Beethoven: Violin Concerto in D major

Informatie

Though some themes of the D major Violin Concerto appear fragmentarily among Beethoven's earlier drafts, the score received its final shape - according to the autograph manuscript - in 1806 only. The first performance took place on December 23 of the same year in Vienna, the violon solo was played by Franz Clement. The concerto met with a rather cold reception: this critic of the Wiener Theaterzeitung admitted 'some beauty' in it but for the rest he found that '...the coherence often seems totally broken and the endless repetitions of some commonplace sections can easily become tedious.' The performance may have not been totally satisfying, it is certainly surprising that the set of parts published in 1808 is dedicated to Stephan von Breuning instead of Clement. It is not impossible that Beethoven lost faith in the value and future of his work, too, - his later attempt to change it into a piano concerto can be interpreted in this way. The violin concerto rarely performed in the next decades and hardly attracted any attention. It was only in 1844 that a 13-year-old child prodigy of Hungarian origin, Josef Joachim presented - under Mendelssohn's baton - the exceptional qualities of the masterpiece to the London and Berlin publics.