Tchaikovsky’s Concerto in D for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 35—today one of his most frequently performed works—carries somewhat unfortunate baggage. On July 18, 1877, Tchaikovsky married Antonini Ivanova Milioukov. As he admitted to his patron Nadezhda von Meck, “I faced a painful choice: I must preserve my freedom at the price of the girl’s ruin...or I must marry. I could only make the latter choice.” After trying unsuccessfully to avoid his wife through various travels, the composer waded into an icy river in hopes of contracting pneumonia. Finally, he convinced his brother Anatoly to forge a telegram summoning him to St. Petersburg, where a doctor prescribed divorce and a change of surroundings as the cure for Tchaikovsky’s mental state. A few weeks later, he began a tour of Berlin, Switzerland, and Italy.

Presumably rejuvenated, Tchaikovsky began writing his violin concerto in March 1878. As he wrote to von Meck, “For the first time in my life I have begun to work at a new piece before finishing the one on hand...I could not resist the pleasure of sketching out the concerto, and allowed myself to be so carried away that the sonata has been set aside.” To write the work, the composer partnered with violinist Yosif Kotek, who played through the solo part as it was composed. Neither Kotek nor the work’s intended dedicatee, Russian violinist Leopold Auer, would perform the work in public, however, perhaps as the result of the concerto’s high degree of difficulty. While Tchaikovsky found this hurdle somewhat daunting, worrying that it would have “the effect of casting this unfortunate child of my imagination into hopeless oblivion,” he eventually persuaded Russian violinist Adolph Brodsky to give the concerto’s first performance in 1881.

The Violin Concerto opens with an orchestral statement that is soon exposed as an introduction; the solo violin carries the weight of introducing the thematic material. Also unusual is the cadenza, which Tchaikovsky composed rather than leaving it to the soloist to improvise on the spot. The pensive Canzonetta, composed in a day after Kotek and Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest rejected the original slow movement, leads directly into the fiercely virtuosic Finale.

While Tchaikovsky was well pleased with his violin concerto, the public’s opinion upon its premiere was markedly different. As critic Eduard Hanslick famously wrote of the work,

The violin no longer played, but torn apart, pounded black and blue...Friedrich Fischer...once said that there existed pictures one could see stink. Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto brings us face to face for the first time with the revolting thought: may there not also exist musical compositions that we can hear stink?

Considering the concerto’s popularity today, Hanslick’s vehement indictment is more than ironic—and Tchaikovsky himself, so hurt by the review that he committed it to memory, would have been well pleased to see history prove the critic wrong.

©Jennifer More, 2021