szigeti and Zoltán Székely respectively. Wholly based on dance tunes, these pieces bring together Hungarian, Romanian, and Ruthenian folk material in medleys of great joy, sadness, and virtuosity. The rhapsodies, performed separately or together, provide the violinist with plenty of Hungarian folk music from which the concerto refrains. The composition of the second violin concerto came at a time of taking stock, reflecting upon what made the violin the wondrous instrument it is and the mastery acquired in writing well for it, especially for a world-renowned Hungarian composer. In the first movement, Allegro non troppo, Bartók not only reflects on the Grand Manner of violin playing as described before but returns to the Allegro sonata form, the time-honored compositional plan that framed the creation of so many masterpieces. The concerto begins with the harp playing quarter-note chords joined, after two measures, by a faraway (pianissimo) French horn and low strings punctuating the tonal center of B major and paving the way for the entrance of the solo violin that plays the first theme based on those very punctuating notes. The solo entrance is magnificent; it swings up and down the G string always accompanied by the harp’s quarter-note chords, sustained strings, and moving woodwinds. Then, the harp stops strumming; the solo violin reaches a high G sharp and descends calmly to the a tempo (mosso). This new section consists of arduous technical contortions pressed on by the glassy sound of tremolando and glissando strings playing sul ponticello (on or near the bridge). Four muted French horns propel the solo violin toward a truly grand Tutti when the full orchestra takes possession of the first theme.

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What follows is a brief orchestral interlude and a succinct (thirtythree seconds, according to Bartók’s time markings in the score) solo violin reflection leading to a surprisingly brusque Risoluto, technically challenging amid spectral sonorities that usher the first movement’s second theme, Calmo, based on a twelve-tone row. Here the composer takes the listener by the hand into Schoenberg’s world, frightening and agitated by the arrival of the Vivace, a sort of closing theme that shows solo violin and orchestra racing for a way out of the nightmare announced by the festive sound of a canonic fanfare leading to the development section of the sonata form scheme. This portion, the most lyrical of the entire first movement, is based on the notes played pizzicato by the lower strings at the very beginning of the concerto. Accompanied by the quarter-note chords of the harp, solo violin and English horn engage in a duet of great beauty. Then the soloist is left alone, wandering through a maze of triplets and trills until it arrives at the Vivace (fortissimo risoluto), a grand detachè (ample staccato bowings, another trademark of the Grand Manner) passage answered in quasi–big band fashion by winds, brass, and snare drums as the solo violin’s grand detachè morphs into very aggressive triple stops chords counteracting the quasi-big band’s compact syncopations. The passage terminates abruptly and gives way to a four-measure undulating motion leading to a dreamy section that features the solo violin playing the inversion of the first theme surrounded by the magical sounds of celesta, harp, tremolando sul ponticello strings, and fast-moving sixteenth notes by the muted violas. This section ends with the Più mosso, a violent orchestral contrapuntal outburst that preludes the recapitulation, a summary return to the beginning of the movement showing the opening theme played suavely on the violin’s upper positions, elaborations of other material previously heard, a brief contrapuntal fanfare, and finally a thunderous orchestral Tutti whose scoring has the orchestra divided in unisons pitting winds and strings against syncopated brass. The solo violin rejoins the dialogue with fragments of the transition part alternated to the second theme: an impervious bravura passage leading to another set of lacerating orchestral unisons, a reentering of the solo violin, and a final landing played quadruple forte. Suddenly, the solo violin begins a sinuous passage of triplets featuring quarter tones between the notes D-C sharp-E Flat, a most unusual passage leading to

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the cadenza, a masterpiece of unaccompanied virtuoso writing whose gestures will appear years later in Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin (1944). At the cadenza’s conclusion, the orchestra engages the solo violin, with its quasi–big band syncopated chords, harp glissando, and final unison exploding in the Coda, a truly ferocious (“feroce,” Bartók writes in the score) race to the finish. This first movement is a very eventful undertaking lasting more than fourteen minutes. It prompted the Amsterdam audience at the concerto’s premiere on March 23, 1939, to burst into applause. The second movement, a theme, six variations, and a coda, is a formulary of rare sonorities mostly within the soft range of the dynamic spectrum. These variations, each lasting from thirty-eight to ninetyeight seconds, could have served Bartók to compose the initially projected full set of variations for violin and orchestra instead of a concerto if Székely had not dismissed the idea. The theme Andante tranquillo is played softly by the solo violin sustained by lower strings marked pianissimo and harmonics played by the harp with a touch of timpani. However, the last two measures serve as a Tutti conclusion with violins in octaves and fully arpeggiated chords by the harp. Variation 1, Un poco più andante, is scored for solo violin, timpani, and harp treated as a percussion instrument while the strings provide a veiled background. Variation 2, Un poco più tranquillo, calls for the solo violin to produce a more consistent tone (“sonoro,” writes Bartók) in contrast with the “whitish” tones of the flutes, oboes, clarinets, celesta, harps, and the violins joined by the cellos in the last five measures. The strings are featured holding very high notes and harmonics tremolando. Variation 3, Più mosso, provides a sudden change of soundscape; the solo violin plays ruvido au talon (roughly, at the frog of the bow), dissonantly grating fast-paced double stops while two French horns sting the sonic fabric and the timpani fill the silence of the rests in the solo violin part. Then, winds and timpani complement the solo violin in a fullthroated exploit of minor sixths played fortissimo in highly romantic fashion (Grand Manner). Variation 4, Lento, is a mysterious, whispered set of rapid embroideries executed by the solo violin and sustained by clarinets and strings that very unexpectedly end smorzando (fading out) on a quarter rest, enough time to allow the soloist to reach the upper region of the G string in order to perform a very risky cantabile passage.

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Variation 5, Allegro scherzando, is a Scherzo distilled for solo violin, piccolo, flute, clarinets, triangle, snare drum, harp, and low, arpeggiated pizzicato strings. Variation 6 continues the delicate tone of the Scherzo by showcasing very rapid, embellished figures characterized by the use of measured ricochet bowings (staccato bouncing notes in groups of six, twelve, and twenty-four taken in one bow stroke). This variation is accompanied by pizzicato strings both plucked and snapped (a Bartók specialty) and punctuated by timpani played on the metal rim with wooden sticks and snare drum hit on the edge of the head. A second phase of this variation presents a simple melody that leads nostalgically to the reprise of the theme very delicately played by sparse winds, celesta, harp, and strings. Bartók’s third movement is a variant of the first. Cast in the same Allegro sonata form, all thematic material is presented in the same order as in the first movement but transformed in rhythmical and melodic contours displayed with great inventiveness. Thematic references in the description below follow those of the first movement. After four measures of strings and French horns, the solo violin enters with two waltz-like transformations of the first theme marked forte con spirito the first time, mezzo forte and delicately canonical with harp, bassoon, and clarinets, the second. Then, a sibilant glissando of harp and piccolo leads to a new episode consisting of grating triplets played forte and strepitoso punctuated by sharp acciaccaturas of the orchestra until the passage reaches a full climax: a voluptuous orchestral intermezzo driven by the waltz rhythm. This luminous section gives way to a contrasting one, a thematic passage infested by sliding chromatic triplets that sarcastically lead to a double forte ruvido section. Again, the strings play the same rough, grating, dissonant triplets heard before col legno (with the wooden part of the bow) until they slow down to announce the entrance of the first movement’s second theme through the barely audible vibrations emanating from the triangle, cymbals, and harp. The mysterious, spectral character of this second theme, based, as noted before, on a twelve-tone series, becomes now ever so transparent due to a sonic nebula created by divisi muted strings playing a very tight (“serré,” indicates the composer) tremolando at the tip of the bow. Meanwhile, the solo violin expands its melody con calore (warmly). This episode is so rich in orchestration details that even the triangle is strick-

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en alternatively by a thin wood stick and a thin metal one to complement the twinkling sounds of celesta and harp, creating a true land of enchantment out of which emerges the motoric ruvido triplets now urged on by the beats of the full orchestra. This episode gets progressively more violent as orchestral unisons, trombone glissandos, and timpani stricken with a wood stick on their metal edge drive the sound avalanche toward a variant of the first movement’s closing theme, where the Grand Manner of violin playing is fully exploited by the solo violin. The development section (according to the sonata form plan) sees the solo violin elaborating on the original first theme until joined by the orchestra in a turbulent, advancing wave of the waltz rhythm, which comes to a halt suddenly. Then, the first theme is played in reverse by the solo violin in a suave fashion accompanied by harp, strings, and sparse woodwinds until it is the orchestra’s turn to take hold of the thematic material and work it out in a typical Bartók fanfare consisting of stacked layers of brass sounds. It ends emphatically echoed by trills in the woodwinds and hooked canonical triplets by the strings, which seep into the solo violin part accompanied by a few strings and winds. This section segues into an ecstatic evocation of the first movement’s second theme, which intensifies its texture as it gets slower in pulse and melts with the Assai lento, a tenebrous, whispering web of string glissandos out of which the solo violin tries to disentangle itself by threading its own sonic web until it reaches full liberation—a quasi-cadenza flourish that “calls” the orchestra back into the dialogue and finally leads to the Coda. The Coda is a motoric, complex array of triplets driven by the timpani’s glissando to the ending of the concerto, a precipitous virtuoso outburst. This is the ending demanded by Zoltán Székely and played by most violinists. Bartók provided the concerto with an alternative ending whose effect is perhaps more dramatic albeit without the participation of the soloist.

ADDENDUM The violin concertos of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Berg, and Bartók discussed in this chapter have been recorded by their dedicatees and are currently available in remastered editions.

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Stravinsky—Violin Concerto in D Samuel Dushkin, violin, and the Lamoureux Orchestra conducted by Igor Stravinsky. Recorded on October 28 and 29, 1935; first issued by Polydor 566273/5, available now as “Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky,” Biddulph Recordings WHL 037, 1997

Prokofiev—Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63 Robert Soetens, violin, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Henry Wood. Recorded live at the Seventh Season of Sunday Orchestral Concerts, Queen’s Hall, London on December 20, 1936; BBC Archive Recording, 2009

Berg—Violin Concerto Louis Krasner, violin, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Anton Webern. Recorded live on May 1, 1936; Testament, 1995 Louis Krasner, violin, and the Stockholm Philharmonic conducted by Fritz Busch. Recorded live on April 20, 1938; GM Label, 2006

Bartók—Violin Concerto No. 2, Op. 112 Zoltán Székely, violin, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Willem Mengelberg. Recorded live at the world premiere on March 23, 1939; Philips Legendary Classics, 1989

9 BARBER AND KORNGOLD, SHOSTAKOVICH AND . . . SCHOENBERG

This chapter discusses audience “accessibility,” elicited by the popularity of the violin concertos by Samuel Barber (first performed in 1941) and Erich Wolfgang Korngold (first performed in 1947); the “Zhdanov” impact on the Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 77 by Dmitri Shostakovich (first performed in 1955); and the stigma of “inaccessibility” that mars Arnold Schoenberg’s lone violin concerto (first performed in 1940).

“HE IS NO HEIFETZ . . . BUT WE SHALL SEE” 1 American violin icon Albert Spalding (1888–1953) was no Heifetz, but surely, on that Friday afternoon of February 7, 1941, he catapulted Samuel Barber’s violin concerto to everlasting fame. Fortunately, the surviving recording of the concerto’s premiere performance bears witness to the event that occurred at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy. 2 Samuel Barber (1910–1981) was a privileged composer in many ways. His music-loving family included a world-famous singer, aunt Louise Homer, and her husband, composer Sydney Homer, who became Samuel’s constant mentor. At the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, founded in 1924, Barber began his studies as a charter student excelling in literature, voice, and composition, which he studied under Rosario Scalero for nine consecutive years. Scalero’s composition 137

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class was legendary indeed. Barber’s peers included Mark Blitzstein, Nino Rota, Gian Carlo Menotti, and later Lukas Foss, Ned Rorem, and many others. Scalero, Louise Homer, and philanthropist Mary Louise Curtis Bok (later Mrs. Efrem Zimbalist), the Curtis Institute’s founder, enjoyed the friendship of Arturo Toscanini, who was immediately taken by young Barber’s talent when his scores were presented to him. Toscanini premiered Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Op. 11 with the NBC Orchestra on November 5, 1938, in the course of a radio broadcast that also included the composer’s Essay No. 1, Op. 12 for orchestra. The Adagio for Strings became a staple of the symphonic repertoire from that moment on. Other remarkable contacts included Toscanini’s sonin-law, the celebrated pianist Vladimir Horowitz, for whom Barber wrote his 1949 Piano Sonata, Op. 26. On the home front, the composer’s private life was blessed by the twenty-five-year companionship of Gian Carlo Menotti and a time particularly rich in intellectual exchanges with the major personalities of the musical, literary, and artistic scenes across the world. Barber’s career was enhanced by prestigious commissions, which permitted him to write in a style integral to his ideals and avoid the influence of current trends and politics. The Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 14 was born out of one of those commissions, perhaps not so prestigious at first but worth one thousand dollars in 1939, a paltry sum for a young American composer considering that in 1944 Yehudi Menuhin paid a similar sum to Béla Bartók for the Sonata for Solo Violin he commissioned. The concerto’s genesis, recounted many times in various flavors, revolved around Philadelphia industrialist and philanthropist Samuel Fels, who commissioned Barber for the composition of a violin concerto for his adopted son, Curtis violin prodigy Iso Briselli (1911–2005). Upon playing thorough the first two movements of the “concertino,” as Barber called it then, Briselli complained that the treatment of the violin was not virtuosic enough for his technical prowess. Consequently, Barber added a third movement in the form of a perpetuum mobile that Briselli declared impossible to play! A little bit of a local cause célèbre ensued over the playability of the movement and Barber’s request to Fels to retain the commission’s advance money (five hundred dollars) as compensation for the time invested in composing the work. In the end, the concerto’s third movement was declared playable in-

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deed by various violinists, and no documentation survived regarding whether Barber kept the advance money or if the balance of the commission was ever paid. Briselli relinquished the one-year exclusive performing rights stipulated by the commission’s agreement and never played the concerto, although he and Barber remained on amicable terms. Now, with no soloist available and with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy scheduled to premiere the work (what a privilege for a young American composer, though!), the concerto, completed in July 1940, was brought to the attention of Albert Spalding, who liked it without reservations. Spalding was no Heifetz, but he certainly delivered the concerto’s world premiere with a great deal of pathos and finesse. Barber described the concerto in the program notes for the premiere performance: The work is lyrical and rather intimate in character. . . . The first movement—allegro molto moderato—begins with a lyrical first subject announced at once by the solo violin, without any orchestral introduction. The movement as a whole has perhaps more the character of a sonata than a concerto form. The second movement— andante sostenuto—is introduced by an extended oboe solo. The violin enters with a contrasting and rhapsodic theme, after which it repeats the oboe melody of the beginning. The last movement, a perpetual motion, exploits the more brilliant and virtuoso character of the violin.

Clearly, such a simplistic description makes one believe that Barber wished his audience to focus unbiased on the experience provided by a world premiere performed by a famed artist, a great conductor, and a superlative orchestra. The first movement, Allegro, is cast in classical sonata form, meaning that some predictability of the thematic material’s presentation and development may offer a fluid experience enhanced by constant lyrical musicality underscored, at times, by dramatic accents. The solo violin enters right away announcing the main theme and delicately accompanied by an arpeggio played by the piano over steady chords provided by strings, bassoon, and horns. This theme is subsequently repeated with melodic variants concluded by scale-like filigree played liberamente (freely) by the solo violin. The clarinet introduces the second theme, a

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snappy melody that assumes a slightly sentimental character when assumed by the solo violin. Finally, a spirited thematic transition, marked grazioso e scherzando, features familiar violinistic patterns played by the soloist in counterpoint with the clarinets, bringing the initial snappy melody’s buoyant humor back into the musical discourse. Next, a flurry of scales leads to a five-measure passage marked poco agitato, a sort of dense reflection on the opening theme that culminates with an ominous chord whose dynamic vanishes into a barely perceptible pause preceding the development section of the sonata-form scheme. This section is built on variable procedures of both second and first themes and additional contrapuntal material held steady by quarternote strokes played by timpani and occasionally pizzicato cellos. This creates a dramatic moment reminiscent of the first movement of Beethoven’s violin concerto and the opening of Brahms’s first symphony. The solo violin leads this extended passage with bravura gestures leading to the recapitulation (i.e., the almost identical repetition of the music heard at the beginning of the movement), thus offering the listener the opportunity to experience again Barber’s excellent thematic inventiveness and savvy developments. The recapitulation culminates in a dramatic chord that traditionally would have called for the solo cadenza. Instead, Barber asks for the soloist to play a brief a piacere (with freedom) linear passage that serves as a bridge to the Coda, an evocation of the material used in the transition urged on by the four timpani strokes played “a tempo to the end, without dragging.” The movement ends very softly. Though Barber insisted that his violin concerto be devoid of extra musical narrative, the second movement, Andante, points to the contrary. It resembles, in fact, a dramatic tripartite aria: Part 1, Part 2, and the return of Part 1 connected by cadenzas in vocal recitative style. The Andante begins with a long oboe solo—an homage, perhaps, to the second movement of Brahms’s violin concerto—echoed by the cellos in counterpoint with the clarinet; then the theme soars in the violins joined by the French horn in preparation for the entrance of the solo violin. The soloist presents a new theme, calm at the beginning but quickly dramatized by orchestral perorations leading to an imperious recitative, cantando liberamente (singing freely) and underscored by the four timpani strokes. The cadenza-like passage ends on a forcefully operatic chord held by strings and timpani roll; then the solo violin

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plays the initial oboe solo on the G string, basking in the dark sonority of the violin supported by strings and French horns. The solo violin continues its lyrical expansion into high positions climaxing when the whole orchestra joins it. Another recitative brings the movement to its end in an evanescent pianissimo. The third movement, Presto in moto perpetuo, opens with two measures of murmured triplets played by the timpani launching the solo violin into its nonstop, 110-measure flight for the duration of approximately four minutes. The solo violin’s steady flow of staccato triplets is “punctured” by shrilly grace notes played by the woodwinds and by asymmetrical accents darted out at the solo violin in the teasing attempt to upset the perpetual motion’s balance. Country fiddling-style patterns played across the solo violin’s strings and a brief, daring fugato section prompted by the rolling snare drum provoke moments of risky ensemble balance until the solo violin’s triplets turn into quadruplets of sixteenth notes. The soloist’s E-flat arpeggio brings the movement to its conclusion with the full orchestra playing a stinging chord on the tonic note A.

IT IS NEEDLESS TO SAY HOW DELIGHTED I AM TO HAVE MY CONCERTO PERFORMED BY CARUSO AND PAGANINI IN ONE PERSON: JASCHA HEIFETZ. 3 Unlike Barber, Erich Korngold had his violin concerto premiered by Heifetz, a privilege that paradoxically turned into a temporary setback. Following the concerto’s world premiere in St. Louis on February 14, 1947, Jascha Heifetz performed it three times in a row at New York’s Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Efrem Kurtz. The final performance took place on Sunday afternoon, March 30, 1947, and was broadcast live by the Columbia Broadcast System (CBS). Korngold’s concerto was heard over the airwaves by millions. Later, Heifetz and Alfred Wallenstein recorded it with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1953 for RCA, an event that sealed off the HeifetzKorngold brand for a long time and perhaps discouraged many a violinist to play the concerto in public as the Heifetz rendition was “untouchable.”

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Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957), a privileged son of Vienna’s influential music critic Julius Korngold and a child prodigy praised by Richard Strauss, composed a pantomime entitled The Snowman when he was eleven years of age. It was followed by two one-act operas, Violanta and Der Ring des Polykrates. At age twenty-three, his opera Die Tote Stadt premiered simultaneously in Cologne, Hamburg, and Vienna. Hailed a masterpiece, Die Tote Stadt was presented for the first time at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House on November 19, 1921, starring celebrated soprano Maria Jeritza in her American debut. In 1935, celebrated theater director Max Reinhardt summoned Korngold to Hollywood to adapt Mendelssohn’s music for a film version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This opportunity, followed by the political and military upheaval engulfing Europe, prompted Korngold and his family to immigrate to the United States and consider Hollywood their new home. For Korngold the composer, Hollywood became the promised land where a new career in writing for motion pictures took flight immediately. Anthony Adverse, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Kings Row, The Constant Nymph, and Deception are only a handful of titles out of seventeen film scores that gained Korngold a good living, celebrity status, and two Academy Awards. In the summer of 1945, at the peak of his Hollywood fame, Korngold wrote his Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35. He utilized old sketches belonging to a never-completed violin concerto he had promised to violin virtuoso Bronislav Huberman since the early 1930s and abstracts from the scores composed for the films Another Dawn (1937), Juàrez (1939), Anthony Adverse (1936), and The Prince and the Pauper (1937). Korngold’s concerto is scored for two flutes and piccolo; two oboes and English horn; two clarinets; bass clarinet; two bassoons and contrabassoon; four horns; two trumpets; trombone; timpani; a colorful array of percussion instruments including cymbal, gong, bass drum, tubular bells, vibraphone, xylophone, and glockenspiel; harp; celesta; and strings. The first movement, Moderato nobile, follows the Allegro sonata form quite literally. It begins with the solo violin stating the gentle first theme over tremolo strings. It is an extensive twenty-nine-measure subject drawn mostly from the 1937 film score to Another Dawn. It ends with a rising, unaccompanied phrase for the solo violin; then a sweeping trill of the woodwinds and a “magical” harp glissando usher in

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the reprise of the theme played by the orchestra, while the solo violin comments with virtuoso arabesques. This episode leads to a somewhat more agitated transitional section before arriving at the second theme. Like its predecessor, this soft and yearning theme was certainly recognized by the late 1940–1950s audience as Empress Carlotta’s love theme heard in the 1939 film Juàrez starring Bette Davis. Another harp swirl (a Korngold signature) takes the listener through a delicate soundscape out of which the solo violin emerges with a brief cadenza culminating in what could be characterized in the sonata form as an abbreviated recapitulation. Here, the main theme is heard in a full-bodied version for orchestra first and then again among the ornate virtuoso vagaries of the solo violin. The first theme reaches a climax in the solo’s impassioned high notes followed by a Sibelius-like moment of intense pathos generated by the second theme. A flurry of trills in the woodwinds, harp glissando, celesta chords, and solo violin scales and trills lead to the sharp orchestral chord that signals the movement’s rapturous conclusion. The second movement, Romance (Andante), is a three-part song in which the sonic blend of vibraphone, celesta, and harp plays an important role throughout the movement. Extracted from the film score to Anthony Adverse (1939), the first theme is presented by the solo violin in the high register. Like a song, it expands and contracts emotively as if following the inflections of imaginary verses. Then, the second theme, poco meno (misterioso), is played by the muted solo violin filtered through a truly magical, richly ornamented atmosphere. Then, the imperious indication in the score, Avanti! (Onward!), performed by the violins divided in octaves, leads to the return of the initial melody. The material of the first section is presented in altered fashion, and the ending comes in delicately dissonant triple piano terraced chords in the strings underscoring the solo violin’s arpeggios echoed by the resonances of the vibraphone. The Finale, Allegro assai vivace, is a Rondo that begins with an exploding orchestral chord followed by shimmering trills of flute and celesta and the solo violin’s presentation of a 6/8 jolly, staccato jig accompanied by plucking strings in 2/4, thus giving the movement a picaresque character. The thematic material upon which this Finale is built derives from the 1937 film score to The Prince and the Pauper, a lavish production of Mark Twain’s novel starring Errol Flynn. The music is

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indeed infused by a strong sense of narrative, romance, and action. For instance, the second theme, a whistling little tune first announced by the solo violin, morphs quickly into a contrapuntal fragmentation that upon regrouping turns into an exciting fiddling-style passage. The main theme is heard again, played by the orchestra and the solo violin in galloping fashion colored by the whipping sound of harp, celesta, and winds until a Coda starts loudly with a doubly augmented version of the whistling theme in the brass and continued in echo by the solo violin’s harmonics. Finally a stretto, using the mischievously orchestrated main theme played at twice the original speed, works up to the concerto’s most brilliant ending. Traditional form, romance, and action dispatched within a twenty- to twenty-five-minute time period seem to be the ideal parameters needed for a successful violin concerto. Melodic inventiveness, rhythmical vitality, dramatic narrative displayed through brilliant orchestration, and spicy contrapuntal devices complete the requirements. Ultimately, since a concerto is written both for the violin and the violinist, contrasting idiomatic instrumental writing to suit the virtuosic and expandable idiosyncratic nature of the performer is an essential formulaic requirement for success. Of the violin concertos composed in the twentieth century, those of Barber and Korngold have reached permanent places in the repertoire thanks to the attributes mentioned above. The Barber concerto, though, went through a process of revision after its premiere in 1941. Following Spalding’s performance, the composer made several adjustments to the original score. He retouched the solo part for fluidity and lightened up the orchestration for better balance between solo and orchestra, especially in the last movement. The new, definitive version of the concerto was published in 1949 and repremiered by American violinist Ruth Posselt on January 7, 1949, with the Boston Symphony conducted by Serge Koussevitsky. Two years later, Barber conducted his violin concerto in Berlin and Frankfurt with Charles Turner as soloist. Finally, in 1951, Louis Kaufman and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra conducted by Walter Goehr offered the first commercially recorded version of the concerto. Then, in 1965, Isaac Stern, Leonard Bernstein, and the New York Philharmonic issued a recording that guaranteed the concerto’s longevity.

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In Korngold’s case, some of the musical ingredients for a successful composition were already vetted through soundtracks written for important Hollywood cinematic productions starring the most popular actors of the time. The concerto’s original “protagonist,” Jascha Heifetz, himself a Hollywood presence, was viewed in the popular imagination as Errol Flynn brandishing a violin bow instead of the customary sword and bow and arrow. Purists may be justified in considering the Korngold concerto a pastiche on well-known tunes as if it were one more fashionable nineteenth-century fantasy or paraphrase on operatic arias that filled the repertoire of all instrumentalists. Yet, the Korngold concerto is based on self-borrowed organic music, which, in some cases, was written for concert use long before being applied to the screen. Korngold’s violin concerto has benefited greatly in recent times from the musicological approach to film music that place a premium on “classical” and innovative works composed for the silver screen beginning with the revival of the Korngold orchestral sound elicited by the extraordinary success of John Williams’s Star Wars films in the early 1970s. The Heifetz/Korngold brand mentioned above found precedents and afterthoughts in the violin concertos Jascha Heifetz commissioned from various composers to suit his taste and unique virtuosity. Take, for instance, the concerto composed by William Walton (1902–1983) and premiered in 1939 at the New York World Fair. It is a work rich in lyrical turns of phrase alternating to charmingly pungent scherzando passages and back to what is essentially the concerto’s overall introverted lyrical mood. Not quite as well-balanced and inspired as the viola concerto of 1929, Walton’s violin concerto is performed often but not enough to win popular consensus and become part of the repertoire. Another concerto bearing the Heifetz imprimatur is Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Violin Concerto No. 2, subtitled “The Prophets.” It was composed at Heifetz’ s request in 1931 in the aftermath of a performance of the composer’s Concerto Italiano by Heifetz and Bernardino Molinari at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. CastelnuovoTedesco (1895–1968), an Italian of Jewish extraction, dedicated the concerto’s traditional three movements to the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Elijah, thus employing a certain melodic, harmonic, and coloristic Hebraism akin to many works by Ernest Bloch. Neither of the two violin concertos by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco has entered the reper-

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toire; however, the composer reached everlasting fame with his 1939 Guitar Concerto No. 1 written for Andrés Segovia and for his activity as a Hollywood film composer and teacher. Like Korngold, CastelnuovoTedesco lived in Hollywood and worked in the film industry after fleeing racial persecutions enacted by the Italian Fascist government against Italian Jews. A fiendishly difficult concerto is the one Louis Gruenberg (1884–1964) wrote for Heifetz in 1943. It was supposed to be a “jazz concerto in long tails,” something along Gershwin’s lines. Yet it fell into folksiness and did not quite reach its preestablished purpose, despite Heifetz’s strong advocacy. Ultimately, it was left to another Hollywood celebrity, Miklós Rózsa (1907–1995), to fulfill a Heifetz commission and produce, in 1953–1954, a violin concerto of sensational appeal. Premiered in Dallas on January 15, 1956, by Jascha Heifetz and the Dallas Symphony conducted by Walter Hendl, Rózsa’s remarkable concerto has been well-accepted by audiences worldwide and by soloists eager to offer alternatives to the current repertoire. Rózsa’s unmistakable Hungarian mood, closer to Kodaly’s than Bartók’s, pervades the rich melodic tapestry of this violin concerto, which the composer used later in the soundtracks of Ben-Hur (1959), perhaps his cinematic masterpiece, and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) in which the concerto’s second movement becomes the hauntingly beautiful “Gabrielle’s Theme.”

IN AND OUT OF THE “ZHDANOVSHCHINA” When, in 1954, the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir published “The Thaw,” a short story by Elya Ehrenburg, the process of de-Stalinization had already begun following the dictator’s death the previous year. “The Thaw,” with its negative criticism of aspects of the 1936 Great Purge and Stalinism in general, served Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s own “thaw” toward a period of liberalization and newly established relations with the West. At that time, with the passing of Prokofiev in 1953, the same year as Stalin, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975) became the most consequential among Soviet composers. He had been chastised twice by the Stalin regime, in 1936 and 1948, for not making his music totally comprehensible by the masses. The second chastisement coincided

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with, or was perhaps the main reason behind, the composition of the Violin Concerto in A Minor, Op. 99 (later renumbered as Op. 77), which the composer cautiously kept hidden in a drawer. Going public with it would have generated a further wave of aesthetical antagonism and politico/disciplinary consequences according to the tenets imposed by Andrei Zhdanov’s cultural ideology. That the concerto was not performed did not mean that it remained out of sight; both composer and dedicatee, famous violinist David Oistrakh, could have worked out a number of revisions until the concerto finally premiered in Leningrad on October 29 and 30, 1955, with the Leningrad Philharmonic conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky. In December 29 of the same year, David Oistrakh and Dimitri Mitropoulos presented Shostakovich’s concerto at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic and recorded it on January 2, 1956. Then, on February 4, 1956, Oistrakh played the concerto in Moscow. It is interesting to note that Moscow’s audience heard the concerto after New Yorkers did. David Oistrakh (1908–1974) represented a sort of “second coming” in terms of modern violin playing. He conquered the West in person when Jascha Heiftez had become a “vinyl” legend heard only on LPs broadcasted by radio stations worldwide. Unforgettable were Oistrakh’s yearly concerts in Rome in the middle to late 1950s, a recital with Vladimir Yampolsky and two concertos played with the orchestra, Tchaikovsky and Brahms but not Shostakovich. Shostakovich’s concerto was heard for the first time in Rome courageously played by Pina Carmirelli, and some ten years later, it was presented as an Oistrakh alternative by Soviet violinist Leonid Kogan. No longer a teenager but a member of the Santa Cecilia Orchestra, on April 23, 1967, I observed Kogan rehearsing and performing the Shostakovich concerto with Vaclav Smetacek conducting, while playing in the orchestra at less than ten feet from the soloist. The power of Kogan’s vibrato and the cutting decisiveness of his bow strokes were such that the stage shook, or so it felt! Three days later, a concert conducted by Franco Mannino featured the Kogan family, violinists Elizabeth Gilels (his wife) and fifteen-yearold son, Pavel. They played a Concerto for Three Violins and Orchestra that Mannino had written for them. In May 1967, the Santa Cecilia Orchestra and the Leningrad Philharmonic reciprocated a two-week tour of the USSR and Italy. Leonid Kogan, a Red Star artist, was the

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USSR’s magnificent official host of our appearances in Moscow and Leningrad. Musically and chronologically, Shostakovich’s violin concerto sits comfortably between the lighthearted Ninth Symphony (1945) and the tragic Tenth (1953), opus 70 and 93 respectively. In fact, one can trace the earthly exuberance of the concerto’s Finale to the Ninth Symphony, while the contemplative and tragic elements foreshadow the Tenth. In depth and seriousness, the violin concerto is closer to the Tenth Symphony as shown by some thematic relationships. This is all the more remarkable, commented Boris Schwarz, since the two works are separated by some five years—years of great inner strain and outside pressure. But the spiritual link between the two works appears unbroken, seemingly unaffected by the intervening years. Nothing comparable happened in the next few years; in fact, one could speak of a creative lull during the years 1954–1955. While the Tenth was an ideological “victory” in musical terms, Shostakovich made no effort to widen and exploit this victory. The works he wrote in those two years—the Festival Overture, the Two-Piano Concertino, a few film scores and songs—contained no hint at musical “liberalization,” or a widening of musical idiom. Nevertheless, the year 1955 brought two Shostakovich premieres that demanded the attention of friends and foes—delayed premieres of works written earlier, during the Zhdanovshchina, but withheld by the composer. One was the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry (for three solo voices with piano), first given in January 1955, though composed in 1948. The other was the Violin Concerto No. 1, composed in 1947–1948 and first played by David Oistrakh in Leningrad on October 29, 1955, and in Moscow on February 4, 1956. The violin concerto, one of Shostakovich’s most original works, is cast in four contrasting movements instead of the traditional three-part approach, fast-slow-fast. This format gives the work a more symphonic connotation, like Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole and Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto for cello and orchestra. The orchestration calls for triple woodwinds, a brass section composed of four French horns and tuba, timpani, percussion (xylophone, tambourine, tam-tam), celesta, two harps, and strings. The opening movement, a lengthy Nocturne (Moderato), is a unique page in the violin concerto repertoire. Profoundly dark but not in a surreal sense, it lets the solo violin soar slowly into the

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universe lit up sporadically by the twinkling sound drops played by the celesta and harp. The character of the music seems to relate a message of peace and hope, knowing perhaps that mankind will prefer to ignore it, but it is there like a time capsule deployed out of the composer’s conscience. This Nocturne sounds like nothing we have known in the repertoire; there are no tunes to remember, just a deep feeling of awe. It is the second movement, Scherzo (Allegro), that makes us look down to Earth to check whether Saint-Saëns and Stravinsky were still in league with the Devil’s macabre. Prickly and nasty, Shostakovich’s Scherzo has no cantabile section; instead it breaks into a sort of Jewish folk dance and back to the blade grinding machine 3/8 against 4/16 motoric rhythm. Then, Shostakovich signs off with his personal motto, a four-note motif—D, E flat, C, B natural—corresponding to the German transliteration of his name (D.Sch, i.e., the notes DSCH), which turns the power off, and the piece terminates instantaneously. The Passacaglia (Andante), a Shostakovich favorite form, is announced by the quartet of French horns in full Mussorgsky fashion. In fact, we can imagine Modest Mussorgsky tending his hand and accompanying us through a lapidary walk stopping with each of the Passacaglia’s variations before the tomb of a luminary personage of the past. The procession of this Passacaglia is stately, never sad but proud. Then Mussorgsky vanishes, leaving us alone to sing our own requiem; it is the cadenza, the composer’s masterpiece for unaccompanied violin. It paraphrases the material heard up to that point, reiterates with a series of chords the Shostakovich motto, and anticipates what there is to be heard in the following movement. Traditionally, the cadenza is time for exhibiting one’s virtuosity. Not this time, though, because bravura has been an intrinsic part of this concerto since the beginning. Shostakovich’s cadenza is the bridge to the festival of humanity. In the last movement, Burlesque (Allegro con brio), the composer sees life as a circus, or was it his ironic stance on the last days of the Stalin regime and Zhdanov’s cultural decree? “The Concerto does not aim at easy effectiveness,” wrote Boris Schwarz. There are no memorable, ingratiating melodies nor virtuoso pyrotechnics designed for immediate audience response. Just as its first performer, David Oistrakh, admitted that he had to “live” with the work for some time until he penetrated its meaning, so the listener must exert some patience and intellectual effort to grasp its full message.

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THE “UNPLAYABLE” “Brahms’s is not a concerto for, but against the violin,” declared conductor Joseph Hellmesberger following the premiere of Brahms’s violin concerto in Vienna on January 14, 1879. Was there a smattering of truth in Hellmesberger’s quip? Jascha Heifetz told Arnold Schoenberg that his Violin Concerto was “unplayable” and that he would need to grow an extra finger if he were to play it. Another witticism? Certainly, since Louis Krasner premiered the concerto on December 6, 1940, with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra and played it a second time on November 30, 1945, with Dimitri Mitropoulos and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. Finally, Krasner recorded the concerto on December 1, 1952, with the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos following two subscription performances on November 29 and 30. Of course, Krasner was an extraordinary maverick whose advocacy for contemporary music of the avant-garde kind was boundless. Like him, a very few soloists performed Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto at special occasions. Arrigo Pelliccia, for instance, gave the concerto’s European premiere in 1948 at the Venice Festival of Contemporary Music. Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto, Op. 36, composed in the United States in 1936, is a rigorously twelve-tone work whose technical intricacies, strictness of construction, complex orchestration, length, and deliberate lack of recognizable “tunefulness” make it, if not impossible, certainly very difficult to penetrate for performers and audiences alike. Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto should be considered as the Brahms’s of the twentieth century. Its writing is eminently nuanced and gestural in the grand manner of the German Romantics and should be played with flare and intensity in order to communicate effectively its innermost details. Violinist Michael Barenboim (Daniel’s son) was able to accomplish such a feat in Chicago at Symphony Center on March 15, 2013. He offered a live broadcast performance of the Schoenberg concerto so stunning that the audience erupted in cheers as if he had just finished playing the Tchaikovsky concerto or Sibelius. One ponders whether Schoenberg’s will enter the violin concerto repertoire in the near future. American virtuoso Hilary Hahn’s “carved in stone” recorded rendition of this concerto may inspire many a soloist to embrace not only this work but some of the many neglected modern

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and contemporary violin concertos I mention in the concluding chapter of this book, a book intended for listeners who, I believe, have the power to demand that new works be performed more often rather than waiting for works to be passively imposed upon them. Of course, reciprocity is a great virtue, but it does not happen spontaneously!

10 MUSIC WITHOUT ANXIETIES

The violin concertos discussed in the previous two chapters represent a substantial spectrum of the current modern and contemporary repertoire. However, a great many violin concertos possessing remarkable originality have not made a strong impression on the international concert scene despite repeated performances in their countries of origin. In recent times, thanks to advanced audio distribution technologies, some lesser-known concertos have attracted the attention of performers and audiences, thus fostering a culture of discovery and demand for live performances. In this closing chapter, I review succinctly some violin concertos not mentioned previously. My selection, based on personal taste and listening opportunities, is intended as a work-in-progress to be complemented by the reader’s own discovery of violin concertos. I begin with works of British composers Ralph Vaughn Williams (1872–1958), Gerald Finzi (1901–1951), Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), Arthur Bliss (1891–1975), and Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934). The concertos of Vaughn Williams and Finzi, despite the composers’ generational gap, appear to be stylistically related. Composed around the same time, Vaughn Williams’s Concerto Accademico in D minor for violin and strings (1924–1925) and Finzi’s Concerto for small orchestra and solo violin (1925–1927) reflect the two musicians’ deep natural feelings for English and Celtic pastoral airs and dance tunes expressed in their concertos in a light vein cast in neo-Classical or neo-Baroque 153

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formal structures, the so-called Back-to-Bach approach very trendy in England in the mid-1920s. Britten’s Violin Concerto, Op. 15 (1939), on the other hand, is a much more consequential work, which was overshadowed perhaps by the contemporary concerto by William Walton, so brilliantly heralded by its commissioner, Jascha Heifetz. The Britten and Walton concertos are highly difficult and passionate; however, in Britten’s case, the level of emotionality seems to be reined in by the composer, leaving the performer with little room for interpretive freedom. According to Spanish violinist Antonio Brosa, who premiered the work with the New York Philharmonic under John Barbirolli on March 28, 1940, Benjamin Britten composed this concerto as a lamentation for the dead of the Spanish Civil War. Therefore, it is possible that he wanted his message to come across without overly expressive and virtuosic elements on the part of the interpreter. In 1955, Arthur Bliss dedicated his violin concerto to popular British virtuoso Alfredo Campoli. The work is a great example of post Brahms/ Elgar virtuoso violin writing bulging with melodies and strong orchestration. Idiomatically, Bliss’s concerto looks back at Walton with a bit of nostalgia. In recent times, Peter Maxwell Davies composed two violin concertos. The first, written in 1985 for Isaac Stern, is a very intense, turgid undertaking dotted by sparse poetical slow sections. In contrast, the shorter and friendlier second concerto, entitled Fiddler on the Shore and composed in 2009, is an impressive contemplative poem celebrating the rituals of fiddle playing at sea in Orkney, Scotland. In France, prolific composer Darius Milhaud (1892–1974) penned four violin concertos in 1927, 1946, 1958, and 1965 respectively in addition to Concertino de Printemps (1934) and the Cinéma-Fantaisie après”Le boeuf sur le toit” (1919/rev. 1962). Of the four concertos, the second receives sporadic performances due to its charming, virtuosic, and well-conceived scoring, notwithstanding its closely Stravinsky-inspired outer movements and the ghost of George Gershwin making more than one appearance in the bluesy second movement. The short Concertino de Printemps (1934), 1 though, shows originality spiced with a pinch of Brazilian rhythmic zest. Finally, Cinéma-Fantaisies on themes from the ballet La boeuf sur le toit is a work of dazzling virtuosity originally intended to accompany a Charles Chaplin silent movie.

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This substantial, seventeen-minute work in one movement provided with a cadenza by Arthur Honegger is a very entertaining virtuoso piece deserving to be heard in concert more often. Jean Martinon (1910–1976), known for his conducting abilities, was also a very gifted composer with two violin concertos to his credit: Concerto giocoso written in 1937 and the second concerto composed in 1961, which turned out to be a work of considerable significance. Superbly written for the violin—the instrument Martinon played—it reveals a variety of compositional stylistic devices without sounding eclectic. It begins with a gesture inspired by Maurice Ravel’s 1930 lefthand piano concerto before proceeding through a personal exploration of forms of atonality applied to dramatic lyricism and rarefied sonorities. Also, this concerto is enhanced by one of the best cadenzas ever written. Henri Dutilleux (1916–2013) is another French composer of great reputation. His violin concerto L’arbre des songes was composed in 1985 and dedicated to Isaac Stern, who premiered it in Paris on November 5, 1985, at the Théâtre de Champs-Élisées with the Orchestre National de France conducted by Lorin Maazel. Dutilleux’s violin concerto comprises four sections and interludes forming a kaleidoscopically organized whole. Definitely a bravura concerto, Dutilleux’s work basks in exotic instrumental sonorities like the interplay between the solo violin and the oboe d’amore and the solo violin against a vast panoply of percussion instruments including a cimbalom. The last section, furthermore, presents the surprising effect of an orchestra tuning up as a prelude to a dreamy soundscape reminiscent of Szymanowski’s first violin concerto. In Spain, Joaquin Rodrigo (1901–1999), the composer universally known for his Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra (1939), was also the composer of a vast repertoire that included the Concierto de estío for violin and orchestra composed in 1943. In this elegant triptych (Preludio—Siciliana—Rondino), Rodrigo transfers to the violin plenty of Spanish/Arab sonorities garbed in neo-Classical forms. The second movement, Siciliana, is especially noticeable for its melodious sweetness and nostalgia for some faraway land. Faraway lands have always attracted Spaniards, not just conquistadores but musicians as well. Valls native Roberto Gerhard (1896–1970) moved to England in the late 1930s. There, in 1942–1943, he composed

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a majestic forty-seven-minute-long violin concerto, an important work conceived partially along Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system, albeit with a deliberate avoidance of dissonances. The second movement, Largo, lapses into romantic modes while the Finale, a ferocious tour de force of virtuosity, is rather eclectic in its decisively tonal language and juxtaposition of quotations, including a snippet of “La Marseillaise.” Like Britten, Gerhard’s concerto was intended to deliver a political message about the Spanish Civil War. Another Spaniard living abroad, Barcelona-born Leonardo Balada (b. 1933), now dividing his time between Spain and the United States, has written concertos for various instruments including the violin. His Concerto No. 1 composed in 1982 is a work built on beautifully interwoven allusions to ancient Catalan dances and long, ethereal melodies underscored by polytonality and “hallucinatory” avant-garde traits. Balada’s engaging violin concerto should be heard more than occasionally. Italy’s so-called Generation of the 1880s included composers Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936), Alfredo Casella (1883–1947), Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880–1968), and Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882–1973), all of whom wrote violin concertos of note. Respighi’s Concerto gregoriano, composed in 1922, deserves a stronger place in the repertoire. The composer’s penchant for old church modes and other archaic stylistic excursions resulted in a number of important chamber, solo, operatic, and orchestral works like Vetrate di chiesa (Church Windows) of 1926, which, although excellent, never reached the popularity of his “Roman” tone poems. The Concerto gregoriano for violin is Respighi’s best work of this creative phase. It possesses great appeal as the solo violin is treated with sumptuous virtuosity supported by a very colorful orchestration. The final movement, Alleluia, is a formidable show of solo/tutti juxtapositions that brings to mind passages, especially when the harp joins the solo violin, from the Scottish Fantasy of Max Bruch, a composer with whom Respighi studied. Casella’s violin concerto (1928) is a bit prolix, a neo-Classical work whose style oscillates between Stravinsky and Hindemith with a personal touch of Mediterranean breeze, which Casella displays in the central Adagio movement. Malipiero’s violin concerto, composed in 1932, presents unusual streaks of originality as the composer adopts Italian Renaissance-inspired secular melodic contours and rhythms cast in free form. In 1963, the octogenarian Malipiero wrote a second violin concer-

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to that reveals the composer’s interest toward serialism. In 1945, Ildebrando Pizzetti wrote a violin concerto that begins promisingly with a sweeping melodic wave on the G string, but, unfortunately, the balance of the concerto is hindered by involuted developments. On the lighter side, a surprising violin concerto came out of the pen of Venetian opera composer Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876–1948). In 1943, he wrote a virtuoso violin concerto for the American violinist Guila Bustabo, who championed it throughout Europe. Nowadays, Wolf-Ferrari’s work seems to be enjoying a revival at the hands of Austrian virtuoso Benjamin Schmid. Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–1975), the most consequential Italian composer of his generation, was acclaimed for his lyrical use of the twelvetone system. He did not compose a violin concerto but two fantasies for violin and orchestra on Giuseppe Tartini’s themes, which he called Tartiniana (1951) and Tartiniana seconda (1955–1956). Exquisitely crafted, these pieces show a personal style deserving a wider international exposure. Bruno Maderna (1920–1973), mainly known as a conductor, wrote in 1969 a violin concerto full of imaginative sound textures, self-quotations, and brilliant cadenzas. It is favorably received in avant-garde circles. Another atonal/serial composer of note is the Greek Nikos Skalkottas (1904–1949). A follower of Schoenberg, Skalkottas spent many years in Berlin, where in 1938 he composed a remarkable violin concerto. In Germany and Austria, lesser-known violin concertos follow various stylistic patterns, from the German post-Romantic legacy to Modernism, from Schoenberg’s serialism to the Darmstadt avant-garde and beyond. I consider four composers whose contributions to the genre are exemplary, beginning with Ernst Krenek (1900–1991). Krenek’s Violin Concerto No.1, Op. 29, composed in 1924, was dedicated to the violinist Alma Moodie, with whom the composer was madly in love. The relationship did not succeed, but the concerto remained as a fine product of the Weimar years; exquisitely bubbling, intimately lyrical, and tightly knitted, Krenek’s concerto would make a great companion piece to the concertos of Kurt Weill and Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 4 described in chapter 8. Krenek’s Violin Concerto No. 2, Op. 140, composed in 1954, is a ponderous atonal undertaking inspired more by Alban Berg than Schoenberg.

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Formidable symphonist Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905–1963) wrote in 1939 Musik der Trauer for violin and strings, later renamed Concerto funebre. This tragic—as implied by its title—work is a stupendously intense concerto, which because of its scoring is heard often in a chamber music context, thus preventing larger audiences from fully appreciate it. Nevertheless, Hartmann’s Concerto funebre is currently in the repertoire of many fine violinists. Paul Hindemith’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, composed in 1939, is one of the composer’s best essays of abstract orchestral music. Crystal-clear logic, gorgeously crafted melodic lines, use of quartal harmonies, and sunny orchestration are the characteristics of this concerto, a palate cleanser for violinists and audiences alike. Hindemith, often dismissed as a cold, academic composer, is all but in this violin concerto that stylistically reflects the unique inventiveness of its creator, including many soulful moments as proven by the interpretations of great violinists like David Oistrakh (1961) and Leonidas Kavakos (2001). Indeed, Hindemith’s violin concerto should be part of the standard repertoire. The highly influential German composer Hans Werner Henze (1926–2012) is credited with three violin concertos composed respectively in 1946, 1971, and 1997. Stylistic trends vary in these works; for instance, the earlier concerto written at age twenty is warmly atonal, delicately orchestrated, and tastefully nestled between Berg and Hindemith. The second concerto is in reality a theater piece scored for solo violinist, recorded tape, bass baritone, and thirty-three instrumentalists. Finally, the third concerto, although traditional in form, follows a programmatic path based on the characters of Esmeralda, Nepo, and Rudi from Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faust. The work comprises a series of long soliloquies replete with double stops of fourths and fifths generally of little interest to violinists. However, its concertante sections are embedded in fascinating harmonic and coloristic sonorities, which bring to mind Delius, Duke Ellington, and Wozzeck. Among German composers of the newer generations, Wolfgang Rihm (b. 1952) deserves special mention for his Gesungene Zeit, Musik für Violine und Orchester (1991–1992), written for and dedicated to Anne-Sophie Mutter. It is a highly conceptualized sound voyage in time and space. Long, unmetered notes alternate ear-piercing sounds to

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crashing chords that provoke frightening dynamics. The work, then, reaches a cathartic disintegration. Swiss born Ernest Bloch (1880–1959) was very fashionable at one time. Schelomo (1915–1916) for cello and orchestra, so full of Hebraic melodies, unfettered rhythms, augmented intervals, and dark instrumental colors, embodied the composer’s self portraiture as much as Don Quixote or Ein Heldenleben did for Richard Strauss. Bloch’s violin concerto, written in 1937–1938, is a grand-scale work unjustly neglected. Perhaps the time between the phenomenal violin masterpieces of Alban Berg, Béla Bartók, and Hindemith was not favorable to the acceptance of another heavyweight concerto. Bloch’s concerto is waiting for its turn despite its championship by violin luminaries like Szigeti, Menuhin, and, more recently, Zina Schiff (2006) and Elmar Oliveira (2007). Bloch’s is a violin concerto that cannot fail to move its listeners; thus, it should not be relegated to the forgotten works by an important yet neglected twentieth-century composer. It deserves better! Frank Martin (1890–1974), another Swiss composer, wrote in 1950–1951 a violin concerto of considerable proportion and importance. Its style shows originality in both the solo writing and orchestration within the confinements of late-Romantic trends and attempts at a personal brand of serialism. Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu (1890–1959) wrote two violin concertos. The one written in Paris in the early 1930s for Samuel Dushkin was a work of predictable neo-Classical stamp; the second was composed in the United States in 1943. This concerto, first performed by Misha Elman on December 31, 1943, was accorded ample acceptance as a sort of antidote to anything too modern. In fact, Martinu’s work, well written and pleasant, is a post-Dvorak nostalgic affair that gained the composer much credit for carrying on the great Czech musical tradition. That being said, though, an authentic Czech masterwork of the first half of the twentieth century is the violin concerto Leos Janacek (1854–1928) left unfinished in 1927. Subtitled The Wandering of a Little Soul, this unfinished piece includes only one movement, which was reconstructed in 1988 and performed thereafter. This highly original violin concerto fragment written by a truly great composer is drenched in the mysterious, passionate moods one encounters in the best pages of Janacek’s string quartets and operatic works.

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Erno von Dohnányi (1877–1960), the preeminent Hungarian piano virtuoso and composer contemporary of Béla Bartók, is known for his excellent compositions well grounded in the Brahms tradition. Two violin concertos of his appeared in 1915 and in 1949 bearing the last vestiges of Romanticism, inevitable perhaps in the first concerto, which shows a great deal of charm and youthful charge. The Violin Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 43, written when the composer lived in Florida, also contains beautiful pages and virtuoso passages that could engage an audience. However, this concerto sounds too nostalgic for 1949, a time when perhaps one would have expected from Dohnányi something along the lines of Strauss in his old age (see the second horn concerto composed in 1943 and the oboe concerto in 1945). Difficult as the task of moving past Bartók’s violin concerto may be, György Ligeti (1923–2006) succeeded in 1992 by presenting a violin concerto full of sonorities and gestures belonging to an imaginary world and yet preserving the unmistakable Transylvanian footprint. Divided in five short sections, Ligeti’s concerto for violin and twenty-three instruments fuses precious, repetitive sound patterns spanning piercing high notes and barely audible murmurs. His dependency on instrumental “extended techniques” is evident in long stretches of ancient chants and polyphonies mixed to jazzy moods, aquatic-like fast-moving sounds, static moments, and frantic rhythmical pulses, especially in the final portion of the concerto. Ligeti’s music has always captured the listener’s imagination since his 1966 galactic Lux Aeterna for sixteen solo singers was included by Stanley Kubrick in the soundtrack of the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. This very imaginative violin concerto should fare well in live performance. Three violin concertos from the Soviet era beg for reevaluation and eventual entrance or reentrance into the current repertoire. Nikolay Miaskovsky (1881–1950), the ultraprolific symphonist, wrote his violin concerto in 1938. This work of Wagnerian proportion distinguishes itself from much Soviet music of the period. It contains transparent pages of unusual beauty and a rhythmical piquancy one would not expect to find in a composer known for his perfunctory attitude. Aram Katchaturian (1903–1978), the author of unforgettable ballet music, wrote a violin concerto in 1940, which, once premiered by David Oistrakh, became instantly an international success and held its place in the repertoire for decades. Now, the Katchaturian is performed occasional-

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ly, shining with seductive tunes, repetitive patterns, and shifting harmonic blocks that resemble somehow a minimalist work. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in C-sharp minor, Op. 129 was written in 1967, the year that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Revolution. David Oistrakh premiered it at the October’s Soviet Music Week in Moscow. Shostakovich’s second violin concerto cannot be compared with his mighty first on any grounds, yet it is a work of distinction for its driving rhythms, meditative Adagio, aggressive cadenzas, and magisterial use of the solo French horn in a co-protagonist role throughout the piece. This concerto deserves to be heard more often. Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998) composed four violin concertos in 1957, 1966, 1978, and 1982. Of interest to this survey are the third and fourth, which reflect the historical perestroika time that brought so many changes to Soviet culture. Schnittke was an unabashed visionary determined to have his voice heard especially in the West. The third violin concerto is a harsh, delirium-riddled work flirting with microtonality mixed with strains of music of the past. The fourth concerto, on the other hand, is a more pleasant composition in which exciting eclecticism, transfixion, and obsession with expressionism give way to dreamy sonorities, tonal moments of serenity, and plenty of exotic orchestral timbres. Sofia Gubaidulina, born in Chistopol, Tatarstan, in 1931, is the composer of a violin concerto called in tempus praesens and dedicated to Anne-Sophie Mutter. The work, completed in 2007 and first performed by the dedicatee in Lucerne the same year, is a masterpiece of dark, relentless intensity. Brahmsian in the treatment of the solo violin, Gubaidulina’s concerto lets the violin play passages of exquisite tenderness as well as whimsical fleeting moments before plunging again into abyssal sonorities. Absolutely tremendous is the cadenza accompagnata just preceding a more standardized solo cadenza. The orchestration is at its best with low brass instruments and tam-tams’ reverberation, especially remarkable toward the apocalyptic ending. No question that this concerto is one of the best pieces of music composed in the past decade. Polish composer Karol Szymanowski made history in 1916 with his first violin concerto (see chapter 7). With his second violin concerto, also written for Paul Kochansky in 1933, the composer curbed the exoticism of the earlier concerto in favor of more formal cohesiveness. The results were mixed as the new concerto entered in the middle 1930s an

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arena crowded with works wishing to assert themselves in the name of Modernism. In 1937, Grazyna Becewicz (1909–1969), a composer deserving utmost attention outside of her native Poland, began creating a series of seven violin concertos that culminated in 1965. These are very interesting works sampling neo-Classical, French-influenced nuances in the first concerto and avant-garde trends in the last. Witold Lutoslawski (1913–1994) composed Chain II, dialogue for violin and orchestra in 1984–1985, followed in 1988 by Partita for violin and orchestra and an unfinished violin concerto (1994). The well-appreciated Chain II consists of several short movements bearing surrealistic characteristics, suggestive dynamic gestures, and engaging passages. The severe Partita is perhaps less engaging than Chain II but as superbly crafted and orchestrated as all compositions by this important composer. Krzysztof Penderecki (b.1933), hailed as Poland’s greatest living composer, is the author of two violin concertos, the first of which, dated 1976, was dedicated to Isaac Stern. It is an ominous, aggressive, roaring concerto full of massive sonorities and drama of catastrophic proportions. Cast in one movement, this almost forty-minute colossal work is one of the most technically challenging violin concertos ever composed. The second concerto, subtitled Metamorphosen, was composed in 1992–1995 and dedicated to Anne-Sophie Mutter. Also cast in one movement and of the same duration as its predecessor, Penderecki’s second concerto is Shostakovich inspired (the Nocturne and Passacaglia from the first violin concerto); generally tenebrous in character, it becomes, at times, quasi-Romantic in the great German tradition. Rhythmically square, this concerto moves at a slow to moderate pace and is endowed by a huge solo cadenza. Penderecki’s two violin concertos are important milestones in the history of the genre. Sweden has produced a good number of modern composers among whom Allan Petterson (1911–1980) deserves a special mention. He is the creator of extravagant works of large dimensions including two violin concertos. The concerto for violin and string quartet, written in 1949, is a rather angular and strident affair belonging to the chamber music realm, and the second violin concerto was composed for and dedicated to Ida Haendel in 1977–1978. This fifty-five-minute work is legendary for its intimidating one-movement pandemonium-like struc-

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ture. The solo violin, most of the time sounding like an obbligato among the many voices emerging simultaneously from the orchestra, is assigned pages of great Romantic reflexivity and significant moments of popularesque, pastoral beauty. The concerto’s gem, though, is to be found in its very engaging last ten minutes. They consist of a sort of religious hymn with variations sustained by a Bolero rhythm and carried on by a Mahler-inspired melodic sweep. In Finland, renowned conductor/composer Esa-Pekka Salonen (b.1958) presented in 2009 a violin concerto of stupendous craftsmanship. Composed for and dedicated to Leila Josefowicz, this is a dream of a contemporary violin concerto. Fantastically written for the violin and extrovertly orchestrated, Salonen’s four-movement piece ushers in a new kind of Impressionism. If Claude Debussy would have lived longer, he could have written this work, so much so that the French composer’s shadow hovers over this concerto without, however, taking anything away from Salonen’s originality. In fact, it enhances it. Latin American composers who wrote violin concertos of merit I wish to mention are Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959), Argentinean Alberto Ginastera (1916–1983), Mexicans Carlos Chávez (1899–1978) and Manuel Ponce (1882–1948), and the Panamanian Roque Cordero (1917–2008). Villa-Lobos’s Fantasia de movimentos mistos for violin and orchestra, the prolific composer’s only attempt at writing a violin concerto, was composed in 1921. The work never caught up with violinists except in Brazil and even there only on sporadic occasions. In the early 1920s, Villa-Lobos was too preoccupied with Modernism, thus his Fantasia de movimentos mistos suffered from lack of spontaneity and overelaboration. It is stylistically removed from the tuneful and colorful music of Villa-Lobos so appreciated worldwide. Celebrated violinist Henryk Szering became a naturalized Mexican citizen in 1946 and a fervent promoter of the violin concertos of Mexican composers Carlos Chávez and his pupil Manuel Ponce. Chávez’s concerto, composed in 1948–1950, is a rhythmically strong, jagged work yet pervaded by lyrical atonality. Ponce’s concerto from 1943 is a much gentler, melodious work reflecting a subtle Spanish influence. Roque Cordero’s concerto, composed in the 1960s, is an outstanding example of twelve-tone writing applied to a sensitively lyrical work for the violin. It was chronologically preceded by Ginastera’s violin concer-

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to, composed and dedicated to Ruggiero Ricci in 1963. This is an enormously difficult undertaking, a sort of hypertextual homage to Paganini not devoid of interesting pages. Very few violinists have played this concerto besides Ricci. American composers have written and continue to write music in a variety of idioms that reflect not only the vastness of the land but its ethnic and cultural confluences as well. I begin with some violin concertos written by composers born during the time of Dvorak’s American sojourn, a crucial event in American music history that stimulated the search for an ideal American musical idiom or a fusion of idioms thereof. Walter Piston (1894–1976), a deacon-like figure among American composers and a Harvard professor, was the author of two violin concertos and a Fantasia for violin and orchestra. Concerto No. 1, written in 1939, was dedicated to violinist Ruth Posselt. A model of craftsmanship and proportions, Piston’s work distinguishes itself for its elegant melodic flare and rhythmic vitality, especially in the last movement, an unabashed homage to the Gershwin of An American in Paris with a dash of Habanera rhythm. The second concerto, composed in 1960 for Joseph Fuchs, is a more substantial work built around the second movement, a poetic adagio that recalls Walton in his best dreamy moments. Coincidentally, Piston wrote in 1957 an outstanding viola concerto to rival Walton’s for best place in that instrument’s scarce repertoire. Piston’s style, notoriously conservative, took a sharp turn in 1973 with the exquisitely Berg-inspired Fantasia for violin and orchestra written for and premiered by Italian virtuoso Salvatore Accardo. Roger Sessions (1896–1985), another great American academician, Princeton this time, composed his violin concerto in 1935. Louis Krasner and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos premiered it in 1947. Sessions’s concerto, a work of large proportions structured in four movements, is musically very complex, very difficult to perform, and not particularly accessible audience wise. Nevertheless, excellent violinists have taken on the challenge to make this deserving work appreciated by more than specialized groups of people. Roy Harris (1898–1979), on the other hand, intended to write a concerto with a distinct American popular flavor and he did so in 1949. Harris’s contribution to the violin concerto repertoire is an openly spa-

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cious and contemplative work based on plain harmonic language and rhythmical patterns that suggest country-fiddling gestures much influenced by Copland. Elliot Carter (1908–2012) wrote his violin concerto at the age of eighty-two for Norwegian violinist Ole Bøhn, who premiered it with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Herbert Bloomstedt on May 2, 1990. Carter’s concerto is the product of one of the most important composers of the twentieth century; however, in terms of violin concerto repertoire, it is more complex, more difficult, and even more impenetrable than its model, the concerto of Arnold Schoenberg. William Schuman (1910–1992), great American composer and revered personality in the music world, worked on his violin concerto for about fourteen years. He started it in 1946 as a commission from Samuel Dushkin, but it was Isaac Stern who premiered it in 1950 with the Boston Symphony conducted by Charles Munch. Then, the composer reworked the concerto in 1954 and in 1957–1958. Schuman’s piece, a work of great intensity demanding from the soloist extreme technical prowess and physical endurance, deserves more than the occasional performance like many other works by this extraordinary composer. Gian Carlo Menotti (1911–2007), the very successful Italian American opera composer, wrote a violin concerto in 1951 that was promptly performed on December 5, 1952, by famous violinist Efrem Zimbalist and the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy. Conservatively conceived, Menotti’s concerto is very pleasant, virtuosic, and a sure hit with audiences the rare times it is performed in concert. George Rochberg (1918–2005), esteemed serialist turned tonal, composed his violin concerto in 1974 for Isaac Stern, who premiered it the same year with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra conducted by Donald Johanos. Rochberg’s concerto is a work of enormous proportions lasting some fifty-two minutes and filled with gorgeous passages bearing more than a streak of Bernard Herrmann’s famous film scores, cadenzas, and a wealth of instrumental situations. Isaac Stern made this concerto successful with audiences by performing the composer-approved version shortened by some fourteen minutes. Nowadays, the work has been restored to its original length and is enjoying a recording revival.

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Another concerto championed by Isaac Stern was the Serenade for solo violin, string, harp, and percussion by Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990). Composed in 1954 and premiered in September of the same year in Venice by Isaac Stern and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the composer, the Serenade, in effect a concerto in five movements, was inspired by Plato’s “Symposium,” thus offering the versatile composer plenty of characteristic opportunities as great melodic turns of phrase, engaging structural counterpoint enhanced by jazzy rhythms, masterly use of string scoring, and outstanding writing for the solo violin converge in this American violin concerto of singular value. The violin concerto by Benjamin Lees (1924–2010), composed in 1958 and premiered by Henryk Szeryng with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf conducting, on February 8, 1962, is a demanding, severe work, which besides Szeryng’s did enjoy the championship of violin virtuosi like Ruggiero Ricci and Elmar Oliveira, who recorded it in 1976 and 2008 respectively. Among the American living composers, I have selected those whose contributions to the violin concerto as a genre appear particularly relevant. Again, I wish to remind the reader that mine is a selection based on personal taste and listening opportunities. Others may offer entirely different points of view, which may only expand the scope of this book. John Corigliano (b.1938), the once child prodigy composer son of concert violinist and New York Philharmonic’s concertmaster (1948–1966) John Corigliano Sr., wrote a formidable soundtrack for the movie The Red Violin (François Girard, 1998), for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Score. The bulk of that soundtrack consisted of a Chaconne for violin and orchestra played by Joshua Bell. Extracted from the film, Corigliano’s seventeen-minute-long Chaconne was very well received on the concert stage and in the recording world. In 2003, Corigliano composed three movements, Pianissimo Scherzo, Andante flautando, and Accellerando Finale, that added to the preexisting Chaconne, forming the Concerto for violin and orchestra (“The Red Violin”). Joshua Bell and the Baltimore Symphony conducted by Marin Alsop premiered this concerto, which was dedicated to the memory of John Corigliano Sr., on September 19, 2003. This work’s outstanding virtuosity, inventiveness, and great audience appeal is becoming another Korngold phenomenon.

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Ellen Taafe Zwilich (b.1939), a professional violinist for a number of years, composed her violin concerto upon a commission from Carnegie Hall. Pamela Frank premiered the work in 1998 with the Orchestra of St. Luke conducted by Hugh Wolff. This is a concerto of great possibilities showing an ample, lyrical first movement followed by a genial, bluesy meditation on Bach’s Chaconne. The third movement, on the other hand, appears to be a collage of fragments inspired by Prokofiev, Copland, and Shostakovich that drowns Taafe Zwilich’s own voice until it finally reemerges lyrically and colorfully in the last pages of the concerto. John Adams (b.1947) also indulges in a chaconne. In fact, his violin concerto of 1993 contains a chaconne as its central movement, an anemic affair that may remind the listener that Shostakovich and Sibelius had been there first. The first movement, a busy, sound-filled orchestral backdrop, lets the solo violin muse about melodic and rhythmical gestures already known from Berg, Schoenberg, and anyone also crossing Adams’s interests, including Philip Glass. The Finale consists of a perpetual motion—an obvious choice for a minimalist—bearing some touches of a very “un-deviled” Stravinskian Histoire. Neo-traditionalist composer Christopher Rouse (b. 1949) penned in 1991 a violin concerto inspired by Béla Bartók’s 1908 violin concerto in two movements. So, like Bartók’s, Rouse’s concerto is in effect a twenty-minute rhapsody based on old-fashioned violinistic grand gestures bolstered by often impetuous and very effective orchestral interventions. In general though, someone like Bohuslav Martinu, whose style was already antiquated in his days, could have written this pleasant work. Rouse’s concerto was composed for Cho-Liang Lin, who has fervently championed it. On a different note, and moving back in time ten years from Rouse’s work, I encountered an original American violin concerto composed by twenty-three-year-old Tobias Picker (b. 1954). A concerto of great promises, fragmented as Delius’s music very often is, Picker does not develop his wonderful ideas to satisfaction. However, he leaves room for the interpreter to supply the necessary nuances and tempo changes and to emphasize the many subtleties scattered throughout the score. Curtis Institute of Music’s professor Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962) was the 2008 recipient of a commission from multiple orchestras (Indianapolis, Toronto, Baltimore) and Curtis to compose a violin concerto for

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Hilary Hahn. The concerto was premiered in Indianapolis on February 6, 2009, and in 2010 the composer won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. So Higdon’s violin concerto was launched under the best auspices. Jennifer Higdon is a very gifted composer and a very knowledgeable scholar of modern music, thus illustrious ghosts of the past make appearances throughout her concerto as in a clever game of guess who. Prokofiev tips his hat in the elaborate first movement while Ravel, Vaughn Williams, Respighi, and Malipiero take turns in praising Higdon in the extended Chaconni (another chaconne after Taafe Zwilich, Adams, and Corigliano?), pronouncing her a sort of neo-archaic fellow. The Finale, entitled Fly Forward, suffers a bit from the Barber syndrome, something short and fast to complement the previous two substantial bodies of work. Mason Bates (b. 1977) wrote his violin concerto in 2012 as a commissioned work from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, who premiered it in Pittsburgh on December 7 of that year with Leonard Slatkin conducting. Bates’s concerto is a very graceful, light, virtuosic, transparently orchestrated work whose three movements allude to a mannerist exoticism of The Butterfly Lovers Concerto (1959) type packed with repeating rhythmic patterns and sensitive melodies. In fact, the concerto’s lovely opening tune is heard throughout the piece like a leitmotif which becomes particularly effective in its last sortie at the concerto’s end, a reminder perhaps of the proverbial eleven o’clock song that saves the Broadway show. Will it save Bates’s concerto from sinking into oblivion, though? If not, the song alone may be remembered for years to come, not a small achievement for a young composer.

AFTERTHOUGHTS Three centuries of Western music history have shown the violin concerto to be one of the most beloved genres. The drama of contrast between the strength of one body of sound and another—the struggle of the individual against the masses rendered even more poignant by the distinctiveness separating the “gifted” solo virtuoso from the “less gifted” orchestral tutti players—gives the concerto an existential dimension of considerable proportions.

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Antonio Vivaldi, whose name began this book’s narrative, was the first undisputed master to exploit the drama of contrast embedded in the violin concerto. He solidified the perfect formula that allowed him to compose the same concerto seven hundred times, Igor Stravinsky jokingly remarked. Vivaldi basked in the success of his works and capitalized on their diffusion across Europe. To the intrinsic drama of contrast characterizing the music of The Four Seasons, Vivaldi added a highly programmatic literary text that turned the set into the most performed piece of music ever. Some living composers have celebrated Vivaldi’s achievements by writing sequels or companion pieces to the Seasons and, by doing so, returning the violin concerto to its origins in an attempt, perhaps, to alleviate it from the weight of history and its anxieties. The Vivaldi-inspired works by Leonid Desyatnikov (b. 1955) and Philip Glass (b. 1937) bring this book to conclusion. Upon a request by Latvian violin virtuoso Gideon Kremer to compose a companion piece to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Russian composer Leonid Desyatnikov complied in the late 1990s by transcribing for violin and strings the Cuatro Estanciones Porteñas, four movements composed between 1965 and 1970 by Argentine bandoneón virtuoso Astor Piazzolla. Piazzolla scored his work for a traditional tango quintet of bandoneón, violin, piano, electric guitar, and double bass. Desyatnikov’s arrangement of Piazzolla’s beloved emotional portraits of the passing of the seasons in Buenos Aires was orchestrated to suit the repertoire of Gideon Kremer and his Kremerata Baltica. Desyatnikov’s work is excellently executed, preserving Piazzolla’s spirit while alluding with tongue in cheek to Vivaldi’s music, which brings a touch of humor to Piazzolla’s nostalgic sentimentality and sultry harmonies. The wide success accorded to the Piazzolla transcriptions encouraged Desyatnikov to compose in the year 2000 The Russian Seasons, a set of four concertos for violin, soprano, and string orchestra also written for Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica with soprano Julia Korpacheva. More formally associated with the Vivaldi model than the Estanciones, The Russian Seasons assigns three movements or songs to each season or, better, to the rituals of the Orthodox Church year. The composer alternates instrumental and vocal solos built upon the narrative of Russian ancient tales and folk melodies. Desyatnikov’s music is beautifully crafted and eclectic, resembling, without direct quotes, the styles

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of many composers from Bach to Berg to Arvo Pärt. Desyatnikov’s idea to include a sung text in his Seasons is closer to Vivaldi’s supposedly declaimed sonnets accompanying his Four Seasons. Philip Glass’s sonic and rhythmical formularies clearly underscore the predictability of modern city life and Vivaldi’s obsession with the luminous unpredictability of life in his native Venice. Of the two concertos dedicated to the violin in 1987 and 2009, Glass scored the second concerto for solo violin, strings, and synthesizer and entitled it The American Four Seasons, an obvious homage to the Venetian composer. Glass attached no poetry or program to his score, leaving the seasonal sequence of the work’s four sections to the imagination of performers and listeners. The results provide the listener with therapeutically induced feelings of liberation from hundreds of years of musical anxieties and the desire to search for luminosity within oneself. So much can a few chord progressions, simple melodic lines, and basic rhythms achieve.

NOTES

1. IN THE BAROQUE 1. The reader should be informed that the acronym BWV stands for BachWerke-Verzeichnis, the number system identifying compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach. RV stands for Ryom-Verseichnis, the standardized catalog of the music of Antonio Vivaldi created by Peter Ryom.

2. MOZART—HAYDN—BRUNETTI—TOMASINI 1. The letter K followed by a number indicates the chronological order of composition assigned to Mozart’s works by Ludwig Ritter von Köchel.

3. VIOTTI AND BEETHOVEN 1. WoO stands for Werke ohne Opuszahi (works without opus number) according to the catalogue of Beethoven’s works prepared by Georg Kinsky and Hans Halm in 1955.

9. BARBER AND KORNGOLD, SHOSTAKOVICH AND . . . SCHOENBERG 1. Samuel Barber in a letter to William Strickland dated August 14, 1940. 171

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2. CD 5, Tracks 6–8. Samuel Barber. Historical Recordings 1935–1960. West Hill Radio Archives (CD-6 039), 2011. 3. Erich Wolfgang Korngold in the program book of the St. Louis Symphony, February 15, 1947.

10. MUSIC WITHOUT ANXIETIES 1. Concertino de Printemps became later part of Milhaud’s Les quatre saisons, a cycle of four concertinos comprising Concertino d’Été (1951) for viola and nine instruments, Concertino d’Automne (1951) for two pianos and eight instruments, and Concertino d’Hiver (1953) for trombone and strings.

SELECTED READING

Albright, Daniel. Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. Edited and with a commentary by Daniel Albright. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Brown, Clive. Classical & Romantic Performing Practice 1750–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Carroll, Brendan G. The Last Prodigy: A Biography of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1997. Clapham, John. “Dvorak’s Relations with Brahms and Hanslick.” The Musical Quarterly 57, no. 2 (April 1971): 241–54. Clement, Franz. Violin Concerto in D Major (1805). Edited by Clive Brown. Middleton, WI: A-R Editions, vii–xii. Cooper, David. Béla Bartók. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. Everett, Paul. The Four Seasons and Other Concertos Op. 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Everett, Paul, and Michael Talbott. Critical Edition of Vivaldi’s Le Quattro stagioni/The Four Seasons. San Giuliano Milanese, Italy: Universal Music Publishing Ricordi S.r.l., 1996. Feisst, Sabine. Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Fifield, Christopher. Max Bruch: His Life and Works. New York: George Braziller, 1988. Goss, Glenda Dawn. Sibelius: A Composer’s Life and the Awakening of Finland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Halliwell, Ruth. The Mozart Family: Four Lives in a Social Context. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Heyman, Barbara B. Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Joseph, Charles M. Stravinsky Inside Out. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Kennedy, Michael. The Life of Elgar. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Krasner, Louis. “Some Memories of Anton Webern, the Berg Concerto and Vienna in the 1930s (as told to Don C. Seibert).” Fanfare (Nov./Dec. 1987): 335–47. Plantinga, Leon. Beethoven’s Concertos: History, Style, Performance. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999. Pople, Antony. Berg: Violin Concerto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Rosselli, John. The Life of Mozart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Schoenbaum, David. The Violin: A Social History of the World’s Most Versatile Instrument. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.

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SELECTED REA DING

Schwarz, Boris. “Beethoven and the French Violin School.” The Musical Quarterly 44, no. 4 (October 1958): 431–47. ———. “Joseph Joachim and the Genesis of Brahms’s Violin Concerto.” The Musical Quarterly 69, no. 4 (Autumn,1983): 503–26. ———. Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia. Enlarged Edition, 1917–1981. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Steinberg, Michael. The Concerto: A Listener’s Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Stowell, Robin. Beethoven: Violin Concerto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Swafford, Jan. Johannes Brahms: A Biography. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. ———. Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014. Talbott, Michael. Venetian Music in the Age of Vivaldi. Aldershot, Great Britain: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 1999. White, Chappell. From Vivaldi to Viotti: A History of the Early Classical Violin Concerto. Philadelphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992. Wolff, Christoph. Bach: Essays on His Life and Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Zaslaw, Neal. “Concertos for Strings.” In The Compleat Mozart: Guide to the Musical Works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 135–47. New York: Norton, 1990.

SELECTED LISTENING

Baroque Vivaldi. Concertos Le quattro stagioni. Virtuosi di Roma/Renato Fasano. Recorded in 1960. EMI Classics, 1995. USA Vivaldi. L’Estro Armonico, Op. 3. Virtuosi di Roma/Renato Fasano. Recorded in 1961. EMI Classics, 1996 (2 CDs). USA Vivaldi. Le quattro stagioni. L’Europa Galante/Fabio Biondi. Opus 111, 1991. France Vivaldi. L’Estro Armonico, 12 Concertos Op. 3. L’Europa Galante/Fabio Biondi. Virgin Classics, 1998 (2 CDs). USA Sinkovsky Plays & Sings Vivaldi. La voce strumentale/Dmitry Sinkovsky, violin, countertenor, and conductor. Naïve, 2014. Germany Bach. Complete Harpsichord Concertos. The English Concert/Pinnock, Gilbert, Kraemer, Mortensen. Recorded in 1981. Archiv Production (3 CDs). USA Janine Jansen—Bach Concertos. Janine Jansen & Friends. Decca, 2013. USA Mozart. Violin Concertos (Complete). Arthur Grumiaux, violin, Arrigo Pelliccia, viola, London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Colin David and New Philharmonia Orchestra/Raymond Leppard. Recorded in 1962, 1965, 1967. Philips Classics Productions (2 CDs), 1993. USA Beethoven. Violin Concerto—Viotti. Violin Concerto No. 22. Arthur Grumiaux, violin, New Philharmonia Orchestra/Alceo Galliera and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/Edo de Waart. Recorded in 1966 and 1970. Philips/Eloquence, 2005. Australia Beethoven & Clement Violin Concertos. Rachel Barton Pine, violin, and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Josè Serebrier. Cedille, 2008. USA Paganini. The 6 Violin Concertos. Salvatore Accardo, violin, and London Philharmonic Orchestra/Charles Dutoit. Recorded in 1974. Deutsche Grammophon (3 CDs), 1988. Germany Janine Jansen—Mendelssohn and Bruch. Concertos and Romance. Janine Jansen, violin and viola/Gewandhausorchester/Riccardo Chailly. Decca, 2006. UK Henryk Szering—Schumann. Violin Concerto in D Minor and Mendelssohn. Violin Concerto in E Minor. London Symphony Orchestra/Antal Dorati. Recorded in 1963. Mercury, 1994. USA Bruch—The Complete Violin Concertos/Scottish Fantasy. Salvatore Accardo, violin, and Gewandhauseorchester/Kurt Masur. Recorded in 1977, 1978, 1979. Philips Classics, 1998. USA Karel Ancerl Gold Edition, volume 8—Dvorak. Violin Concerto, Romance and Josef Suk. Fantasy. Josef Suk, violin, and the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/Karel Ancerl. Recorded in 1960, 1961, 1965. Supraphone, 2002. Czech Republic

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SELECTED LISTENING

Anne-Sophie Mutter. Brahms. Violinkonzert—Schumann. Fantasie Op. 131. Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin, and New York Philharmonic/Kurt Masur. Deutsche Grammophon, 1997. Germany Rachel Barton Pine. Brahms and Joachim Violin Concertos. Rachel Barton Pine, violin, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Carlos Kalmar. Cedille, 2002. USA Lalo—Saint-Saens—Chausson—Massenet—Ravel—Sarasate—Ysaye. Violin Concertos and Virtuoso Showpieces. Joshua Bell, violin, and Orchestre symphonique de Montréal/Charles Dutoit and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Andrew Litton. Decca (2 CDs), 1991. UK Oistrakh/Ormandy—The Philadelphia Orchestra—Tchaikovsky/Sibelius Violin Concertos. David Oistrakh, violin, The Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy. Recorded in 1959. Sony Classical, 2011. EU Brahms. Double Concerto, Bruch. Scottish Fantasy, Glazunov. Violin Concerto in A minor. Jascha Heifetz, violin, Emanuel Feurmann, cello, and London Philharmonic Orchestra/John Barbirolli, RCA Victor Orchestra/William Steinberg, Philadelphia Orchestra/ Eugene Ormandy. Recorded in 1939, 1947, 1934. Naxos, 2000. Germany Elgar Violin Concerto. Gil Shaham, violin, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra/David Zinman. Canary Classics, 2007. USA Reger Violin Concerto—Chaconne. Benjamin Schmid, violin, and Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra/Hannu Lintu. Ondine, 2012, Germany Nicola Benedetti—Szymanowski, Chausson, Saint-Saens. Nicola Benedetti, violin, and London Symphony Orchestra/Daniel Harding. Deutsche Grammophon, 2005, Germany Delius. Double Concerto—Violin Concerto—Cello Concerto. Tasmin Little, violin. Paul Watkins, cello, and BBC Symphony Orchestra/Sir Andrew David. Chandos, 2011, UK Prokofiev—Gruenberg Violin Concertos. Jascha Heifetz, violin, and Boston Symphony Orchestra/Serge Koussevitzky and San Francisco Symphony Orchestra/Pierre Monteux. Recorded in 1937 and 1945. Naxos, 2000. USA Alban Berg—Igor Stravinsky Violin Concertos and Ravel Tzigane. Itzhak Perlman, violin, and Boston Symphony Orchestra/Seiji Osawa and New York Philharmonic/Zubin Methta. Recorded in 1980 and 1987 (Ravel). Deutsche Grammophon, 1987. Germany Anne-Sophie Mutter. Berg. Violinkonzert and Rihm. Gesungene Zeit. Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra/James Levine. Deutsche Grammophon, 1992. Germany Bartók. Violin Concerto No. 2 and Rhapsodies Nos. 1 & 2. Gil Shaham, violin, and Chicago Symphony Orchestra/Pierre Boulez. Deutsche Grammophon, 1999. Germany Bartók / Eötvös / Ligeti. Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin, and Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and Ensemble Modern/Peter Eötvös. Naïve, 2012. France Shostakovich. Violin Concerto, Op. 99—Cello Concerto, Op. 107. David Oistrakh, violin, and New York Philharmonic/Dimitri Mitropoulos—Mstislav Rostropovich, cello, and Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy. Recorded in 1956 and 1960. Sony Classics, 1998. USA Barber—Korngold Violin Concertos. Gil Shaham, violin, and London Symphony Orchestra/André Previs. Deutsche Grammophon, 1994. Germany Schoenberg—Sibelius Violin Concertos. Hilary Hahn, violin, and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra/Esa-Pekka Salonen. Deutsche Grammophon, 2008. Germany

INDEX OF NAMES

Accardo, Salvatore, 52, 164 Adams, John, 167, 168 Alday, Paul, 39 Alsop, Marin, 166 Anger, Moric, 84 Ansermet, Ernest, 117 Anzoletti, Marco, 52 Arbós, Enrique Fernández, 122 Auer, Leopold, 88, 106 Autretter (family), 26 Ayo, Felix, 9 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22 Bach, Johann Christian, 16 Bach, Johann Christoph, 16 Bach, Johann Sebastian, x, xvi, 3, 5, 6, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 62, 63, 105, 116, 128, 129, 167, 170, 171n1 Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann, 18 Baillot, Pierre, 39, 44, 46, 56 Balada, Leonardo, 156 Barber, Samuel, xviii, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 168, 171n1 Barbirolli, John, 154 Barenboim, Daniel, 150 Barenboim, Michael, 150 Bartók, Bela, x, xviii, 107, 108, 115, 116, 119, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 138, 146, 159, 160, 167 Bates, Mason, 168

Baudelaire, Charles, 124 Bazzini, Antonio, 57, 110 Becewicz, Grazyna, 162 Beethoven, Ludwig van, x, xvii, 31, 37, 39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 57, 62, 63, 64, 81, 92, 122, 140, 171n1 Bell, Joshua, 166 Berg, Alban, xviii, 116, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 134, 157, 158, 159, 167, 170 Beriot, Charles de, 56, 57 Berlioz, Hector, 76 Bernstein, Leonard, 10, 144, 166 Berri, Pietro, 52 Biber, Heinrich Ignaz Franz, 6 Bigot, Marie, 43 Bizet, George, 91 Bliss, Artur, 153, 154 Blitzstein, Mark, 138 Bloch, Ernest, 145, 159 Bloomstedt, Herbert, 165 Böhm, Karl, 67 Bøhn, Ole, 165 Borghi, Luigi, 22 Bottesini, Giovanni, 52 Boulez, Pierre, 111 Brahms, Johannes, x, xvii, 37, 39, 63, 66, 68, 70, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 95, 98, 99, 101, 140, 147, 150, 154, 160 Brecht, Berthold, 116 Breuning, Julie von, 43 177

178

Breuning, Stephen von, 43 Briselli, Iso, 138, 139 Britten, Benjamin, 153, 154, 156 Brodsky, Adolf, 88 Brosa, Antonio, 154 Brown, Clive, 41 Bruch, Ewald, 69 Bruch, Max, x, xvii, 40, 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 85, 90, 91, 92, 99, 104, 156 Bruckner, Anton, 63 Brunetti, Antonio, 23, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 Bull, Ole, 56 Burmester, Carl Adolf Wilhelm (Willy), 103 Busch, Adolf, 95 Busch, Fritz, 135 Busoni, Ferruccio, 81, 92 Bustabo, Guila, 157 Campoli, Alfredo, 9, 154 Cannabich, Christian, 22 Cantelli, Guido, 9 Carmirelli, Pina, 147 Carter, Elliot, 165 Cartier, Jean-Baptist, 39 Casadesus, Henri, 34 Casadesus, Marius, 34 Casella, Alfredo, 5, 156 Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Mario, 145, 146 Ceccarelli, Francesco, 33 Celoniat, Antonio, 38 Chaplin, Charles, 154 Chausson, Ernest, 98, 111 Chávez, Carlos, 163 Cherubini, Luigi, 38, 39 Chinnerys, Margaret, 39 Chinnerys, William, 39 Clement, Franz, xvii, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46 Clementi, Muzio, 38, 43 Colloredo, Hieronymus, Count (Archbishop), 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 33 Copland, Aaron, 165, 167 Cordero, Roque, 163 Corelli, Arcangelo, 3, 38 Corigliano, John Jr., 166, 168 Corigliano, John Sr., 10, 166 Couperin, François, 4 Crosby, George, 54

INDEX OF NA MES

Curtis Box, Mary Louise, 138 Dacci, Giusto, 51, 52 Dallapiccola, Luigi, 157 Darrieux, Marcel, 110 Davaux, Jean-Baptist, 23 David, Ferdinand, xvii, 49, 60, 64, 65, 75, 79 Davidov, Vladimir Lvovich “Bob”, 87 Davies, Peter Maxwell, 153, 154 Davis, Bette, 143 Debussy, Claude, 111, 115, 163 Delius, Frederick, 109, 112, 113, 158, 167 Desyatnikov, Leonid, 169, 170 Dittersdorf, Carl Ditters von, 22 Dohnányi, Erno von, 160 Dragonetti, Domenico, 38 Durazzo, Giacomo, 4 Durazzo, Giuseppe Marcello, 4 Dushkin, Samuel, 117, 118, 135, 159, 165 Dutilleux, Henri, 155 Dvorak, Antonin, 70, 82, 83, 84, 85, 159, 164 Edge, W. Sr., 54 Ehrenburg, Elya, 146 Einstein, Albert, 37 Einstein, Alfred, 37 Elgar, Edward, xviii, 95, 99, 100, 101, 113, 154 Ellington, Duke, 158 Elman, Misha, 159 Elvers, Rudolf, 64 Ernst, Heinrich Wilhelm, 56 Esterhazi (family), 35 Estreicher, Karol, 64 Everett, Paul, 7, 8 Fasano, Renato, 6, 9 Fazer, Konrad, 103 Fazer, Naema, 103 Fels, Samuel, 138 Ferrari, Domenico, 5, 22 Fifield, Christopher, 73, 92 Finzi, Gerald, 153 Fiorillo, Federico, 49 Fischer, Wilfried, 41 Fisher, Johann, 8 Flager Cary, Mary, 73, 74

I N DE X OF N AM E S

Flesch, Carl, 95, 99 Flynn, Errol, 143, 145 Foá, Mauro, 4 Foá, Roberto, 4 Foss, Lukas, 138 Frank, Pamela, 167 Franzoni, Romeo, 51, 52 Frederick Augustus II, Elector of of Saxony, 2 Frederick II, King of Prussia (the Great), 22 Fuchs, Joseph, 164 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 62 Gallini, Natale, 52 Gaviniès, Pierre, 8, 22, 49 Gentili, Alberto, 4 Gerhard, Roberto, 155, 156 Germi, Luigi, 47, 53, 54 Gershwin, George, 146, 154, 164 Geyer, Stefi, 107, 108 Ghur, Karl, 55 Giardini, Felice, 22, 38 Gilels, Elizabeth, 147 Ginastera, Alberto, 163 Giordano, Filippo, 4 Giordano, Renzo, 4 Girard, François, 166 Glass, Philip, 167, 169, 170 Glazunov, Alexander, 95, 98, 106, 107, 109 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 4 Goebbels, Joseph, 67 Goehr, Walter, 144 Goldmark, Karl, 76, 84 Graupner, Christoph, 8 Gropius, Manon, 124, 125 Gropius, Walter, 124 Gruenberg, Louis, 146 Grumiaux, Arthur, 35, 52 Guibaidulina, Sofia, 161 Guignon, Jean-Pierre, 8 Gulli, Franco, 52 Haas, Otto, 73 Haendel, Ida, 162 Haffner (family), 27 Haffner, Marie Elisabeth, 27 Hahn, Hilary, 150, 168

179

Halír, Karl, 103 Halm, Hans, 171n1 Handel, Georg Frederick, x, 21 Hanslick, Eduard, 82, 83 Harris, Roy, 164 Hartman, Karl Amadeus, 158 Haydn, Franz Joseph, xvii, 8, 22, 34, 35, 36, 38, 41, 63 Haydn, Michael, xvii, 23, 27, 34, 35, 36 Heifetz, Jasha, 70, 103, 137, 139, 141, 145, 146, 147, 150, 154 Hellmesberger, Josef Sr., 41, 80, 150 Hendl, Walter, 146 Henschke, Eduard Amadeus, 64 Henze, Hans Werner, 158 Herbeck, Johann, 82 Herrmann, Bernard, 165 Herschel, William, 22 Herzogenberg, Elisabet von, 80 Herzogenberg, Heinrich von, 80 Hess, Willy, 41, 71 Higdon, Jennifer, 167, 168 Hindemith, Paul, 34, 67, 105, 116, 156, 157, 158, 159 Hoffmann, Melchior, 16 Homer, Louise, 137, 138 Homer, Sydney, 137 Honegger, Arthur, 155 Horowitz, Vladimir, 138 Hubay, Jeno, 107, 130 Huberman, Bronislav, 142 Ives, Charles, 116 Janacek, Leos, 159 Jeritza, Maria, 142 Jiosefowicz, Leila, 163 Joachim, Joseph, xvii, 24, 32, 37, 39, 44, 66, 67, 69, 70, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 88, 103 Johann Ernst, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, 14 Johanos, Donald, 165 Joseph, Franz, 8 Katchaturian, Aram, 160 Kaufmann, Louis, 9, 144 Kavakos, Leonidas, 103, 158 Keller, Robert, 79 Kennedy, Michael, 101

180

Khrushchev, Nikita, 146 Kinsky, Georg, 171n1 Knecht, Justin Heinrich, 8 Kochanski, Paul, 109, 110, 112, 117, 161 Köchel, Ludwig Ritter von, 171n1 Kodaly, Zoltan, 146 Kogan, Leonid, 147 Kogan, Pavel, 147 Köhler, Karl-Heinz, 64 Kolisch, Rudolf, 99 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, xviii, 107, 137, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 166, 172n3 Korngold, Julius, 142 Korpacheva, Julia, 169 Kotek, Iosif, 87, 88 Koussevitsky, Serge, 110, 144 Kraft, Anton, 43 Krasner, Louis, 124, 125, 135, 150, 164 Krebs, Ludwig, 16 Kreisler, Fritz, 1, 3, 33, 44, 49, 78, 99, 100, 118 Kremer, Gidon, 52, 169 Krenek, Ernst, 157 Kreutzer, Rodolphe, 39, 46, 49, 56 Kubrick, Stanley, 160 Kulenkampf, Georg, 67, 95 Kunhau, Johann, 6 Kurtz, Efrem, 141 Lafont, Charles Philippe, 48, 55 Lalo, Eduard, 85, 87, 88, 148 Le Cène, Michel-Charles, 2, 6, 7 Leclair, Jean-Marie, 22 Lees, Benjamin, 166 Lehar, Franz, 76 Leinsdorf, Erich, 166 Leoncavallo, Ruggiero, 115 Ley, Robert, 67 Ligeti, György, 160 Lin, Cho-Liang, 167 Lindberg, Magnus, x Lipinski, Karol, 55, 76 Lipp, Franz Ignaz, 35 Liszt, Franz, 39, 51, 77 Lobkowitz, Prince, 42 Locatelli, Pietro Antonio, 6, 49 Lolli, Antonio, 22, 49 Lombardini-Sirmen, Maddalena, 22

INDEX OF NA MES

Louis XVIII, King of France (Comte de Provence), 38 Lully, Jean-Baptist, 8 Lutoslawski, Witold, 162 Lutterotti, Nikolaus von, 63 Maazel, Lorin, 155 MacMillan, James, x Maderna, Bruno, 157 Mahler, Alma, 124 Mahler, Gustav, 115, 124, 163 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 156, 168 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 115 Mann, Thomas, 158 Mannino, Franco, 147 Marais, Marin, 6 Marcello, Alessandro, 14 Marcello, Benedetto, 14 Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, 38 Marteau, Henry, 95 Martin, Frank, 159 Martinon, Jean, 155 Martinu, Bohuslav, 159, 167 Mascagni, Pietro, 115 Maximilian Francis, Archduke of Austria, 27 Mendelssohn, Felix, x, xvii, 3, 40, 44, 50, 57, 60, 63, 65, 67, 68, 75, 76, 77, 79, 91, 102, 104, 142 Mengelberg, Willem, 135 Menotti, Gian Carlo, 138, 165 Menuhin, Yehudi, 34, 46, 70, 80, 138, 159 Meschchersaya, Nina, 109 Mestrino, Niccolò, 49 Meyers, Anne Akiko, 168 Miaskovsky, Nikolay, 160 Michalski, Andreas, 63 Milhaud, Darius, 154, 172n1 Milstein, Nathan, 44, 110 Milton, John, 7, 8 Milyukova, Antonina Ivanovna, 88 Mishakoff, Misha, 9 Mitropoulos, Dimitri, 147, 150, 164 Mlynarski, Emil, 112 Molinari, Bernardino, 5, 9, 145 Mompellio, Federico, 52 Moodie, Alma, 157 Morzin, Wenzel von, 6, 7 Mozart, Leopold, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 34

I N DE X OF N AM E S

181

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, ix, x, xvi, 2, 3, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 62, 63, 64, 171n1 Mravinsky, Yevgeny, 147 Munch, Charles, 165 Mussorgsky, Modest, 149 Mutter, Anne-Sophie, 158, 161, 162

Prokofiev, Sergei, x, xviii, 109, 110, 112, 116, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 129, 134, 146, 148, 167, 168 Puccini, Giacomo, 115 Pugnani, Gaetano, 3, 22, 38

Nardini, Pietro, 22 Newsome, Jon, 80 Nielsen, Carl, 105, 106 Nikish, Arthur, 95 Novácèk, Viktor, 102, 103

Ramuz, Charles-Ferdinand, 117 Rauzzini, Venanzio, 26 Ravel, Maurice, 123, 127, 155, 168 Reger, Max, xviii, 71, 95, 96, 98, 109, 112, 123–124 Reich, Willi, 125 Reinhardt, Max, 142 Respighi, Ottorino, 111, 156, 168 Ricci, Ruggiero, 52, 164, 166 Richter, Franz Xaver, 2 Riemann, Hugo, 96 Rihm, Wolfgang, 158 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nicolai, 104 Robbins Landon, Howard Chandler, 35 Robert the Bruce, 92 Rochberg, George, 165 Rode, Pierre, 39, 41 Rodrigo, Joaquin, 155 Roger, Estienne, 2 Rolla, Alessandro, 56 Rolla, Antonio, 56 Rolli, Paolo, 8 Rorem, Ned, 138 Rosselli, John, 24 Rossini, Gioacchino, 50 Rostal, Max, 128 Rota, Nino, 138 Rothschild, Baron of, 53 Rouse, Christopher, 167 Rózsa, Miklós, 146 Rudge, Olga, 5 Russolo, Luigi, 115 Ryom, Peter, 171n1

Oistrakh, David, 147, 149, 158, 160, 161 Oliveira, Elmar, 159, 166 Ondricek, Franticek, 84 Ormandy, Eugene, 137, 139, 165 Ottoboni, Pietro, 7 Oziminski, Józef, 112 Paganini, Achille, 47, 49, 51 Paganini, Andreina, 51 Paganini, Giuseppina, 51 Paganini, Niccolo, ix, x, xvii, 39, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 75, 76, 87 Pagin, Andre-Noel, 8 Pärt, Arvo, 170 Pelliccia, Arrigo, 150 Penderecki, Krysztof, 162 Pergolesi, Giovan Battista, 5 Petri, Henri, 92 Petterson, Allan, 162 Petzold, Christian, 2 Piazzolla, Astor, 169 Picker, Tobias, 167 Pincherle, Marc, 3 Pisendel, Johann Georg, 2, 3 Piston, Walter, 164 Pixis, Friedrich, 38 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 156, 157 Plato, 166 Poewe, Wilhelm, 61 Polledro, Giovan Battista, 56 Ponce, Manuel, 163 Posselt, Ruth, 144, 164 Pound, Ezra, 5 Powell, Maud, 67, 71 Principe, Remy, 9

Quantz, Johann Joachim, 22

Sacher, Paul, 107 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 85, 90, 112, 149 Salomon, Johann Peter, 38 Salonen, Esa-Pekka, x, 163 Sammartini, Giovanni Battista, 22 Sammons, Albert, 112 Sarasate, Pablo de, 59, 69, 85, 86, 90, 91

182

Scalero, Rosario, 137, 138 Scarlatti, Alessandro, 5 Scarlatti, Domenico, 5 Schatzki, Walter, 74 Scherchen, Hermann, 125 Schering, Arnold, 3 Schiff, Zina, 159 Schindler, 44 Schmid, Benjamin, 157 Schmierer, 8 Schneeberger, Hans-Heinz, 107 Schneeweiss, Amalie, 83 Schnittke, Alfred, 161 Schoenberg, Arnold, x, xviii, 99, 123, 124, 137, 150, 156, 157, 165, 167 Schott, Georg Balthasar, 16 Schubert, Franz, 31, 42, 63 Schuman, William, 165 Schumann, Clara, xvii, 37, 39, 66, 70, 80, 83 Schumann, Robert, xvii, 57, 66, 67, 75, 77 Schuppanzigh, Ignaz, 42 Schwarz, Boris, 81, 148 Scott, Walter, 91 Scriabin, Alexander, 111 Segovia, Andrés, 146 Seidler, Carl August, 43 Sessions, Roger, 164 Severn, Charles, 54 Shakespeare, William, 142 Shostakovich, Dimitri, x, xviii, 137, 146, 147, 148, 149, 161, 162, 167 Sibelius, Jan, x, xviii, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 143, 150, 167 Sigismund III of Schrattenbach, 23 Simpson, Christoph, 8 Simrock, Fritz, 79, 82, 83 Sivori, Camillo, 56 Skalkottas, Nikos, 157 Slatkin, Leonard, 168 Smetacek, Vaclav, 147 Soetens, Robert, 122, 135 Sokolowskij, Wassilij, 62 Somis, Giovan Battista, 38 Spaeth, Franz Xaver, 27 Spalding, Albert, 137, 139, 144 Spohr, Louis, 41, 55, 59, 60, 75 Sprague Smith, Carleton, 63, 64 Stalin, Joseph, 120, 146, 149

INDEX OF NA MES

Stamitz, Johann, 22 Starzer, Josef, 35 Stern, Isaac, 144, 154, 155, 165, 166 Stokowski, Leopold, 150 Stowell, Robin, 44 Stradivari, Antonio, 21, 54 Strauss, Richard, 92, 93, 103, 107, 108, 112, 142, 159, 160 Stravinsky, Igor, xviii, 106, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 134, 149, 156, 169 Strickland, William, 171n1 Stuart Wortley, Alice, 100 Sutro, Ottilie, 74 Sutro, Rose, 74 Székely, Zoltán, 130, 132, 133, 135 Szering, Henryk, 52, 163, 166 Szigeti, Joseph, 110, 116, 117, 130, 159 Szymanowski, Karol, 109, 111, 112, 116, 155, 161 Taafe Zwilich, Ellen, 167, 168 Tartini, Giuseppe, 3, 21, 22, 35, 117, 118, 157 Tchaikovsky, Modest, 88, 98, 99, 106 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilych, x, xviii, 87, 88, 89, 117, 147, 150 Teleman, Georg Philip, 8, 16 Telmány, Emil, 105 Tomasini, Luigi, 35, 36 Tomasini, Luigi Jr., 44 Toni, Alceo, 9 Toscanini, Arturo, 138 Tourte, François, 39 Truman, Harry, 63 Turner, Charles, 144 Twain, Mark, 143 Tyson, Alan, 44 Ulrich, Hugo, 44 Vanhal, Johann Baptist, 22 Vaughn Williams, Ralph, 153, 168 Verdi, Giuseppe, 57 Vieuxtemps, Henri, 44, 57, 76, 90, 110 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 163 Viotti, Giovan Battista, xvii, 22, 37, 38, 39, 41, 45, 46, 56 Vivaldi, Antonio, x, xvi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 21, 38, 169, 170,

I N DE X OF N AM E S

171n1 Vogler, Johann Gottfried, 16 Vuillaume, Jean-Baptiste, 48 Wagenseil, Georg Christoph, 22, 35 Wagner, Richard, 75, 77, 124 Walter, Benno, 93 Walton, William, 145, 154, 164 Webern, Anton von, 123, 124, 135 Weill, Kurt, 116, 117, 157 Whilelmj, August, 49 Whitehead, Peter James Palmer, 60, 61, 63 Wieniawski, Henryk, 57, 76, 85

183

Williams, John, 145 Woldemar, Michel, 49 Wolf-Ferrari, Ermanno, 157 Wolff, Hugh, 167 Wood, Henry, 135 Wranitzky, Anton, 43 Yampolsky, Vladimir, 147 Ysaye, Eugene, 111, 129 Zaslaw, Neal, 32 Zelenka, Jan Dismas, 2 Zhdanov, Andrei, 147, 149 Zimbalist, Efrem, 138, 165

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Franco Sciannameo is an Italian-born violinist, musicologist, and cultural historian. He holds degrees from the Conservatorio di Musica “Santa Cecilia” in Rome and from the University of Pittsburgh. Always concerned with the role of artists in society, Sciannameo writes and lectures extensively on contemporary music and its relation to politics, cinema, and the arts. He has worked with a number of celebrated composers, including Giacinto Scelsi, Vieri Tosatti, Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, and Paul Chihara, with whom he collaborated on many performances and recordings. Sciannameo’s articles and essays are featured regularly in The Musical Times (London), and his most recent books include Nino Rota’s The Godfather Trilogy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010); Phil Trajetta (1777–1854), Patriot, Musician, Immigrant (2010); and Music as Dream: Essays on Giacinto Scelsi (with Alessandra Carlotta Pellegrini; Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). Sciannameo is professor of music and associate dean of the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh; visiting professor of applied musicology in the School of Music, Faculty of Performance, Visual Arts and Communications at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom; and editor of the College Music Society’s monograph series Cultural Expressions in Music.

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