In September 1902 Jean Sibelius wrote to his wife that he had just conceived “a marvelous opening idea” for a violin concerto, and if he was speaking of the way that the work actually begins in its finished form, “marvelous” is indeed the term to apply: against a hushed D minor chord played by the strings of the orchestra, the soloist enters delicately on a dissonant note, yearning as it leans into the chord. The magic begins already during the first few seconds of the piece.
While working on the Concerto throughout 1903, Sibelius kept his friend, violinist Willy Burmester apprised of his progress, and when he sent him the completed work, Burmester was enraptured “Wonderful! Masterly!” he wrote. “Only once before have I spoken in such terms to a composer, and that was when Tchaikovsky showed me his concerto!” At one point Sibelius mentioned dedicating the work to Burmester, too.
The violinist proposed to premiere it in Berlin in March 1904, where his fame as a soloist would have guaranteed something of a splash. But Burmester was unable to appear at that time. Instead, Sibelius made a choice that guaranteed failure, by offering the premiere to an undistinguished violin teacher named Viktor Nováček.
Neither soloist nor orchestra were up to the demands of the piece, and one of the leading critics, Karl Flodin, a long-standing supporter of Sibelius, wrote that the Concerto was “a mistake.”
Today, this is still once of the most challenging concertos in the violin literature. Here it is, as performed by Hilary Hahn:
