Nineteenth–century concertos for strings and winds

Abstract

If the nineteenth-century piano concerto – part blend, part farrago of symphonic rigour, acrobatic virtuosity, dramatic theatrical effects, and world-weary soulful lyricism – traces its descent from Beethoven and Weber, what is the lineage of concertos for other instruments? In the case of the most prevalent non-keyboard variety, the violin concerto, a good argument could be made for the primacy of Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755–1824), whose twenty-nine concertos appeared between 1782 and 1817. Heir to the grand tradition of Baroque Italian violinists, Viotti was the prime mover in establishing the modern French violin school, the creation of which spanned the waning years of the ancien régime in Paris, where he worked between 1782 and 1792, and the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. Tainted by persisting associations of his music with political ideologies, owing to his earlier successes at the Concert spirituel and service to Marie Antoinette, Viotti fled Paris; then, a few years later in London, where he appeared with Haydn at Salomon's Hanover Square Concerts, he was suspected of Jacobin views and deported under the Alien Act. When the restored Bourbon monarch Louis XVIII appointed the violinist director of the Paris Opéra in 1819, the way seemed cleared for his return to former glory. But months later, an assassin dispatched the Duke of Berry on the steps of the Opéra, and Viotti's position became untenable; he resigned within two years.