Ludwig Van Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D Major, op 61
Beethoven’s deafness was getting worse. Fearing for the future, as well as his professional credibility, he briefly contemplated suicide. But even as his body failed him, he decided he still had too much to live for: fate “shall certainly not crush me completely” he declared to a friend. He resolved to no longer make his deafness a secret to the wider world, a significant sign of coming to terms with it.
No-one has ever definitively pinpointed the cause of Beethoven’s most famous affliction. Various theories have been suggested, including undiagnosed syphilis, chronic lead poisoning (everyone ate off lead plates in those days for example), or even the composer’s habit of plunging his head into a basin of freezing cold water before starting work. Beethoven himself always insisted that the problem started after a row with a singer in around 1798. It was during their heated altercation that Beethoven felt he could get his point across better by throwing himself melodramatically onto the floor. When he got up, he was greeted by an unfamiliar buzzing in his ears and his hearing was never quite the same again. Soon it was causing him serious problems, as he began to struggle in both social settings and as a performer.
Deafness might just be the cruellest affliction for a musician. And yet Beethoven did have so much else going for him. His music was only getting better: “I am not satisfied with the work I have done so far”, he wrote to a fellow composer in 1803. “From now on I intend to take a new way.” He was entering a creative “middle” period, marked by a widening range of expressive power and a superb craftmanship which allowed him to build his music into ever more majestic structures. In the space of just three years, he was producing his symphonies numbers Three and Four, his Fourth Piano Concerto, a Concerto for Violin, ‘Cello and Piano, his opera Fidelio, a set of three string quartets (knowns as the “Rasumovskys”) plus further piano and violin sonatas.
Although his days as a virtuosic performer were now largely behind him, he still managed to make a good living through his music – published copies of his works sold well, and they were performed regularly. Like his teacher Joseph Haydn, he benefitted from aristocratic patronage, but in Beethoven’s case he managed to do so in a much more freelance way, without being tied down to any formal positions. He received regular commissions from rich friends, and sometimes an annual stipend. Even as Beethoven’s deafness pushed him towards the social margins, he was always surrounded by a solid core of admiring supporters.
His Violin Concerto in D Major dates from around the middle of this “middle” period. Beethoven had spent the summer of 1806 staying with wealthy patrons in Hungary, and flirting with the family’s two daughters, one of whom he eventually proposed marriage to but was promptly turned down by. Having suffered another episode of his chronically unlucky love-life, Beethoven was probably grateful for a distraction. It arrived in the form of a commission from his virtuoso violinist friend, Franz Clement, who proposed a full-scale concerto. Whether Beethoven was running to a tight deadline or simply procrastinated before beginning work is not clear, but in the end the concerto was written in such a rush that Clement only got to see his technically demanding solo part (for a fifty-minute work) two days before the first performance. He largely sight-read it at the première, as did most of the orchestra. A shoddy rendition was the inevitable result, even as Clement attempted to lift the mood between the first and second movements by incongruously placing his violin on his head and playing a virtuosic little piece which he had composed himself. The Concerto was declared a flop, and seldom performed for the next forty years. Most agreed that Beethoven had been having an off day when he wrote it.
The few audiences who got to hear the work in that time were puzzled by its restrained mood and relative lack of virtuosity for the soloist. No-one realised quite how revolutionary Beethoven had been in creating an entirely different concept of what a violin concerto could be. Whereas in the eighteenth century the soloist and orchestra had had clearly defined (and separate) roles, in the Beethoven the two had forged a much more intricate and complex relationship. It was less a concerto than a symphony for violin and orchestra.
Redemption for the Concerto finally arrived in 1844 at the hands of composer Felix Mendelssohn (conducting), and a young 12-year-old prodigy named Joseph Joachim, who would go on to become one of the most famous violinists of the late nineteenth century. Both musicians seemed to have an intuitive understanding over how the work should be performed, and their thoughtful interpretation met with great acclaim: belatedly, audiences began to realise it was a masterpiece. Many subsequent composers thought so too, and the piece would have a considerable influence on violin concertos in the late nineteenth century – those written by Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Brahms all owe a great debt to it.
The huge strength of the Concerto is the way in which it creates great dramatic power from understated means. Partly it is down to its epic scale. The first movement alone lasts more than twenty minutes and is built around a monumental structure which allows the music to unfold naturally and organically. There are constant little surprises, from the five soft timpani beats on D (the key of the piece) which open the work, answered not long after by the four emphatic D sharps in the violins, a jarring semitone up from D. The often serene, pastoral mood of this movement is frequently interrupted by dramatic outbursts in the orchestra as well as sudden changes of key, leaving a sense of unease and struggle always just under the surface. The solo violin does not make its first appearance until several minutes into the music, after which it starts a long dialogue with the orchestra, using just three principal motifs throughout in an endlessly inventive and creative way.
The second movement is a set of variations, with the violin taking the lead and creating intricate melodic patterns against a fixed harmonic progression, while the orchestral accompaniment is ever more delicate and ethereal. The third movement, a brilliant rondo in 6/8, finally releases the tension a little, and is perhaps the most traditionally concerto-like of the piece. The violinist at last has some scope to show off, before the music ends in a rousing finale – bringing with it a distinct sense of a long struggle having been overcome.
It’s a piece of music which was written against the clock by a creator afflicted with heartache and hearing loss. It bombed for the first forty years of its existence. And yet the Violin Concerto stands today as one of Beethoven’s purest and most perfect compositions, a testimony to his creative courage and unshaken artistic vision.
Suggestions for further listening
Beethoven wrote one other concerto that was somewhat overlooked in his day and which has remained so to an extent, his Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano in 1804. The story goes that he was commissioned the work by a rich family as an “easy” piano concerto for their talented teenage son (also a pupil of Beethoven’s), and that Beethoven added in the other two solo instruments for support. Whatever the case, it’s an interesting and inventive work, and unique in the Beethoven canon.
It’s often forgotten that the violin was Beethoven’s second instrument after the piano, and that he played it with some proficiency. Although he only once ventured into the concerto world with the instrument, he wrote ten sonatas for violin and piano. They are all worth a listen, but my personal favourite would be the Sonata in G Major (op 96), which he wrote in 1812 and which shares some of the spacious serenity of the Concerto.