To late-nineteenth-century audiences Brahms was the ‘chosen one’ of Schumann’s celebrated ‘New Paths’ eulogy (October 1853), a young man like Minerva sprung ‘fully armed from the head of Kronos—by whose cradle Graces and Heroes have stood watch’ (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik). His friend Georg(e) Henschel—the British-domiciled first conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra—met him in 1874. ‘He was broad-chested, of somewhat short stature, with a tendency to stoutness. His face was then clean shaven, revealing a rather thick, genial underlip; the healthy and ruddy colour of his skin indicated a love of nature and a habit of being in the open air in all kinds of weather; his thick straight hair of brownish colour came nearly down to his shoulders. His clothes and boots were not exactly of the latest pattern, nor did they fit particularly well, but his linen was spotless. What, however, struck me most was the kindliness of his eyes. They were of a light blue; wonderfully keen and bright, with now and then a roguish twinkle in them [best described as good-natured sarcasm], and yet at times of almost childlike tenderness … In the evening of the day of our first meeting I found myself sitting with [him] in a Kneipe—one of those cosy restaurants, redolent of the mixed perfumes of beer, wine, tobacco, coffee, and food, so dear to Germans in general, and to German artists in particular’ (Personal Recollections of Johannes Brahms, 1907). A genius of opposites and contrasts, a ‘solitary altruist’, generous on the one hand, cantankerously uncivil on the other, ‘ready to snap at friends and adversaries alike’ (Max Graf, Composer and Critic, 1946), he was born into the deprived tenement quarter (Gängeviertel) of Hamburg on the Elbe—during his youth a Hanseatic port of escape to America and Australasia for refugees fleeing the Austro-Russian suppression of the 1848/49 Hungarian uprising. In the 1860s he settled in Vienna—Franz Joseph I’s capital where ‘rode the Nibelungs, [where] the immortal Pleiades of music shone out over the world … [where] all the streams of European culture converged’ (Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 1934/42).

Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), beloved of the Mendelssohn/Schumann circle. ‘First violin player, not only of his age, but of his siècle’ (Illustrated London News). His performance of the Beethoven Concerto in Hamburg, 11 May 1848, aged sixteen, was an occasion that for Brahms ‘remained vividly in his remembrance as one of the few great musical events’ of his life (Florence May, The Life of Johannes Brahms, 1905). A Hungarian Jew, Joachim, shortly to become Liszt’s concertmaster in Weimar, moved to the Hannoverian Court at the end of 1852. The following May he appeared at Schumann’s invitation at the Lower Rhine Music Festival in Düsseldorf, playing once again the Beethoven. Shortly afterwards, in his Prinzenstrasse rooms in Hannover, he and Brahms, just twenty, of ‘high voice and long fair hair’ (Albert Dietrich), met for the first time, marking the beginning of a lifelong friendship (only Joachim’s divorce in the early 1880s rupturing the harmony, Brahms siding with his wife, the contralto Amalie Schneeweiss). ‘Never in the course of my artist’s life have I been more completely overwhelmed with delighted surprise, than when [this] rather shy-mannered, blonde [German] played me his sonata movements [Op 1], of quite undreamt-of originality and power, looking noble and inspired the while … his playing, so tender, so imaginative, so free and so fiery, held me spell-bound’ (Brahms Festival address, Meiningen 7 October 1899). In 1853, through Joachim’s support and letters of recommendation, Brahms met with Liszt and Schumann. Life shaping times. Liszt he disliked. Schumann he esteemed.

‘The Germans,’ claimed Joachim in 1906, ‘have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising, is Beethoven’s. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. The most inward, the heart’s jewel, is Mendelssohn’s.’ Dating from between his Second Symphony and G major Violin Sonata, sharing the mood of both, Brahms wrote his Concerto in the summer of 1878 in the lyrical Carinthian surroundings of Pörtschach am Wörthersee. ‘It is lovely here, lake, forest, blue mountains above, shimmering white in the pure snow, there are loads of crabs. The inn is called Werzer, the best and most comfortable …’ Typically he’d be up at dawn, have a swim au naturel, take breakfast and a stroll around 5 am, and start composing at 7. Never reticent about seeking the advice of trusted friends and instrumentalists when it came to writing soloistically for other than the piano, he advised Joachim, 21 August, that he would be sending ‘a number of violin passages’ for his opinion, the next day dispatching the solo part of the first movement and the beginning of the finale. Joachim responded positively, joining Brahms at the beginning of September to work on the score in person. Later that month, in Hamburg, they played the opening Allegro to Clara Schumann who admired how ‘the orchestra blends completely and utterly with the [solo] player’. Between October and December, back in Vienna, Brahms continued to revise and improve, among other things rejecting his original four-movement plan (applied later to the Second Piano Concerto), having ‘stumbled over the [intended] Adagio and Scherzo, naturally they were the best’ (23 October). A substitute slow movement, described self-deprecatingly as no more than ‘a paltry adagio,’ was confirmed in a subsequent letter to Joachim (10 December). The holograph full score (1878/79), Library of Congress ML96.B68, formerly in the possession of Fritz Kreisler), shows the extent of Brahms’s corrections and Joachim’s input, five differently coloured pencil/ink stages permeating the primary brown ink underlay.

Mastering the ‘truly unusual difficulties’ of the solo part if not without effort—‘the case-hardened and battle-tested warrior [needed to] visibly exert himself to negotiate the technical difficulties and precarious balance of the solo part’ (Signale für die musikalische Welt [SwM])—Joachim premiered the Concerto on New Year’s Day 1879, the composer directing the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra with Carl Reinecke otherwise responsible for the programme, finishing with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. He then took the work to Habsburg Vienna (Musikverein, 14 January, under Joseph Hellmesberger), later Victorian London (Crystal Palace, 22 February, with August Manns), Ethel Smyth contributing a programme note. In 1889 Franz Kneisel, Nikisch and the Boston Symphony gave the first North American performance (Boston Music Hall, 6 December ‘rehearsal and concert’ matinee, 7 December 1889 evening), with a presentation in New York days later (Steinway Hall, 17th). Incorporating still further revisions and changes—‘so extensive’ as to necessitate re-engraving the finale’s solo part (Michael Struck, Neue Brahms Ausgabe)—Simrock’s Berlin edition, together with Brahms’s violin and piano reduction, was published in October 1879.

‘The product of a romantic age and a chivalrous one’ (Yehudi Menuhin, 1979). Early reaction to the Concerto was divided. Leipzig thought it ‘one of this composer’s most approachable, translucent, and spontaneous creations’ (SmW). In Vienna Eduard Hanslick, friend and champion, hailed it as ‘the most significant violin concerto to appear since Beethoven’s and Mendelssohn’s. In London the Musical Times correspondent (March, April 1879 issue) was undecided. ‘Brahms’s new manuscript Violin Concerto … is like all its author’s compositions highly original, and deeply thoughtful; it requires indeed several hearings before its beauties can be fully appreciated. So far as can be judged from a single performance, the first and second movements are the best; the finale strikes us as less interesting’. ‘A second hearing … confirms our impression that the work gradually deteriorates as it advances, the first movement, although discursive and vague in character, being by far the best’ (Philharmonic Society, St James’s Hall, 6 March). For British and Empire audiences, the young Donald Francis Tovey’s landmark analytical notes for Marie Soldat, Fritz Steinbach and the Meiningen Orchestra (St James’s Hall, November 1902) set the record straight, even if some found their angling and severity of tone off-putting.

Reconciling ‘the lyrical and the constructive: Brahms the songwriter, Brahms the symphonist’ (Hubert Foss, 1952), the Teutonic classical portals of the work are unmistakeable. In particular the first movement’s tensioned tonal theatre and motivic development, and its focussing of action through traditionally familiar parameters from double-exposition sonata design to the balancing of tutti and soli entries. A curious flashback at the onset, albeit different material dynamically reversed, is the side-step from D tonality to C major harmony in bar 9, echoing the similar drop of a tone between the opening C and B-flat statements, likewise eight bars apart, of the 1853 Op 1 Piano Sonata (also inscribed to Joachim). The great F major variation-poem of the central Adagio Tovey thought of as ‘a single unbroken melody [of] inexhaustible variety and resource’. Not least among its orchestral refinements is the opening 31-bar solo oboe/wind serenade ritornello (paired flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns), comprehensively switching timbral fields. The culminating rondo, like the conclusions of Brahms’s three other concertos (as well as the accellerated coda construction of the two for piano, especially the same-tonic first), owes something to the paprika-and-bikavér finales of Joachim’s Hungarian Concerto (1857) and Bruch’s First (1866/68). No doubt stimulated as much by Joachim himself, and by Brahms’s early violin partner Ede Reményi, as by the fact that Hungarians, gypsies and the lustrous dark-eyed peoples of the Balkans were as integral to the Viennese landscape as to the lanes and wenching dens of childhood Hamburg. Brahms ‘would frequently come to our room and play to us,’ recalled Schumann’s youngest daughter, Eugenie, ‘Schubert waltzes or his own Valses Op 39 [1865], and wonderful, melancholy Hungarian melodies for which I have looked in vain among his published works; perhaps he never wrote them down’ (Erinnerungen, 1925).

Among the Violin Concerto’s antecedents and influences, Beethoven is the model most widely invoked [Charlie Siem, Signum Classics SIGCD704]. In a letter to Clara Schumann from Pörtschach, June 1878, Brahms, however, mentions another—Giovanni Viotti’s ‘London’ A minor, No 22 (printed in 1803, dedicated to Cherubini). ‘My very special love … It is a magnificent piece, showing a remarkable freedom of invention; indeed it sounds as though the soloist is improvising. Every detail is conceived in masterly style … If people only knew it, what they get from us in drops they could drink in abundance there.’ In the manner of Mozart, Viotti, Beethoven and others (but not Mendelssohn), the Brahms Concerto was the last grand Classico-Romantic example of the genre to leave the choice/writing of the first movement cadenza to the soloist. Initially, among many, Joachim (1878/79, printed 1902 following many revisions); Joachim/Soldat (c 1884/85, MS Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna, a leaner version preferred/amended by Brahms, published 2004); Maud Powell (1891). Latterly Tovey (c1900), Auer (1903, 1916), Busoni (1913), Kreisler (1928), Ysayë (1938). This recording favours Enescu’s quotational 56-bar cadenza (1903—advocated early on by Menuhin, Enescu’s student in Paris, notably his April 1943 BBC Maida Vale broadcast with Boult) in Ana-Alexandra von Bülow/Frank Heckel’s 2021 transcript of the composer’s May 1946 Moscow/Oistrakh manuscript. The finale’s accompanied cadenza (composer generated) links with Viotti’s practice.

A pacifist married to a Moldavian princess, Enescu, the guiding spirit of 20th-century Romanian music, scarred by the Second World War, opposed to the new Communism of his country, died in exile in Paris—paralysed from a stroke and poverty-stricken, essentially forgotten. In the early 1890s, as a student in Vienna, he’d played under Brahms, including the First Symphony. The E major Ballade, Op 4a, for violin and small orchestra, dedicated to the French violinist Eva Rolland (daughter of his landlady), was completed in Paris, 9 November 1895, its author newly enrolled as a pupil of Massenet and Fauré at the Conservatoire. Richly veined music, the outer andante paragraphs, fusing polyphony and ‘walking’ baroque bass (pizzicato cellos, doublebasses) with nobly soaring Brahmsian sentiment, frame a declamatory central section.

Originally part of an abandoned Piano Quintet (violin, viola, cello, doublebass, possibly incorporating ideas from as early as 1896) before being recycled for a lutherie competition in 1908, the Aria and Scherzino appeared independently in Le Monde musical in 1909—the D major Aria in a January supplement, the B minor Scherzino in August. The former, sonically and melodically, touches Enescu’s most sensually lyrical vein; the latter is a fleet, virtuosic 2/4 affair, grace and gossamer to the fore. Sourced from notebooks in the George Enescu Museum, Bucharest, the late Sherban Lupu’s adaptation for violin, string orchestra and piano was published in September 2005 (Romanian Cultural Institute).

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