Violin Concerto in D minor Op.47

The first performance of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, in Helsinki on 8 February 1904, is generally considered to have been a disaster. Certainly, with a substandard Helsinki Philharmonic and “a red-faced and perspiring Victor Novacek fighting a losing battle” as soloist it was not a great performance and it was not well received. But if it had been given not by the violin teacher at the Helsinki Musical Academy but by Willy Burmester – the international virtuoso for whom it was intended and who promised to play the work “in such a way that Helsinki will be at your feet” – it might have been a real disaster: Burmester might have concealed the many defects in the original score and Sibelius might never have been moved to carry out the revisions which made it the masterpiece it now is.

One thing the two versions do have in common is the inspired opening, which bears the distinction of introducing one of the longest main themes in any work of its kind. Growing out of the first two intervals (a rising second and a falling fifth) delicately poised on the solo line over rustling D minor harmonies on muted violins, it proliferates effortlessly for fifty bars or so. In the present version, which is generally more economical than the original, an early cadenza gives the orchestra, led by bassoon and lower strings, an opportunity to anticipate a change of subject. The new melody is presented in its definitive form in D flat major in double-stopped harmonies high on the solo violin. At the same time clarinet and bassoons and then a solo viola offer a quietly insistent counterpoint which eventually stimulates a surprisingly vigorous allegro molto section for orchestra alone. By means of a dramatic cadenza, the solo violin finds its way in again, recapitulates its own two themes and, when the orchestra reintroduces its allegro molto material, offers virtuoso competition on its own vigorous terms.

In the Adagio di molto – which, as the most successful of the three movements in the original version, required little revision – the orchestra again seems more concerned than the soloist to force the pace. The opening woodwind phrases are impatient in comparison with the serene melody in B flat major on the solo violin. Nothing – no pizzicato prompting on violas and cellos, no pressing syncopations on the strings as a whole, no emphatic recall of the woodwind phrases from the beginning – can unsettle the soloist. On his re-entry he immediately doubles the time values of the last orchestral idea and then, having made his point in this way, urges the orchestra itself to undertake the reprise of the main theme.

There is no such division of interest in the last movement. The orchestra provides the rhythmic impulse and the soloist duly offers the dance tune to go with it in D major. Similarly, when the orchestra introduces the second subject in G minor the soloist has nothing against it – providing he can present his own version with double-stopped harmonies and extra-emphatic rhythms. In the recapitulation, when that theme reappears on clarinets and bassoons in D minor, he adds a new dimension of virtuosity in long trills and sweetly whistled harmonics. That, however, is nothing to the sweeping gestures and heroic poses adopted in the D major coda.

Willy Burmester, who had encouraged Sibelius from the beginning of his work on the Violin Concerto, never actually played it in public. Apparently too impatient to wait until Burmester was available, the composer awarded the first performance of the revised version to Karl Halir, leader of the orchestra in Berlin, and after that event (in Berlin in October 1905, with Richard Strauss conducting) Burmester understandably lost interest.