Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Opus 61: Violin Concerto

composed: 1806 (age 36)
published: 1808
first performance: Vienna, December 23, 1806 (Franz Clement, soloist; the composer conducting the Theater an der Wien orchestra)
dedicated to Stephan von Breuning

145. This is the biggest cultural gorilla so far, and I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard the whole thing before. No, wait, not ashamed. Just not proud.

Beethoven’s music, in my experience, is for the most part not superficially very attractive. To enjoy it I must travel inward, and that takes repeated listening. During which slow process I had many conflicting thoughts about the piece, most of them inane. The best one I think was this:

Beethoven gets credit for plumbing the depths with music that feels totally unadorned, made up of very simple materials. The bareness puts us directly in the presence of the mystery of all music, a mystery that we can more easily gloss over when music is busier and provides more distraction. Beethoven harnesses the inherent strangeness of melody and harmony, of all musical sound. “Strangeness” is here interchangeable with “profundity.” That fact is interesting in itself.

They say that Beethoven’s music expresses the aspirations of the human spirit, and it certainly seems like Beethoven himself thought of it that way, but to me the emotional impulse in a piece like this is as abstract as the beauty of architecture. Musical elegance might remind one of life, but the principal appeal is the mystery of its non-signification, of elegance being its own reward. Elegance detached from being. As I said here, the peculiar status of musical things that are neither objects nor signifiers of other objects. Beethoven – especially in this piece – dispenses with most gestures toward human life and language, and leaves us alone in the room with only the unblinking sphinx face of musical beauty itself.

This could be said about Bach, too, but the beauty in Bach is of intricate woven patterns, like a geometric tessellation. Beethoven has nothing particularly geometrical about him; he superficially seems always to be saying fairly childish human things. Except that humans would never actually say them. In this piece, who could possibly be initiating that queasy four-note figure that follows the first melody? Certainly not a person; not even some personification of “fate.” The notes sound to us like real fate, like an actual message from the universe, because they are music and music never quite seems to come from people, when we are given the room to reflect on it. Beethoven’s skill is for leaving the room, for stepping aside.

I say all this as a partial explanation of what people seem to find in Beethoven, but I myself don’t always find it. Often the simplicities sound to me exactly like things humans would say, particularly humans around 1810 with bad senses of humor and no social skills. Sometimes I feel rather uncharitable indeed toward Mr. Beethoven. Maybe all this glorious sphinx-faced profundity is just the unintentional result of a composer with a striking lack of natural talent applying himself with incredible intensity to sterile materials. But beside the fact that that’s near-sacrilege, it’s also hard to reconcile with Beethoven’s increasing knack for achieving that “deep” effect as he matured. It would seem that he did in fact know what he was achieving. Nonetheless there is a mysteriously fine line between sphinx-like universality and cloddish sterility, and it is not always immediately obvious to me which side of that line I’m listening from. We are presented, in liner and program notes, with the fact that the Violin Concerto was not considered successful during Beethoven’s lifetime, that it was criticized for being bland and repetitive, as one of those “just goes to show how wrong people can be” tidbits. For my part, I can hear exactly what Beethoven’s hopelessly history-bound contemporaries were talking about. It’s an awfully repetitive piece with a lot of conventional busywork for the violin. I can also hear that it is potentially compelling in a certain expansive, sepiatone way. On rare occasions I can even hear it as profound. At least the first and second movements. But that impression is still a relatively rare and fragile one, susceptible to being sneezed away. Considering the scope of this piece’s reputation – the most noble of all concerti, or whatever – I still feel like I haven’t quite made contact. But I’ve listened many times.

I think Beethoven is a great deal less universal than the guidebooks tell us.

Comments: My favorite part of the whole work is the ominous centerpiece of the first movement’s development, when we seem to be suddenly below decks, in the quiet heart of a creaking, slowly rocking ship. The first and second themes in the first movement are oddly similar in character, making for a certain degree of monotony. There’s also a to-me-gratuitous third repetition of much of the exposition, which doesn’t help matters. The second movement is one of those Beethoven specialties where solemn repetition and decoration makes a simple idea increasingly uncanny. I know some find this movement a very deep example of that idea, but to me this has a very mild effect compared to some of the piano sonatas.

I think there’s something about being aware of the constant challenge of intonation, on the violin, that tends to yank me out of the ethereal realms, so to speak. It is an instrument that sounds like hair, whereas I want music built this way to sound like stone. This is perhaps why my favorite recording of those I heard – and this is more sacrilege – was the recording of the piano concerto arrangement that Beethoven did the next year. The piano is much more impersonal, much less susceptible to human wavering, which this piece doesn’t seem to have a place for. Also, Beethoven wrote cadenzas for that version, which he never did for the violin version. The Kreisler cadenzas that I heard repeatedly (I think I heard Joachim and Auer cadenzas too) are nothing special, if you ask me, whereas the Beethoven piano cadenzas (with timpani!) are bold and wacky and well worth hearing. The obscure Piano Concerto Op. 61a was a much more endearing companion, to me, than the great Beethoven Violin Concerto Op. 61. But maybe I just haven’t heard the right recording yet.

In lieu of a photo of Beethoven at age 36, here’s an evocative 19th-century illustration I found of Beethoven thoroughly nestled in an unearthly pastoral. This picture amuses me but I also feel that its rich oddness is in some ways entirely apt.

Dubal said:

Heifetz, NBC Symphony Orchestra, Toscanini: RCA 60261-2-RG
Kennedy, North German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Tennstedt: EMI Classics CDC 54574
Grumiaux, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Davis: Philips 420348-2
Menuhin, Philharmonia Orchestra, Furtwängler: EMI Classics CDH 69799

The Grumiaux release is, as you can see from the link, long forgotten, but the recording is now available as this. I was able to obtain, as it turned out, none of those, so I’m willing to believe that my ambivalence about the piece is simply due to not having heard a good enough recording. I’ll continue to seek out new versions. The ones I heard are below. As I said, my favorite was the piano one, but among the violinists, I’d have to go with Heifetz.

This thing where I find all the album covers and put them here is getting tedious. Follow the links to amazon and see for yourself what they look like.

Maxim Vengerov, London Symphony Orchestra / Mstislav Rostropovich. EMI 3 36403 2. 2005.
David Oistrakh, Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra / Kyril Kondrashin. BBC BBCL 4127-2. 1965.
Itzhak Perlman, Philharmonia Orchestra / Carlo Maria Giulini. EMI 5 66952 2. 1980.
Jascha Heifetz, Boston Symphony Orchestra / Charles Munch. RCA 09026-61742-2. 1955.
Isaac Stern, New York Philharmonic / Leonard Bernstein. CBS MYK 37224. 1959.
Bronislaw Huberman, National Orchestral Association / Leon Barzin. Arbiter 115. 1944.

And the piano version:
Jenő Jandó, Nicolaus Esterházy Sinfonia / Béla Drahos. Naxos 8.554288. 1997.

Scores here currently include the full score, two piano/violin reductions, and a 4-hands arrangement.