Max Bruch
(1838-1920)
Vorspiel (Prelude): Allegro moderato –
Adagio
Finale: Allegro energico
Max Bruch’s First Violin Concerto is one of the greatest success stories in the history of music. The violinist Joseph Joachim, who gave the first performance of the definitive version in 1868, and had a strong advisory role in its creation, compared it with the other famous 19th century German violin concertos, those of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Brahms. Bruch’s, said Joachim, is ‘the richest, the most seductive.’ (Joachim was closely associated as performer with all four of these concertos, and with the creation of Brahms’ concerto, which he premiered in 1879). Soon Bruch was able to report that his concerto ‘is beginning a fabulous career’. In addition to Joachim, the most famous violinists of the day took it into their repertoire: Auer, Ferdinand David, Sarasate. With his first important large-scale orchestral work, the 30 year-old Rhinelander from Cologne had a winner. Joachim thought the first version, when Bruch sent it to him, ‘very violinistic’, and particularly singled out the slow movement, ‘which I shall especially enjoy hearing’. Indeed, this is the core of the work, hailed by a leading German concert guide as ‘perhaps the most rewarding piece of music that has ever been written for the violin’.
The success of this concerto was to be a mixed blessing for Bruch. Few composers so long-lived and prolific are so nearly forgotten except for a single work (Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra is Bruch’s only other frequently performed piece, its use of Jewish melodies having erroneously led many to assume that Bruch himself was Jewish). Bruch followed up this violin concerto with two more, and another six pieces for violin and orchestra. But although he constantly encouraged violinists to play his other concertos, he had to concede that none of them matched his first. This must have been especially frustrating considering that Bruch had sold full rights in it to a publisher for the paltry sum of 250 thalers.
In 1911 an American friend, Arthur Abell, asked Bruch why he, a pianist, had taken such an interest in the violin. He replied ‘because the violin can sing a melody better than the piano can, and melody is the soul of music.’ Bruch, whose mother and wife were singers, composed several oratorios, regarded (especially Odysseus) as his most significant works by many. One of those, Donald Tovey, said that nobody who can appreciate the First Violin Concerto ‘will believe for a moment that its composer has written nothing else worthy of the like success’. The public and musicians remain obstinately unconvinced.
It may have been instinctive, as Tovey also observed, for Bruch to write beautifully. Nevertheless, this violin concerto was the result of long preparation and careful revision. It was the composer’s association with Johann Naret-Koning, concertmaster of the Mainz orchestra, which first set Bruch on the path of composing for the violin. He did not feel sure of himself, regarding it as ‘very audacious’ to write a violin concerto, and reported that between 1864 and 1868 ‘I rewrote my concerto at least half a dozen times, and conferred with x violinists’. The most important of these was Joachim. Many years later Bruch had reservations about the publication of his correspondence with Joachim about the concerto, worrying that ‘the public would virtually believe when it read all this that Joachim composed the concerto, and not I’.
As we have seen, Joachim thought Bruch was on the right track from the first. Bruch was lucky to have the advice of so serious an artist, a composer himself, well aware of how the ‘concerto problem’ presented itself 20 years after Mendelssohn’s E minor Violin Concerto. Like Mendelssohn, Bruch had brought the solo violin in right from the start, after a drum roll and a motto-like figure for the winds. The alternation of solo and orchestral flourishes suggests to Michael Steinberg a dreamy variant of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. With the main theme launched by the solo violin in sonorous double-stopping, and a contrasting descending second subject, a conventional opening movement in sonata form seems to be under way. The rhythmic figure heard in the plucked bass strings plays an important part. But at the point where the recapitulation would begin, Bruch, having brought back the opening chords and flourishes, uses them instead to prepare a soft subsiding into the slow movement, which begins without a pause. Bruch called the first movement Introduzione-Fantasia, then changed its heading to Vorspiel (Prelude), and asked Joachim rather anxiously whether he shouldn’t call the whole work a Fantasy rather than a Concerto. ‘The designation “concerto” is completely apt’, replied Joachim. ‘Indeed, the second and third movements are too fully developed for a Fantasy. The separate sections of the work cohere in a lovely relationship, and yet – and this is the most important thing – there is sufficient contrast’. Joachim added that Spohr calls his Gesangsszene a ‘Concerto’. This once famous but largely forgotten work of 1816, Spohr’s Eighth Concerto, played without pause ‘in the manner of a vocal scena’, is important background for Bruch’s concerto as for Mendelssohn’s. Spohr pioneered Romantic composers’ tendency to think of the concerto as a continuously unfolding and thematically linked whole.
The songful character of the violin is to the fore in Bruch’s Adagio. Two beautiful themes are linked by a memorable transitional idea featuring a rising scale. The themes are artfully and movingly developed and combined, until the second ‘enters grandly below and so carries us out in the full tide of its recapitulation’ (Tovey).
Although the second movement comes to a quiet full close, the third begins in the same warm key of E flat major, with a crescendo modulating to the G major of the Finale, another indication of an overarching unity. The Hungarian or Gypsy dance flavour of the last movement’s lively first theme must be a tribute to the native land of Joachim, who had composed a ‘Hungarian’ concerto for violin. Bruch’s theme was surely in Brahms’ mind at the same place in the concerto he composed for Joachim. Bruch’s writing for the solo violin, grateful yet never gratuitous throughout the concerto, here scales new heights of virtuosity. Of the bold and grand and second subject, Tovey observes that Max Bruch’s work ‘shows one of its noblest features just where some of its most formidable rivals become vulgar’. In this concerto for once Bruch was emotional enough to balance his admirable skill and tastefulness. The G minor Violin Concerto is just right, and its success shows no sign of wearing out.
First published for ABC/Symphony Australia orchestras