Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto became one of the greatest

Person: Felix Mendelssohn
Lived: 1809–1847
Field: Music
From: German

The story

Felix Mendelssohn and the violinist Ferdinand David shared a remarkable bond. David was born in 1810 in the same house in Hamburg where Mendelssohn had been born the year before, and the two were childhood friends. When Mendelssohn became principal conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1835, he made David its concertmaster, and David later taught at the conservatory Mendelssohn founded in Leipzig in 1843.

In a letter of 30 July 1838 Mendelssohn told David that he wanted to write him a violin concerto, adding that one in E minor was running through his head and that its beginning gave him no peace. The work took six more years. Mendelssohn was busy with other music, including his Scottish Symphony, and with an unhappy period working for the King of Prussia in Berlin, and he was often unsure of himself. Throughout, he wrote regularly to David, asking for technical and musical advice. The concerto was one of the first written with the close involvement of a professional violinist, a model of collaboration that many later composers followed.

The autograph score is dated 16 September 1844. The concerto was first performed in Leipzig on 13 March 1845, with David as soloist playing his Guarneri violin. Mendelssohn was ill, so the Danish composer Niels Gade conducted. The work was well received from the start.

It was also new in form. The violin enters almost immediately instead of waiting for a long orchestral introduction, and the three movements are linked so that they are played without a break. The great violinist Joseph Joachim called it one of the four great violin concertos, alongside those of Beethoven, Brahms and Bruch, and Charles Rosen described it as the most successful synthesis of the Classical concerto tradition and the Romantic virtuoso style.

Today it is one of the most frequently performed violin concertos in the world and a milestone that every aspiring concert violinist is expected to master. When the long-playing record was introduced in 1948, the first LP released was a recording of the concerto by Nathan Milstein and the New York Philharmonic.

Why it matters

The concerto has given generations of violinists and audiences one of the most loved works in classical music, and a model of collaboration between composer and performer.