Violin Concerto in D, Op. 61
Ludwig van Beethoven

[1806]

When the 21-year-old Beethoven arrived in Vienna in 1792, he was following in the footsteps of his hero Mozart, whose death a year earlier left an opening for a hotshot keyboard player. Beethoven hustled for all sorts of paying gigs around town—teaching lessons, performing public and private concerts, and writing accessible music that could be published and sold to amateurs.

One of the most effective ways for popular musicians in Vienna to rake in a good chunk of income on a single night was to self-produce a concert for their own benefit. When Beethoven’s friend Franz Clement asked for a concerto to play on his own benefit concert, the composer felt obliged to come through for the violinist—who had introduced Beethoven’s Third Symphony on an earlier benefit concert, and who had been instrumental in getting the opera Fidelio produced.

Beethoven threw together an entire Violin Concerto with uncharacteristic speed, cutting it so close that the soloist supposedly had to sight-read his part at the performance. The Violin Concerto starts with a quintessential Beethoven theme: a single note, D, struck five consecutive times by the timpanist. This modest tapping motive proves to be the backbone of the substantial first movement. One exceptionally refined moment comes just after the first movement cadenza, when the violin offers a guileless melody over a naked accompaniment of plucked strings.

The slow movement continues the rarified mood with a stately theme and variations accompanied only by the lower winds and muted strings. The Rondo finale, reached without pause through a solo cadenza, supplies the concerto with a more extroverted conclusion. Taking a page from Haydn, who loved to introduce a theme softly and then hammer it hard the second time, Beethoven goes a step farther by delaying the impact until two melodic cycles have passed by, the second voiced even more delicately than the first.

Solo violin; flute, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, strings