The first four notes of Beethoven’s violin concerto are easy to miss as you settle down to listen, but they are very important to hear. The timpanist beats four regular strokes on the drum tuned to D before the woodwinds introduce the touchingly simple first theme of the concerto. Here is one of the most striking openings in symphonic music. After hearing it, contemporary audiences wondered if the composer was either a genius or mad. But Beethoven turns the four notes of the timpani into a key structural and melodic building block of the first movement, so he must have been a genius—perhaps a mad genius. The concerto did not have much success until 1844 when the violin prodigy Joseph Joachim, age 12, took up the work and made it a staple of the violin repertoire.
The expansive first movement takes the concerto form far beyond any of Mozart and provides the violinist ample opportunity to display her talent. The middle and last movements are together shorter than the first. The unassuming middle movement is full of innovations; a theme and variations where the soloist never plays the theme, only decorates it. The soloist soon interrupts the variations with her own themes before taking over the most striking parts of the orchestral theme for herself. A cadenza follows, but it does not bring the movement to an end. Rather it transitions into the third movement and to what one writer on this concerto calls one of Beethoven’s “drastic rondo themes.”
Beethoven seemed at times to delight in shocking with his originality, and some more stodgy critics and music lovers have not appreciated the final movement’s tilt into an almost folksy mood. Beethoven rarely made a mistake in music, however, and the rondo brings his violin concerto to a perfectly satisfying close.
Beethoven lived for 21 more years after composing the violin concerto. In his final works (the last string quartets and piano sonatas) he stretched musical expression to the limits with the materials available to him. The violin concerto, however, is situated smack in the middle of his creative output. He has absorbed the works of his masters, Haydn and Mozart, and is now expanding the traditions he inherited just as younger generations have done from time immemorial and still do today.