Violin Concerto

Jean (Johan Julius Christian) Sibelius was born at Tavastehus (Hämeenlinna), Finland, on December 8, 1865, and died at Jarvenpää, at his country home near Helsingfors (Helsinki), on September 20, 1957. He began work on his violin concerto in 1902, completed it in short score—that is, with the orchestration worked out but not written down in detail—in the fall of 1903, and finished the full score about new year 1904. The first performance was given in Helsingfors on February 8, 1904, with Viktor Nováček as soloist and with the composer conducting. Sibelius then withdrew the work for revision, and in its new and present form it had its premiere in Berlin on October 19, 1905, with Karl Halir as soloist and with Richard Strauss on the podium.

In addition to the violin soloist, the score of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto calls for an orchestra of 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings.

In no violin concerto is the soloist’s first note—delicately dissonant and off the beat—so beautiful. Indeed, in September 1902, Sibelius wrote to his wife that he had just had “a marvelous opening idea” for such a concerto. But even with that inspired start, the history of the work was troubled. Sibelius was drinking heavily and seemed virtually to be living at Kämp’s and König’s restaurants. He was limitlessly resourceful when it came to finding ways of running from this work in progress. He behaved outrageously to Willy Burmester, the German violinist who had been concertmaster in Helsingfors for a while in the ’90s, who admired Sibelius and was ambitious on his behalf, who stirred him up to compose a violin concerto, and who of course hoped to give its first performance. Sibelius sent the score to Burmester (“Wonderful! Masterly! Only once before have I spoken in such terms to a composer, and that was when Tchaikovsky showed me his concerto!”), let word get out that the work would be dedicated to him, but at the same time pushed for a premiere at a time when Burmester was not free or would not have had time to learn a piece that in its original form was still more difficult than it is now. Viktor Nováček—not to be confused with the better-known Ottokar Nováček, composer of a popular Perpetuum mobile—was a violin teacher of no distinction and without reputation as a performer. That he would fail with the concerto was a foregone conclusion, yet that was the destructive path Sibelius chose. After the premiere, Burmester offered his services once again for a series of performances in October 1904—”All my twenty-five years’ stage experience, my artistry and insight will be placed to serve this work...I shall play the concerto in Helsingfors in such a way that the city will be at your feet”—only to find himself passed over again, this time in favor of Karl Halir, concertmaster in Berlin, a former member of the famous Joachim Quartet, and himself a quartet leader of great distinction. Moreover, the dedication finally went to Ferenc von Vecsey, a Hungarian violinist born in 1893, who, in his prodigy days, had been one of the concerto’s earliest champions.

From Bach to Bartók, many of the great keyboard concertos have been written by composers for themselves. Rather more of the significant violin concertos have been written for others to play. Sibelius wrote his for a kind of ghostly self. He was a failed violinist. He had begun lessons late, at fourteen, but then, “the violin took me by storm, and for the next ten years it was my dearest wish, my overriding ambition, to become a great virtuoso.” In fact, aside from the handicap of the late start and the provincial level of even the best teaching available to him in Finland, he had neither the gift of physical coordination nor the appropriate temperament. In 1890-91, when he was studying composition in Vienna with Robert Fuchs and Karl Goldmark, he played in the orchestra at the conservatory (its intonation gave him headaches) and on January 9, 1891, auditioned for the Vienna Philharmonic. “When he got back to his room,” we read in Erik Tawaststjerna’s biography, “Sibelius broke down and wept. Afterwards he sat at the piano and began to practice scales.” With that he gave up, though a diary entry for 1915 records a dream of being twelve and a virtuoso. The concerto is, in any event, imbued both with his feeling for the instrument and the pain of his farewell to his “dearest wish” and “overriding ambition.”

The two violin concertos that most extraordinarily explore the structural and expressive potential of cadenzas are Elgar’s and Schoenberg’s. Without intending anything as theatrical or fantastic, Sibelius assigns a role of unprecedented importance to his first-movement cadenza, which, in fact, takes the place and function of the development section. What leads up to that crucial point is a sequence of ideas beginning with the sensitive, dreamy melody that introduces the voice of the soloist and continuing (via a short cadenza of a conventional sort) with a declamatory statement upon which Sibelius’s mark is ineluctable, an impassioned, superviolinistic recitation in sixths and octaves, and so to a long tutti that slowly subsides from furious march music to wistful pastoral to darkness. Out of that darkness the cadenza erupts. It is an occasion for sovereign bravura, and at the same time it is brilliantly, imaginatively, and economically composed. Whether comparing his own work with the Brahms concerto, which he first heard in Berlin in January 1905, or, many years later, with the Prokofiev D major, Sibelius set store by having composed a soloistic concerto rather than a symphonic one. True, there is none of the close-knit dialogue characteristic of the greatest classical concertos from Mozart to Brahms: Sibelius opposes rather than meshes solo and orchestra (or the orchestra as accompanist). True also that the Sibelius is one of the really smashing virtuoso concertos. It would be a mistake, though, to associate it with the merely virtuosic tradition represented by the concertos of, say, Tchaikovsky and Bruch (and perhaps even the elegant Mendelssohn). This first movement with its bold sequence of disparate ideas, its quest for the unity behind them, its drastic substitute for a conventional development, its recapitulation that continues to explore, rearrange, and develop, its wedding of violinistic brilliance to compositional purposes of uncommon originality, is one in which the breath of the symphonist is not to be mistaken.

The second and third movements proceed from another level of ambition, which does not mean, however, that the Adagio is anything other than one of the most moving pages Sibelius ever achieved. Between its introductory measures and the main theme there is a fascinating disparity. Clarinets and oboes in pairs suggest an idea of rather tentative tone (and surprisingly Wagnerian cast), a gentle beginning leading to the entry of the solo violin and to a melody of vast breadth. It is to be played sonoro ed espressivo. It speaks in tones we know well and that touch us deeply, and it took me years of knowing it before I realized that the world, the gesture it evokes, is Beethoven’s, and particularly the Cavatina in the B-flat quartet, Opus 130. Sibelius himself never found, perhaps never sought, such a melody again: this, too, is farewell. Very lovely, later in the movement, is the sonorous fantasy that accompanies the melody (now in clarinet and bassoon) with scales, all pianissimo, broken octaves moving up in the violin, and the soft rain of slow scales in flutes and plucked strings.

“Evidently a polonaise for polar bears,” said Donald Francis Tovey of the finale. The charmingly aggressive main theme was an old one, going back to a string quartet from 1890. As the movement goes on, the rhythm becomes more and more giddily inventive, especially in matters of the recklessly across-the-beat bravura embellishments the soloist fires over the themes. It builds a drama that evokes the Dvořák D minor symphony Sibelius so much enjoyed when he heard it in Berlin in 1890, to end in utmost and syncopated brilliance.

Michael Steinberg

Michael Steinberg was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1979, and after that of the San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic. Oxford University Press has published three compilations of his program notes, devoted to symphonies, concertos, and works for chorus and orchestra.

The first American performance of the Sibelius Violin Concerto was given on November 30, 1906, with Vassily Safanov conducting the New York Philharmonic and soloist Maud Powell (who was also the first to play the Dvořák and Tchaikovsky concertos in America, and would be soloist for the first BSO performances of the Sibelius in April 1907).

The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto featured Maud Powell on April 19 and 20, 1907, with Karl Muck conducting (the program also included the Boston premiere of Grieg’s In Autumn and the repeat, “by public request,” of a brilliant new work introduced to the U.S. by the BSO earlier in the season, Debussy’s La Mer). Frank Peter Zimmermann was soloist and Juanjo Mena conducted the most recent BSO performances in Symphony Hall in October/November 2014; Andris Nelsons led the BSO and soloist Baiba Skride in the most recent Tanglewood performance this past summer, on July 11, 2021.