Henri Vieuxtemps: a profile

“Vieuxtemps is as remarkable a composer as he is an incomparable virtuoso.” Berlioz’s tribute to Vieuxtemps the violinist we cannot question: after all, he did hear him play. But was Vieuxtemps the composer really so remarkable? Certainly, in the middle of the 19th century when Berlioz wrote those words, he was a rare phenomenon in that, unlike Paganini and his followers, he wrote concertos that offered not only a brilliant solo part but also intrinsic musical value. As Leopold Auer put it 70 years later, “his bravura compositions are all rich in beautiful musical ideas.”

This is not to say that Vieuuxtemps did not admire Paganini. He “understood,” as he said, “the immensity of his genius” and, indeed, inherited much of his technique through his teacher Charles de Bériot. As a fellow Belgian, Bériot had taken a paternal interest in the 8-year-old Vieuxtemps’s precocious talent and later accompanied him to Paris, where aspiring Belgian violinists traditionally learned their art. Although he became a major adornment of what was later to be known as the Franco-Belgian school of violin playing, Vieuxtemps had higher ambitions, however. Inspired by Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, which was all but forgotten in Vienna when Vieuxtemps played it in that city at the age of 14, he studied counterpoint with the eminent Viennese theorist Simon Sechter and then, having settled in Paris for a year or two, worked on composition with Berlioz’s teacher Anton Reicha. When he wrote the earliest in a series of what would eventually amount to seven violin concertos he was still in his teens.

Vieuxtemps’s creative ambitions did not stop him embarking on the life of the travelling virtuoso. He made frequent visits to London and toured America three times, finding that over the course of 30 years the American audience had become very much sophisticated than on his first tour in 1843 when, he said, ‘I could not excite the Yankees except with    “Yankee doodle,” their national tune.“ He had no such problems in St Petersburg where from 1846 to 1851 he acted as solo violinist to the Tsar and as a teacher at the Theatrical Music School, contributing much to the development of violin playing in Russia.

It was in Russia that he wrote his much admired Fourth Violin Concerto in D minor, which was greeted by Berlioz as “a magnificent symphony with a principal violin.” The Fifth Violin Concerto in A minor was written in 1861 as a competition piece for the Brussels Conservatory where, ten years later, he was to become professor of violin, counting Eugène Ysaÿe among his pupils. Sadly, however,    after two years in the post, he suffered a stroke and was forced to resign in 1879. He died two years later.

Gerald Larner © 2010