Notes for: August 13, 2019
Charles Auguste de Bériot clearly was a man in love with the sound of the violin. The Belgian virtuoso founded a school of violin playing known as the Franco-Belgian school, which combined Paganini’s pyrotechnic displays with classical French elegance, and which produced a generation of great Belgian violinists, including Henri Vieuxtemps and Eugène Ysaye.
Bériot’s own life was a combination of public success and private pain. He was born in Louvain, Belgium, to aristocratic parents who died when he was ten. At that age he already had begun to perform in public. He spent the next several years studying with a succession of teachers before launching a peripatetic career as a violin virtuoso. For a few years he served as chamber violinist to King William I of the Netherlands. When Belgium revolted against the king in 1830, Bériot resumed touring, this time with the soprano Marie Malibran, with whom he had a son. Mendelssohn reportedly celebrated their relationship by writing an aria with violin accompaniment for them. They married in 1836, after her first marriage finally was annulled. But a month later, Malibran fell from a horse and died. Shattered, Bériot retreated for two years before going back to concertizing. He was widely admired. The poet Heinrich Heine commented that Malibran’s voice continued to sing through Bériot’s sweet, melting tones. Others found his melodies to be operatic and compared him to Bellini. In 1842 Bériot turned down the offer of a chair at the Paris Conservatory. Instead, the next year he agreed to head the violin faculty of the Brussels Conservatory, where he shaped a distinctive approach to the violin. But he began to go blind, and in 1852 he retired, although he still performed. By 1857, though, not only had he had become totally blind, but his left arm had become paralyzed. His life as a virtuoso was over.
His teaching and composing, however, had a long and influential impact. He wrote 10 violin concertos and many other instrumental works, including many that were intended as instructional pieces and still are used in music schools today. But works like his three Duo Concertantes are much more than exercises. His compositions reflected his belief that a work should be both technically challenging in the Italian manner, and warm and distinctively French in sound. You’ll hear that in this first movement from the Duo Concertante No. 1, which opens dramatically with double stops, staccato runs, rapid arpeggios, and other challenges, then segues into a graceful melody, full of charm. It’s the combination of overt virtuosity and Gallic grace, plus some lighthearted transitions, that make this movement so enjoyable.