There is so much of available literature (in books, reviews and articles) on this piece that I thought I would share instead my personal experience with the
Beethoven violin concerto.
I do not remember the year or the month or the day that I first heard this concerto, but I do remember the circumstances. I did come to this piece late (in my early 20s). My violin teacher at the time was Fredrick Mendahna, who hailed from Goa (a city made famous by Portuguese occupation; on the west coast of India). A retired grandfather he may have been, but his playing had all the punch and verve you would expect in a young violinist. Classes were in his apartment.
On one occasion I had arrived early and was limbering up as he finished his meal in the next room. I played a very impassioned but dreadful rendition of Beethoven’s Largo from his Triple Concerto. Mendahna came out as soon as I finished and while he could not have been impressed with my audacity at taking on a masterpiece like that, he did see that I was extremely fired up with Beethoven.
Instead of heading for his violin to commence class, he went to his album collection and pulled out a recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto by Yehudi Menuhin (with the great Otto Klemperer as conductor). He loaned it to me for a few weeks.
I came home that day and listened to the LP on an old mono LP player (our stereo system was in need of repair at that point). I listened to it many more times in the weeks that followed.
The music threw me! The majesty and beauty of that first movement, the sublime Largehetto and the rousing final movement…it was all beyond the most beautiful I had heard at any time before (of course, I had not yet heard the last string quartets or the last piano sonatas or the Missa Solemnis; and those make up another story!).
My father, who until then enjoyed listening to the Beethoven Triple Concerto more than any other concerto, on listening to the first few minutes of the violin concerto, could not help but wax lyrical and call the music nothing short of “divine”.
Those days of first discovery of this treasure will remain imbued in my memory as golden days; days sanctified by Beethoven, Menuhin and Klemperer reaching me across the divide of time and space and filling my heart with a sunlit serenity that I have always been able to bring back with each repeat listening. To those ‘touched’ by this masterpiece, it may not be difficult to understand it when I say that the Larghetto has cast its warmth and light on many a dark moment and I invariably come out of its exalted air feeling with certainty that life is nothing but beautiful.
While the Brahms violin concerto may be more difficult and Mendelssohn’s may be more violinistic, the Beethoven is by all accounts the summit of the violin concerto repertoire. I have since then heard recordings of this concerto by Josef Suk, Wolfgang Schneiderhan, Jascha Heifetz, Maxim Vengerov, Anne Sophie Mutter, Joshua Bell and countless others; but none have approached the radiance and power of that first recording I heard (including, in my estimate, Menuhin’s own earlier recording with Furtwangler).
Have you a story to tell on the Beethoven violin concerto?
