On Tour in Boston: Beethoven’s Violin Concerto with Maxim Vengerov, and Ein Heldenleben

About the Work

Beethoven composed his only violin concerto in 1806. He wrote it for Franz Clement, one of the leading violinists in Vienna, who had given him useful advice on his opera Fidelio. Clement played it at the Theater an der Wien on 23 December 1806, at a benefit concert for himself.

By all accounts the score was finished at the last minute, so late that Clement is said to have played part of the solo more or less at sight. Stories also survive of the entertainment he added to the evening, a piece of his own played on one string with the violin held upside down; the accounts differ on whether this came between the movements of the concerto or at the end of the concert. Whatever happened, the premiere made little impression, and for nearly forty years the concerto was seldom played. It was on a larger scale than any violin concerto before it, a good deal longer than Mozart’s, and its solo part, for all its difficulty, offers the player few chances for display.

Its fortunes changed in London in 1844, when the twelve-year-old Joseph Joachim performed it with the orchestra of the Philharmonic Society under Mendelssohn. Joachim kept it in his repertoire for the rest of a long career, and since then it has stood at the centre of the violin repertoire.

What sets the concerto apart is its calm. Beethoven’s middle-period works are often thought of as music of struggle, but here the prevailing mood is spacious and lyrical, and the soloist spends much of the time decorating the orchestra’s themes with scales, arpeggios and trills high above them. Commentators have traced some of its features, including the drum-taps of the opening, to the French violin school of Viotti, Rode and Kreutzer that Beethoven admired. He left no cadenzas for the violin. Many players have supplied their own, and those by Joachim and by Fritz Kreisler are the ones most often heard.

What to Listen For

First movement. Four soft taps on the timpani, alone, begin the concerto, and the woodwind answer with a serene hymn-like phrase. That drum rhythm is the seed of the whole movement: listen for it passing to the violins, the horns and the trumpets, sometimes as a whisper and sometimes with the full orchestra’s weight. The orchestra sets out all the themes before the soloist plays a note. When the violin does enter it rises from the depths in broken octaves, as if improvising, and climbs to the top of its range. The quietest and most affecting passage comes in the middle of the movement, where the violin muses in the minor over soft drum-taps from the horns. After the cadenza the soloist plays the second theme very simply, low on the instrument, over plucked strings.

Second movement. Muted strings state a short, grave theme, and what follows is a set of variations in which the theme mostly stays with the orchestra while the violin embroiders around it. Midway the soloist introduces a new melody of its own, one of the stillest moments in Beethoven. The movement does not end: a sudden loud gesture from the strings and a brief cadenza lead straight into the finale.

Third movement. The violin announces the rondo theme on its lowest string, a bouncing tune like a hunting call, and repeats it at once two octaves higher. The episodes between its returns include a plaintive minor-key melody shared with the bassoon. After the final cadenza Beethoven plays games with the theme, sending it through distant keys before two abrupt chords end the piece.

About the Work

Ein Heldenleben (‘A Hero’s Life’) is the largest of the tone poems Richard Strauss wrote in the 1890s, and he was 34 when he finished it. In July 1898 he wrote from a Bavarian mountain resort that, since Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ was so unpopular with conductors and so rarely played, he was filling the gap with a long tone poem on a similar subject: ‘It is entitled A Hero’s Life, and while it has no funeral march, it does have lots of horns, horns being quite the thing to express heroism.’ The joke tells you a good deal about the tone of what followed. He completed the score at the end of December and conducted the first performance himself in Frankfurt on 3 March 1899. The dedication went to the young Willem Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.

Strauss worked on the piece alongside Don Quixote and thought of the two as companions: one a comic study of a deluded knight, the other a portrait of a hero taken, at least on the surface, at his own valuation. Who that hero is has been argued over ever since. Strauss gave no programme beyond titles for the six sections, and he was evasive when asked whether he had painted himself. The music is less discreet. The hero’s companion is a portrait of the composer’s wife, Pauline; his adversaries are plainly the critics; and when the hero looks back on his ‘works of peace’, what we hear are themes from Strauss’s own earlier scores. Early reviewers took the point and some were furious, one calling the piece ‘as revolting a picture of this revolting man as one might ever encounter’. Later writers have been more inclined to hear irony in it, and to notice that this hero ends by turning away from the world towards private life.

It asks for an enormous orchestra, with eight horns, five trumpets, two tubas and two harps, and it plays without a break for about three quarters of an hour.

What to Listen For

The six sections run into one another, but each has a clear character.

The Hero. The piece opens with its main theme, a long, striding melody for horns and cellos that climbs through nearly three octaves in E flat major, the key of the ‘Eroica’. Other ideas pile up around it until the whole orchestra stops on an expectant, unresolved chord, followed by silence.

The Hero’s Adversaries. Into the silence come the critics: thin, chattering woodwind, each instrument carping in its own register, with two tubas grumbling in the parallel fifths that students of harmony are taught to avoid. The hero’s theme sinks into the minor before he shakes them off.

The Hero’s Companion. A solo violin, played by the orchestra’s leader, enters with a long sequence of cadenzas, by turns flirtatious, tender, sulky and scolding. The hero answers in the low strings and horns. Eventually the two come together in a broad love scene, the most richly scored music in the work, with the critics briefly audible in the distance.

The Hero’s Deeds of War. Trumpets sound from offstage and the battle begins. Percussion drives the music on, and the hero’s theme fights its way through against the adversaries’ music, with the companion’s at his side. It ends with the opening theme returning in triumph.

The Hero’s Works of Peace. Here Strauss quotes himself. Fragments of Don Juan, Also sprach Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration, Don Quixote and Till Eulenspiegel, among others, drift past, woven together so smoothly that they can be hard to pick out one by one.

The Hero’s Retreat from the World and Fulfilment. After a last outburst of anger the music settles. The hero’s rising theme is reshaped into a slow, falling melody for the strings, the most touching passage in the score, and the work closes quietly in E flat major, a long way from the swagger with which it began.