Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755–1824)
Moderato
Adagio
Agitato assai
Don't be surprised if you haven't heard of Viotti, or don't know any of his music. This concerto is his most often recorded, but the audible page turning by one of the most famous of its interpreters on record, Isaac Stern, suggests that he didn't expect to be asked to play it often enough to make it worth memorising. At least his curiosity led him to this concerto, which he admittedly plays very well. Perhaps he knew, as one of the finest players of Brahms's two concertos featuring the violin, that this concerto of Viotti's was a favourite both with Brahms and with his great violinist friend Joseph Joachim. In the Double Concerto for Violin and Cello, which was Brahms's work of reconciliation with Joachim after a bitter break in their friendship, Brahms refers in the first movement to one of Viotti's themes, knowing that Joachim loved this music as well as he did.
Yet posterity has been carelessly forgetful. One of the most quoted proofs of Brahms's devotion to the musical past is in a letter he wrote to another great musician and friend, Clara Schumann, in 1878. Here Brahms is giving his opinion about what Clara should play at a concert in Hamburg, and approves Mozart (K.466) and Mendelssohn. He goes on 'The fact that people in general do not understand or respect the best things...is well known, and it is owing to this that people like ourselves thrive and come to fame. If only people knew that they get from us in drops what they might drink by the gallon from these sources.' This usually appears in standard musical reference works as referring only to Mozart, but Brahms actually wrote '...the best things, such as the Mozart concerto and the above by Viotti'. Earlier in the letter he had written 'The A minor Concerto by Viotti is a particular favourite of mine'.
Mozart, too, was an admirer of Viotti. Probably for one of his subscription concerts in Vienna, he composed extra trumpet and timpani parts for Viotti's Concerto No.16. Mozart's own style of writing for the violin was influenced by the French school of which Viotti by that stage was the leading representative. He was a Frenchman by adoption, like his friend and colleague Cherubini. Viotti's first resounding success was his début at the Concert Spirituel in Paris on March 17, 1782. Although within a year he had retired from public concert-giving, into the service of Queen Marie-Antoinette, his concerts left an indelible impression. This son of a horn-playing blacksmith from Piedmont is usually described as the founder of the 'modern' (i.e. nineteenth century) French school of violin playing. This is probably true as far as technique is concerned: Viotti, whose teacher was Pugnani, taught or influenced other founders of the French school, Kreutzer, Baillot and Rode. He also persuaded the Parisians of the beauty of the Stradivari violins, and may have assisted Tourte in creating the modern bow.
Why did Viotti's playing make such an impression? The qualities required by the concertos which are his most important works are confirmed by contemporary descriptions, which stress his beauty of sound, power, and expression: 'large,strong, full tone... powerful, penetrating singing legato...variety, charm, shadow and light...the greatest diversity of bowing'. The breadth and power which could bring off a concerto with so expansive and leisurely a first movement as this one were new. The style, while virtuosic, is also classical, and the display is never allowed to distort musical proportion.
It is this music which the nineteenth century thought of as Classical violin music. We know that Beethoven was familiar with the concertos of Viotti, who was also one of the starting points for Spohr. Both Mozart and Viotti were probably influenced by Parisian violinist-composers of the 1770s and 1780s (like Simon le Duc, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, M.-A. Guérin and others), all overshadowed after 1782 by Viotti's great success.
The remainder of Viotti's life was disrupted by the political upheavals of the French Revolution. He was closely associated with members of the royal family, under whose patronage he established a new opera house, the Theâtre de Monsieur, for the performance of Italian and French works, including those of his friend Cherubini. In 1792 Viotti's position became untenable, and he fled to London, where he was the featured violinist in Salomon's concert series. He played in Haydn's benefit concerts in 1794 and 1795, therefore almost certainly in the concert in which Haydn's Symphony No.104 was first heard (no, we didn't know that when we programmed them together!). Ironically, Viotti in 1798 fell victim to the British government's Jacobin scare, a kind of McCarthyism before its time. He protested his innocence, in a letter to The Times, of any radical political activity , but had to live in Germany. When he returned to England, possibly in 1801, he retired from music almost altogether, and made his living from a wine business. Visiting his friends in Paris he played for them in private, and they were amazed that he had lost none of its power.
In 1818 Viotti's former patron the Count of Provence became King Louis XVIII of France, and in 1819 Viotti was appointed director of the Paris Opéra. In this and other theatrical posts he lost money. He returned to London in 1823, his health failed, and he died on March 3, 1824 in the home of his friends Mr. and Mrs. William Chinnery, leaving many debts and two violins, one of them a Stradivarius.
Viotti composed 29 violin concertos. The first 19 were all composed for Paris, and of these the last six (14-19), all but one of them in minor keys, illustrate a development away from the galant style and towards Romanticism. The last ten concertos were written in London, and their fuller orchestration, more varied accompaniment, and richer texture may have been influenced, Viotti expert Chappell White suggests, by contact with Haydn's late symphonies. The brilliance of the Paris concertos is here tempered by a pervasive lyricism. One is constantly reminded, in concerto No.22, of the motto Viotti took from Tartini: 'Per ben suonare, bisogna ben cantare' (to sound well, the instrument must sing). Let Brahms have the last word on this concerto: 'It is a remarkable work showing great facility of invention. It sounds as if he were improvising and the whole thing is conceived and carried out in such a masterly fashion'.