Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35

Composed: 1878

BY Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

BORN

There is no shortage of great masterpieces that met with negative criticism at their premiere, but few have fared worse than Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. This may sound surprising, since this work — now one of the most popular of all concertos — has none of the revolutionary spirit of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung operas, or Beethoven’s heroic Third Symphony, to name just three works that generated heated controversies around the time they debuted. Yet, at its premiere, the Tchaikovsky concerto clashed with the expectations of people who had strong opinions about what a violin concerto ought to be like.

May 7, 1840 near Votkinsk, Russia

DIED

November 6, 1893

St. Petersburg, Russia

The great violinist and teacher Leopold Auer, for whom Tchaikovsky had written the concerto, rejected it. And the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, a friend of Brahms and a fierce opponent of Wagner, uttered the immortal phrase that the concerto “stank to the ear,” after the 1881 premiere. The harshness and vulgarity of these opinions could not help but exacerbate Tchaikovsky’s depressive tendencies, which were rarely far from the surface. The composer never forgot Hanslick’s caustic remarks.

Why this unusually strong resistance to a work that did not challenge the existing world order but “simply” wanted to be what it was: a brilliant and beautiful violin concerto? In Hanslick’s case, the answer may lie in the critic’s inability to accept symphonic music that was not Germanic in spirit. The first great violin concerto to come from Russia, Tchaikovsky’s work certainly struck a chord that was disconcertingly foreign in Vienna. (It is ironic that Hanslick thought of Tchaikovsky as a Russian barbarian, while in Russia, the composer was considered a “Westernizer” whose music was not as truly Russian as that of the group of composers known as the “Mighty Five.”)

As for Auer, the novel technical demands of the piece may have seemed out of place to him. He was quoted later as feeling that certain passages were “not in keeping with the demeanor of the violin,” as he knew the instrument. To his credit, he took a second look and changed his mind soon enough. Once it was introduced by others, he became a great advocate of the concerto — although, he modified certain passages to conform to his view of how they should have been written. Auer, one of the great violin teachers of his era, taught the work to many of his own star students, including Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz, and Efrem Zimbalist.

Tchaikovsky wrote his Violin Concerto in the spring of 1878. In order to recover from the recent trauma of his ill-fated and short-lived marriage to Antonina Milyukova, the composer retreated to the Swiss village of Clarens, on the shores of Lake Geneva, accompanied by his brother Modest and a 22-year-old violinist named Yosif Kotek, who assisted him in matters of violin technique.

The composition progressed so effortlessly that the whole concerto was written in only three weeks, with an extra week taken up by the orchestration. During this time, Tchaikovsky wrote not only the three concerto movements that we know, but a fourth one as well. The initial second movement, “Méditation,” was rejected at an early run through and replaced with the present “Canzonetta,” written in a single day. Due to Auer’s initial unfavorable reaction, no violinist accepted the work for performance for three years, until the young Adolf Brodsky, a Russian-born virtuoso living in Vienna, chose it for his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic.

One of the things that makes this concerto so great is the ease with which Tchaikovsky moves from one mood to the next. Lyrical and dramatic, robustly folk-like, and tenderly sentimental moments follow one another without the slightest incongruity, just as a variety of elements had in his First Piano Concerto, written three years earlier. Another remarkable feature is the combination of virtuosity with emotional depth. Although the technical difficulties of the solo part are tremendous, every note also expresses something that goes far beyond virtuosic fireworks. All in all, it is one of the greatest violin concertos ever written, and no critic after Hanslick has ever challenged its status again or smelled anything unpleasant in the work!

Duration: 35 minutes