Violin Concerto in D major, Op.61

On December 23, 1806, to the delight of his Viennese audience, Franz Clement played a violin sonata on one string only while holding the instrument upside down. Earlier in the same concert in the Theater and der Wien he had given the first performance of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, which pleased the audience rather less.

Clement was 26 years old at the time, director of music at the Theater an der Wien and, with Schuppanzigh and Tomasini, one of the three most famous violinists in Vienna. What persuaded Beethoven to write a concerto for him was not so much the violinist’s sensational virtuosity as his long experience of Clement’s considerable gifts as a musician. The reviews of the first performance of the Violin Concerto refer to Clement’s “customary grace and elegance” and his “genuine art and grace-fulness,” as well as his “power and assurance on the violin, which is his slave.” As the appearance of the manuscript suggests, Beethoven had enough respect for the violinist - himself the composer of a violin concerto Beethoven both knew and admired - to go through the score with him before the first performance and to write down his ideas for changes and improvements in the solo part. Several (though not all) of them were incorporated in the published version two years later.

So Beethoven obviously had faith in Clement. Without it, he would scarcely have entrusted him with the high-flown poetry of the soloist’s first entry: the violin soars upwards, floats down in a chain of triplets, and rises again to a hight unheard of by Clement’s contemporaries, there to remain and phrase the first subject even more sweetly than the oboe an octave below. In fact, Beethoven entrusts him with that inspiration a second time, though in a different key and in a slightly less elevated position, for his next entry in the development section. And the highpoint of the recapitulation is where the soloist applies similarly sublime treatment to the second subject, climbing to the end of the 1806 fingerboard and incorporating a sheer drop of an octave and a half in the melodic line.

style of the rest of the movement? Clearly what Beethoven wanted to hear from Clement was his expressive playing in the higher positions, but not necessarily on the E string. The emergence of the second subject on G and D strings after the cadenza is one example. Another is the new melody on the same two lower strings in the Larghetto where the violin’s function is otherwise mainly decorative. Of course the first movement has its virtuoso passages, and so does the final Rondo. But the point about Beethoven’s virtuoso writing - so well illustrated in the two main episodes of the Rondo and in the coda - is the strong melodic interest which is combined with physical agility. Significantly, after the cadenza and before the coda, Beethoven could not resist one last appeal to Clement’s lyrical susceptibility - in the brief but unmistakable echo of the Larghetto high on the E string.