Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61

Program notes

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.