Violin Concerto, Op. 64

After one bar of string accompaniment, the solo violin begins the melody in E minor. Clarinets and bassoons hold their notes, and the basses play pizzicato. The soloist has the theme before the orchestra has played a tune of its own.

A rising violin run leads to fortissimo chords, and the full orchestra plays the opening melody in E minor while the soloist rests. Until this point the violin has carried the melody over accompaniment for about a minute.

A chromatic transition follows. The orchestra gives out a transition theme, and the soloist carries it in running notes through crescendos and diminuendos over sustained chords. The music moves away from E minor towards G major and the second theme.

On 30 July 1838 Mendelssohn wrote to Ferdinand David, leader of Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra, that he would like to write him a violin concerto the next winter. He added that “one in E minor sticks in my head, the beginning of which will not leave me in peace.”

The violin descends to its open G string and holds it. Flutes and clarinets play the new G major tune above it, marked tranquillo. For this first phrase the soloist supplies the bass, and the orchestral strings are silent.

Mendelssohn finished the autograph on 16 September 1844; it is kept in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków. There the movement is headed “Allegro con fuoco” (with fire). While preparing the première he changed the heading to the printed “Allegro molto appassionato” and lengthened the cadenza.

After a held chord, the violin resumes its opening melody over quiet strings and pizzicato basses. It moves into running scales, with the woodwinds playing in alternation. In the development the two themes of the exposition are combined.

The development reaches its first climax. Strings and winds hold fortissimo chords with long trills, and the soloist, marked con forza, trills with them. A diminuendo follows in the whole orchestra.

The autograph is dated 16 September 1844. On 17 December, three months before the première, Mendelssohn asked David whether the lengthened cadenza was written smoothly, then added: “Do not laugh at me too much, I feel ashamed in any case, but I cannot help it; I am just groping around.”

Ferdinand David gave the first performance on 13 March 1845, at the last Gewandhaus concert of the winter in Leipzig. Niels Gade, the concerts’ music director, conducted. Mendelssohn was living in Frankfurt and led none of that season’s concerts; he had promised David a concerto “next winter” in a letter of 30 July 1838.

The solo violin plays the cadenza alone, with chords, wide leaps, trills and arpeggios. Mendelssohn placed it in the middle of the movement, before the opening theme returns. The violin continues its arpeggios when the orchestra re-enters.

Mendelssohn wrote the cadenza out in full. In the printed score its rhythm moves in stages from broken-chord quavers to triplets to semiquaver arpeggios. The violin diminishes to pianissimo as the orchestra returns.

The cadenza leads directly into the recapitulation. The opening melody returns in flutes, oboes and first violins, and beneath it the soloist continues the semiquaver arpeggios across the strings, pianissimo.

Mendelssohn wrote the cadenza out and placed it at the end of the development, before the recapitulation. Donald Tovey called the concerto “the original type of the majority of modern concertos”. Tchaikovsky later used the same plan in his Violin Concerto.

The second subject returns in E major. The violin holds a low E while the woodwinds play the theme, with oboes and bassoons now joining the flutes and clarinets. G♯ colours the tonic before the movement turns back to E minor.

The closing stretch returns to E minor and speeds up. Mendelssohn writes Più presto, then Sempre più presto, and finally Presto. The violin plays runs over wind chords and accented off-beats in the strings.

The first movement closes in E minor, and the first bassoon holds B after the other instruments stop. The note carries over into the Andante. As the slow movement begins, it rises a semitone to C.

The first bassoon holds its B after the first movement ends, then rises a semitone to C. A flute enters and the low strings begin to move. The semitone step takes the concerto from E minor into the C major of the Andante.

The solo violin plays a melody in C major above a rising and falling accompaniment in the strings, marked pianissimo. The winds rest through its opening phrases.

The Andante has three parts: the violin’s C major melody, an A minor middle section and the melody’s return. Donald Tovey found “true breadth and dignity” in it, and in the middle section “agitation and anxiety” without fussiness.

Mendelssohn linked all three movements without a break. Weber’s Konzertstück had already done this, though no work called a concerto had. Steven Ledbetter added that the Liszt concertos and many others are hard to imagine without Mendelssohn’s example.

Ferdinand David pressed Mendelssohn for a concerto and asked that it be brilliant. In an 1839 letter Mendelssohn replied, “How can anyone like me do this?”, and added that the whole first solo was to lie on the E string. The concerto, promised in 1838, was finished in 1844.

In July 1839 Mendelssohn told Ferdinand David that he needed only “a few days in a good mood” to produce the promised concerto. He did not work on it seriously until July 1844, and he finished the score that September.

Trumpets and timpani enter in the middle section, in A minor, above string tremolos. When the solo violin takes up the tune, it also plays the quick repeated notes beneath it, so the one bow carries both the melody and the tremolo accompaniment.

In the middle section the orchestra builds chord by chord to fortissimo, with sforzandi and long crescendos. Under it the soloist plays continuous semiquavers.

The violin plays its first melody again in C major. Beneath it the strings keep up a quick, quiet accompaniment of repeated notes, carried over from the middle section. Flute and clarinet add short responses around the solo line.

In March 1948 the Columbia librarian Helene F. Chmura signed a label order for ML 4001, a recording of this concerto by Nathan Milstein with the New York Philharmonic under Bruno Walter. Columbia released it that June, when the company launched the long-playing record.

Sempre più piano — softer all the time. The violin’s last runs descend to a soft C major chord, and the strings play pizzicato beneath the final wind notes. A pause is written over the last chord, and the finale’s linking phrase follows on the next page.

The solo violin and strings play a short bridge out of the Andante, fourteen bars in E minor marked Allegretto non troppo. The winds and brass rest while the violin plays one more phrase.

Two short fanfares for bassoons, horns, trumpets and timpani open the Allegro molto vivace. Between them the violin plays a rising figure. The strings then accompany its quick tune in E major, playing lightly.

Steven Ledbetter described this finale as one of those brilliantly light and fleet-footed examples of “fairy music” that Mendelssohn made so uniquely his own. The strings play with light bows beneath the solo violin’s fast notes.

The solo violin plays a short, light second theme in B major. Arpeggios follow, rising and falling across the strings. The orchestra plays short phrases between the soloist’s passages.

The orchestra plays its own version of the opening tune, and the development moves towards G major. The violin continues in quick notes while short wind phrases enter around it.

The opening theme returns in the solo violin, and the strings add a new countermelody beneath it. Mendelssohn marks the passage sempre pp, always pianissimo.

On 23 October 1845 Mendelssohn conducted the Gewandhaus’s third concert of the season, and Ferdinand David played the concerto there for the second time. Mendelssohn had conducted none of the previous winter’s concerts, including the première. Over several years David had helped shape the solo part through letters and advice.

The violin holds long trills while the woodwinds play the main tune. Pizzicato strings mark the pulse underneath.

After the trills the violin returns to running notes, and the coda moves towards E major. The orchestra plays sharply accented chords against the violin’s scales. A final upward run leads soloist and orchestra into the closing chords together.