Kurt Weill: Violin Concerto, op. 12 - Konzert für Violine und Blasorchester - NM

Kurt Weill developed his creative energies mainly within the world of musical theater, where he proved to be an immensely productive and imaginative innovator, but he also left behind a small body of work for the concert hall. Nearly all of these works date from early in his career, when he studied briefly with Engelbert Humperdinck at the Berlin conservatory (1918/1919), and much more intensively in Ferruccio Busoni’s master class at the Prussian Academy of the Arts, where he was enrolled from 1921 to 1923. Here he composed his first mature works, such as the String Quartet Op. 8, which prompted Busoni to recommend his student to the Viennese publisher Universal Edition, where Weill was soon offered a contract.

The Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra Op. 12 dates from the spring of 1924. Weill began to conceive the work in February, but an extended trip to Italy interrupted his labors. In early April – back in Berlin – Weill composed the work relatively swiftly, although toward the end of May his progress stalled, as a letter to his sister conveys: ‘I’ve been very diligent and have completed two movements of a violin concerto. But in the last few days it’s been too hot to think anything through.’ A far greater distraction was Busoni’s grave illness. No longer a student, Weill had become a friend and confidant and visited Busoni daily, often to assist in various business matters. It is unknown whether they discussed the concerto during these visits, but Weill was shocked to see his revered mentor’s health decline so rapidly: ‘Busoni is deathly ill and none of us knows where our heads are. It would be less painful to suffer oneself than to see such a man suffer so terribly. When I’m not with him I have to bury myself in work in order to forget the sight of him.’ Conceivably, the darker mood of the concerto’s first movement, with its interwoven allusions to the ‘Dies irae’ (m. 47ff.), could be related to this context. At the end of June Weill notified his publisher that he had finished the work. Busoni died on 27 July 1924.

Scored for two flutes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, one oboe and trumpet, percussion, and four contrabasses, the concerto comprises three movements. While composing the work, Weill informed his publisher: ‘I am working on a concerto for violin and wind orchestra that I hope to finish within two or three weeks. The work is inspired by the idea – one never carried out before – of juxtaposing a single violin with a chorus of winds.’ At this point Weill could have had no knowledge of Stravinsky’s Concerto for Piano and Wind Orchestra (also with percussion and contrabasses), but he greatly appreciated the Russian composer’s L’histoire du soldat, which he had heard in Frankfurt in the summer of 1923. The second movement of Weill’s concerto, which consists of three character pieces, could have been inspired by Mahler’s Symphony No. 7. A friend of Weill’s, the conductor Peter Bing, called the Notturno ‘a true “night piece” in the [E.T.A.] Hoffmannian sense’, in which the xylophone plays a crucial role, whereas the Cadenza features the trumpet and the Serenata gives a prominent role to both oboe and flute (in addition to the violin). To contrast with the first movement’s subdued mood, Weill gave the final movement the characteristics of a tarantella. 

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