Violin Concerto, Op. 15

Program notes

About the Work

Benjamin Britten was in his mid-twenties when he wrote his only violin concerto, and the world it came out of was falling apart. He composed it in 1938 and 1939 for the Spanish violinist Antonio Brosa, a friend with whom he had played his Suite for violin and piano at the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Barcelona in 1936. Within months of that visit Spain was at civil war. Britten was a convinced pacifist, and commentators have long heard that war in this score: the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s programme note calls the concerto his reaction to the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War.

By the time he finished it he had left England. In 1939 Britten left for North America with the tenor Peter Pears, and he completed the concerto in Quebec that year. The orchestra’s own note dates the finished score to 29 September 1939, four weeks after the German invasion of Poland. Brosa gave the first performance at Carnegie Hall in New York in late March 1940, with the New York Philharmonic under John Barbirolli. The score is dedicated to Henry Boys, a friend from Britten’s student years at the Royal College of Music.

The layout is unusual. There are three movements, played without a break, but the fast music sits in the middle and the weight falls on a slow finale. Prokofiev had used a similar plan in his First Violin Concerto. The finale is a passacaglia, a set of variations over a repeating bass line, and it is the first time Britten used a form he would return to for some of his most serious music. He looked at the concerto again in later years and made revisions, including changes to the solo part, without altering its structure.

What to Listen For

I. Moderato con moto. The concerto begins with the timpani alone, tapping out a short rhythmic figure answered by a cymbal. That rhythm passes to the bassoon and never really leaves the movement. Over it the violin enters high up with a long, singing melody that keeps slipping between major and minor. A second idea is hard and martial, with the soloist striking out chords. The most striking moment comes when the roles are exchanged: the orchestral strings take over the opening melody, hushed, while the soloist plays the drum rhythm in plucked and strummed chords.

II. Vivace. A fierce, driving scherzo, one of several pieces from these years that Britten cast as a dance of death. In the quieter middle section listen for a strange passage in which piccolos whistle at the very top of the orchestra while a solo tuba climbs up from the bottom, with nothing in between. The movement ends in a long cadenza for the violin alone, which recalls the drum rhythm and the opening melody and leads straight into the finale.

III. Passacaglia: Andante lento. The trombones, silent until now, enter as the cadenza ends with the slow, rising and falling theme on which the finale is built. The variations that follow change character constantly: restless, biting, dance-like, then a broad march. At the close the music settles towards D, and the violin is left trilling between the two notes that would make the harmony major or minor. Britten leaves the question open, and the concerto ends on that uncertainty.