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At-A-Glance

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Composed: 1806

Length: c. 43 minutes

Orchestration: flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings, and solo violin

First Los Angeles Philharmonic performance: December 5, 1919, Walter Henry Rothwell conducting, with Albert Spalding, soloist

About this Piece

The four drum taps that open Beethoven’s Violin Concerto represent one of the most surprising and audacious ideas that the composer ever committed to paper. What was he thinking? Are they an echo of the military music that emanated from the French Revolution and heard all over Vienna during those warlike years? Are they setting the tempo, like those audible 1-2-3-4 counts that jazz musicians rely on? Are they a suggestion of menace or coming thunder? A way to attract the audience’s attention? Or a tune?

The concerto is so familiar in concert halls that it’s no longer easy to imagine the shock waves those four notes should have set off at its first performance in 1806. In fact the concerto came into the world with little fanfare and made hardly any impression on the Viennese or anyone else. Not for some 50 years was it treated as the great work we now know it to be, when Joachim, David, Vieuxtemps, and other virtuosos began to play it everywhere.

Beethoven may have had no knowledge of Mozart’s five early violin concertos, but he certainly knew a D-major concerto by Franz Clement, a young Viennese violinist who had played it in an 1805 concert at which Beethoven presented the “Eroica” Symphony. Beethoven’s own concerto was written “par Clemenza pour Clement” as we read on the autograph score, and the dedicatee gave the first performance in December 1806, an event colored by the anecdote that he was sight-reading from Beethoven’s messy manuscript and by the program’s inclusion of a sonata to be played by Clement on a single string and “mit umgekehrten Violin”—with the instrument upside down.

What makes Beethoven’s concerto different from all the other violin concertos of his time is its enormously enlarged sense of space. With four symphonies behind him, he now thought instinctively in the extended paragraphs of symphonic structure and was able to create a broad horizon within which his themes could be extended in leisurely fashion and adorned by graceful elaborations from the soloist. The four drum taps are a theme, or at least a crucial part of a theme, to be taken up by the soloist and the orchestra at various points, sometimes soft, as at the opening, sometimes brutally loud, and always highly distinctive. The other themes are elegant, often built out of rising or falling scales and usually moving in stepwise motion, avoiding wide intervals and sustaining a calm dignity.

The slow movement is a group of variations on a theme of surpassing simplicity and beauty, 10 measures long. First played by the strings alone, it passes to the horns and clarinet, then to the bassoon, then back to the strings with strong wind punctuation. The soloist, who has offered only decoration up to this point, then introduces a second theme, even more serene than the first, also treated to a variation. Just when the horns seem to hint at a final variation, a violent series of chords sets up a cadenza link to the finale. Since Beethoven left no cadenzas himself, every great soloist from Joachim onward has composed his own set.

The Rondo’s catchy theme releases a burst of energy and an inexhaustible flow of lively invention. The bassoon is favored in a minor-key episode that is heard, regrettably, only once. At the end, the coda plays with the theme like a kitten with a ball of wool and rounds off the work with a light touch quite at odds with the image of a surly, stormy composer that we often take to be the real picture. —Hugh Macdonald