Szeps-Znaider’s Beethoven and Elgar’s First

About the Work

Beethoven’s only violin concerto is now universally regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces for the instrument: serene, spacious and song-like, music of Olympian calm from the most turbulent of composers. Yet its beginnings were chaotic. Beethoven wrote it in 1806 for the violinist Franz Clement, a brilliant player and friend, and, as so often, he finished it desperately late; it is believed that Clement had to sight-read parts of the solo line at the premiere in Vienna on 23 December 1806. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that first performance was not a success, and the concerto languished for decades, dismissed as too long and insufficiently brilliant.

Its rescue came almost forty years later, and from a child. In 1844 the twelve-year-old prodigy Joseph Joachim played it in London under Mendelssohn’s baton, and his advocacy, sustained over a long career, finally established the concerto as the cornerstone of the repertoire it is today. What earlier audiences heard as a lack of fireworks we now recognise as its glory: this is a concerto not of display but of breadth, lyricism and inwardness, the soloist less a virtuoso showman than a singer floating long, radiant lines above the orchestra.

It is also one of the most original concertos ever written, beginning not with a flourish but with five quiet, mysterious taps on the timpani, a rhythmic motif that, astonishingly, goes on to permeate the entire first movement. From that hushed opening grows some of the most sublime and expansive music Beethoven ever wrote.

What to Listen For

Listen, right at the start, to those five soft drum-beats, an utterly novel way to open a concerto, and a rhythmic idea that recurs throughout the long first movement, sometimes gently, sometimes (on unexpected notes) with a faint sense of unease. The movement is vast and unhurried; rather than waiting for bravura, savour the breadth of its themes and the way the solo violin, when it finally enters, soars and decorates rather than competes, spinning endless lyrical lines.

The slow movement (Larghetto) is pure serenity: a hushed set of variations on a tender theme, the violin embroidering above muted strings, music of rapt, almost religious calm. It leads without a break, via a questioning pause, straight into the finale: a buoyant, dancing Rondo with a catchy hunting-horn lilt. Listen for how the soloist tosses the cheerful main tune around with the orchestra, with moments of charm and wit, bringing this most spacious and noble of concertos to a genial, high-spirited close. (Listen, too, for the cadenzas, the soloist’s unaccompanied flourishes, which different violinists choose from a range of versions.)

About the Work

Elgar’s First Symphony was one of the most eagerly awaited works in British musical history. By 1908 he was at the height of his fame, and it was widely known that he had been contemplating a symphony for over a decade; when it finally appeared, the anticipation was enormous. The premiere, given by the Hallé Orchestra under the great Hans Richter (the conductor who had led the first Ring cycle for Wagner) in Manchester on 3 December 1908, was a sensation. Rehearsing the London Symphony Orchestra for the London premiere a few days later, Richter reportedly called it ‘the greatest symphony of modern times, written by the greatest modern composer,’ and the public agreed: within little more than a year the symphony had received around a hundred performances across Britain, Europe and America, an almost unheard-of success for a new symphonic work.

Elgar dedicated it to Richter, and built the vast, four-movement structure around a single ‘motto’ theme, a broad, noble melody (he marked it nobilmente, a favourite Elgarian direction) heard at the very opening, which returns, transformed, across the whole symphony to bind it together and crown it at the end. The work is huge in scale and emotional range, moving from serene grandeur through a driving, restless scherzo to one of the most beautiful slow movements ever written by an Englishman, before a finale that battles its way to a blazing return of the opening nobility. It is Edwardian confidence and private vulnerability held in a single, magnificent span.

What to Listen For

Everything begins with the motto theme: listen, at the very opening, for a slow, grand, hymn-like melody over a quiet tread, noble and serene. Fix it in your memory, because Elgar will bring it back, transformed, throughout the symphony, and its triumphant return is the work’s ultimate goal. After this majestic introduction, the first movement proper grows restless and stormy, the calm of the motto repeatedly disturbed.

The second movement is a fierce, driving scherzo, full of nervous energy and brilliant orchestration; listen for how its hurtling march-like material gives way to a gentler, almost pastoral episode. Then, magically, that same fast music slows and transforms directly into the great Adagio third movement, one of the supreme slow movements in the repertoire, music of profound, songful tenderness that Richter compared to Beethoven. (Listen for how the scherzo’s notes literally become the Adagio’s melody, slowed almost beyond recognition.) The finale begins in shadow and uncertainty, gathering its forces, until at last the noble motto theme returns in full glory, sweeping the symphony to a radiant, affirmative close in A-flat.