Violin Concerto

The four drum taps that open this violin concerto are one of the most surprising and audacious ideas that Ludwig van Beethoven ever committed to paper. What was he thinking? Is this an echo of the military music that emanated from the French Revolution — and which was to be heard all over Vienna in those warlike years? Is it an easy way to set the tempo, like those audible 1–2–3–4 counts that jazz musicians rely on? Is it a suggestion of menace or coming thunder? Is it a way to attract the audience’s attention? Is it a tune?

The concerto itself is so familiar to many of us — along with so many even more daring ideas let loose in the past two centuries — that it’s quite a challenge today to imagine the shockwaves those four notes should have set off at its first performance in 1806. Unless, perhaps, the audience was too noisy to allow anyone to hear them clearly (or at all). Perhaps the Viennese were already used to Beethoven’s eccentricities and regarded this as just another of his strange ways.

In fact, this concerto came into the world with very little fanfare and made little 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 Joseph Joachim, Ferdinand David, Henri Vieuxtemps, and other virtuosos began to play it everywhere.

What makes Beethoven’s concerto different from the others of his time is its enormously enlarged sense of space. With four symphonies behind him, he now thought instinctively in symphonic structure and was able to create a broad horizon within which his themes could be extended in a leisurely fashion and adorned by graceful elaborations from the soloist. For 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, but always highly distinctive. The other themes of this opening movement are elegant, often built out of rising or falling scales and usually moving in stepwise motion, avoiding wide intervals and sustaining a calm dignity.

Since Beethoven left no written-out solo cadenzas for this concerto, violinists have been writing their own for two centuries. Joachim, Vieuxtemps, Eugène Ysaÿe, Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, and dozens of others have published their own versions, and some more recent cadenzas break with convention by quoting from other concertos or indulging in modern techniques such as quarter-tones written in the cracks between notes within Beethoven’s own tonal scale. All three movements offer opportunities for cadenzas, the one at the end of the slow movement acting as a link to the Rondo finale. 

The middle slow movement is a group of variations on a theme, 10 measures long, of surpassing simplicity and beauty. First played by the strings alone, the theme passes to the horns and clarinet, then to the bassoon, then back to the strings with strong woodwind punctuation. The soloist, who has offered only decoration up to this point, then introduces a second theme, even more serene than the first, which acts as an interlude before the next variation, marked by pizzicato strings. Just when another variation seems to be hinted at by the horns, a violent series of chords sets up the link into the finale.

The Rondo third movement’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 — rounding the work off with a light touch quite at odds with the image of a surly, stormy composer that we too often take to be the real Beethoven.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.