Nicolò Umberto Foron

In Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto “the violin is no longer played, it is torn apart, shredded, blackened,” railed critic Eduard Hanslick after the premiere in December 1881 in Vienna. The concerto was written in the wake of a broken marriage and a psychological collapse. On July 18, 1877, the composer married his pupil Antonina Milyukova. “It suddenly became clear to me that towards my wife I did not in fact feel even the simplest sentiment of friendship, but rather I abhorred her in the truest sense of the word,” he confessed to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck. His condition improved only in Clarens, the winemaking village on Lake Geneva. It was there, in 1878, that he composed his only violin concerto, combining profound sadness with newfound hope and joy in life.
The French Revolution shook European aristocratic society, and Beethoven translated this epochal change into music with his Third Symphony, which would shock his contemporaries. “I am not satisfied with the works I have written so far, from now on I intend to follow a new path,” he declared in 1802. On this “new path” he would create his Eroica Symphony, “composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.” That man was Napoleon, who in 1804 betrayed the ideals of liberty by proclaiming himself “Emperor” of the French. Beethoven tore the title page from the score that bore the name “Bonaparte.”