Bartók’s First Violin Concerto: A Portrait of Idealized Love

For fifty years, Béla Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 1, Sz. 36 was treated much like a forgotten love letter relegated to the bottom of a dusty drawer.

Completed in 1908, thirty years before Bartók wrote the monumental work we now know as Violin Concerto No. 2, Sz. 112, the First Concerto remained unpublished until 1956, after the composer’s death. Its posthumous premiere, performed by Hansheinz Schneeberger, occurred two years later in Basel, Switzerland.

Bartók wrote the Concerto for Stefi Geyer, a violinist with whom he had fallen in love. A student at Budapest’s Franz Liszt Academy at the time, Geyer was regarded as one of the leading violinists of her generation. She did not reciprocate Bartók’s feelings. Although she accepted the Concerto, she never performed it. Only when she was on her deathbed did she reveal its existence, and bequeath the score to the patron and conductor Paul Sacher.

The Concerto unfolds in two rhapsodic movements, each of which forms a portrait of idealized love. “Written from the heart,” it is music infused with the same turbulent passions we sense in Berlioz’ Symphonie fantastique and Leoš Janáček String Quartet No. 2, “Intimate Letters.” Bartók described his love for Geyer as a “kind of opium” which fueled his creativity, “even if it is nerve-wrecking, poisonous, and dangerous.”

The first movement (Andante sostenuto) begins with the solitary voice of the solo violin, which presents a lamenting and nostalgic theme. Other instruments join gradually, creating a haunting weave of imitative counterpoint. The wandering voices reach continuously toward a seemingly unattainable goal. In this music, the young Bartók found “idealized Stefi, celestial and inward.” The movement was later reworked into an orchestral tone poem as the first of Two Portraits, Op. 5.

The second movement (Allegro giocoso), an exuberant scherzando, is a tribute to Stefi Geyer the virtuoso. Its main theme is a retrograde version of the first movement’s theme. For the composer, it was a “cheerful, witty, and amusing” portrait. At times, the music sparkles with a coquettish energy.

The Concerto’s background makes for a fun story. But we are left with the youthful music of a great composer, still finding his voice.

I. Andante sostenuto:

II. Allegro giocoso:

Five Great Recordings

• Bartók: Violin Concerto No. 1, Sz. 36, György Pauk, Antoni Wit, National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra Naxos
• David Oistrakh with Gennady Rozhdestvensky and the Grand Symphony Orchestra of All-Union National Radio Service and Central Television Networks
• James Ehnes with Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
• Kirill Troussov with Zsolt Hamar and the Württembergische Philharmonie
• Christian Tetzlaff with Hannu Lintu and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra

Featured Image: a portrait of Stefi Geyer