Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-1881)
- Fantasia appassionata, Op. 35 (1859), IHV 16
Performers: Gidon Kremer (violin); London Symphony Orchestra; Riccardo Chailly (conductor)
Painting: Barthélemy Vieillevoye (1798-1855) - Portrait du violoniste Henri Vieuxtemps à l'âge de 7 ans
Further info: Violin works
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Walloon violinist and composer. Son of Jean-François Vieuxtemps
(1790-1866), he received early lessons from his father, a weaver and
amateur violin-maker. He made his concert debut at the age of six and
toured neighbouring cities with his teacher Joseph Lecloux-Dejonc,
attracting the attention of Charles-Auguste de Bériot in the process.
Two years later he went to Brussels to study with de Bériot, who
introduced him to Parisian audiences in 1829 with great success. After
de Bériot’s teaching ended in 1831, his sister-in-law, the singer,
pianist and composer Pauline Garcia, also assisted in Vieuxtemps’s
continuing musical education. After giving a series of concerts in
Germany and Austria, winning praise from Robert Schumann, who heard him
in Leipzig, he made his debut in London in 1834, where he also heard and
met Niccolò Paganini. He was anxious to perfect his technique and
broaden his musical tastes, but seems to have picked up a lot of his
skill in composition piecemeal as he embarked on the busy,
country-hopping career of a travelling virtuoso. In Vienna, where he was
the first to revive Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, he took composition
lessons from Simon Sechter, and in Paris from Antoine Reicha. The first
of his seven violin concertos dates from this time. He visited Russia
for the first time in 1837, and he toured America in 1843 and 1844. In
the latter year he married the Vienna-born pianist Josephine Eder, and
in 1846 settled for some years in St Petersburg as court violinist and
soloist in the Imperial Theatres as well as teaching violin at the
Conservatory. He left a lasting legacy there, for he had a definite
influence on the development of the Russian school of violin playing. In
1854 the leading Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick ranked Vieuxtemps
together with Joseph Joachim as the two foremost violinists in the
world. After a second American tour in 1857 with the pianist Sigismond
Thalberg, and further periods based successively in Brussels, Frankfurt
and Paris, he returned to Brussels in 1871 as professor of violin at the
Brussels Conservatoire, where his most celebrated pupil was Eugène
Ysaÿe. His career as a virtuoso was cut short by a stroke that affected
his bowing arm, but though he was acutely frustrated by his inability to
perform to his former standard, he managed to resume conducting and
teaching until 1879, when he resigned from the Conservatoire and joined
his daughter and son-in-law in Algeria. Here he completed his last two
violin concertos before his death on 6 June 1881; his body was brought
back to Belgium and he was buried with honours in his home town of
Verviers. His younger brothers Lucien Vieuxtemps (1828-1901) and Ernest
Vieuxtemps (1832-1896) were also musicians.
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