Violin Concerto in D
Composition and premiere: Stravinsky composed the Violin Concerto between mid-March and September 25, 1931. The premiere on October 23, 1931, featured Samuel Dushkin as soloist and the composer conducting the Berlin Radio Orchestra. First BSO performances: January 1 and 2, 1932, less than six weeks after the world premiere; Serge Koussevitzky conducting and Samuel Dushkin, solo violin. First Tanglewood performance: August 5, 1949, Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, Irwin Hoffman conducting and Esther Glazer, violin. The first BSO performance at Tanglewood was July 4, 1970, Seiji Ozawa conducting with BSO concertmaster Joseph Silverstein as soloist.
Stravinsky mistrusted virtuosos:
In order to succeed they are obliged to lend themselves to the wishes of the public, the great majority of whom demand sensational effects from the player. This preoccupation naturally influences their taste, their choice of music, and their manner of treating the piece selected. How many admirable compositions, for instance, are set aside because they do not offer the player any opportunity of shining with facile brilliancy!
These thoughts were prompted by the suggestion made in 1931 by Willy Strecker, one of the directors of the music publisher B. Schott’s Sons, that Stravinsky write something for a remarkable young violinist named Samuel Dushkin, whom Strecker admired. Dushkin was a Polish-born musician who had been adopted by an American benefactor, Blair Fairchild, and who studied with Leopold Auer. Stravinsky hesitated for two reasons: he doubted that he was familiar enough with the violin to write a really virtuosic part for it, and he was afraid the usual type of “virtuoso performer” would not in any case be interested in playing his piece. A meeting with Dushkin dispelled the latter doubt: “I was very glad to find in him, besides his remarkable gifts as a born violinist, a musical culture, a delicate understanding, and—in the exercise of his profession—an abnegation that is very rare.”
In the meantime Paul Hindemith encouraged Stravinsky to undertake the work despite his lack of familiarity with the violin; this could be a positive advantage, Hindemith insisted, since it would prevent the solo part from turning into a rehash of other violin concertos, employing the same old runs and turns of phrase.
So Stravinsky and Dushkin began to work together. The first movement was largely composed between March 11 and March 27, 1931; the second movement between April 7 and May 20, the third between May 24 and June 6, and the finale between June 12 and September 4.
As the work progressed, Stravinsky would show Dushkin the materials as they were composed; the violinist tried them out and made suggestions as to how they might be made easier or more effective for the solo instrument. Dushkin suggested ways to make the material “violinistic,” suggestions that Stravinsky rejected at least as often as he accepted them.
Whenever he accepted one of my suggestions, even a simple change such as extending the range of the violin by stretching the phrase to the octave below and the octave above, Stravinsky would insist upon altering the very foundations accordingly. He behaved like an architect who if asked to change a room on the third floor had to go down to the foundation to keep the proportions of the whole structure.
The one thing Stravinsky sought to avoid throughout was the kind of flashy virtuosity of which many romantic concertos—and especially those by violinists—were made. Dushkin recalled:
Once when I was particularly pleased with the way I had arranged a brilliant violinistic passage and tried to insist on his keeping it, he said: “You remind me of a salesman at the Galeries Lafayette. You say, “Isn’t this brilliant, isn’t this exquisite, look at the beautiful colors, everybody’s wearing it.” I say, “Yes, it is brilliant, it is beautiful, everyone is wearing it—I don’t want it.”
Despite Dushkin’s assistance, the resulting concerto is unmistakably Stravinsky’s own. In the opening Toccata, the parts for woodwind and brass predominate so thoroughly and to such bright effect that one is tempted to think that Stravinsky completely omitted the upper strings (as he had done in the Symphony of Psalms a year earlier) to allow the soloist to stand out. Actually the orchestra is quite large (and includes the full body of strings), but Stravinsky scores the solo violin in a wide variety of chamber-music groupings. The result is thus less like a grand romantic concerto, in which the soloist is David pitted against an orchestral Goliath, and rather more like one of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, with the soloist enjoying the role of primus inter pares.
As is often the case when Stravinsky uses elements of an older style in this period, he takes gestures that sound stable and solid—the turn figure in the trumpets right after the opening chords, the repeated eighth notes—and uses them in different ways, so that the expectations they raise are sometimes confirmed and sometimes denied. What is an upbeat? a downbeat? What meter are we in, anyway? The witty play of older stylistic clichés in a new and unexpected arrangement is one possible meaning of “neo-classic” in Stravinsky’s work.
The two middle movements are both labeled “Aria,” a name sometimes given by Bach to predominantly lyrical slow movements. Aria I is the minor-key lament of the concerto, but a gentle one; Aria II is the real lyric showpiece. The melodic lines have the kind of sinuous curve found in an embellished slow movement by Bach. Stravinsky himself commented that the one older concerto that might reveal an influence on his work was the Bach concerto for two violins. His predilection for instrumental pairs hints at that in the earlier movements, especially the Toccata, but the last movement is most charmingly explicit: after the solo violin has run through duets with a bassoon, a flute, even a solo horn, the orchestra’s concert- master suddenly takes off on a solo of his own—or rather a duet with the principal soloist—thus creating the two-violin texture of the Bach concerto.
STEVEN LEDBETTER
Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.
