Date of composition: 1902-1903
Premiere: 9 January 1904 in Prague with the Czech Philharmonic, conductor: Oskar Nedbal, violin: Karel Hoffmann
Duration: 23 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
first performed on 18 December 1911 under the direction of Arthur Nikisch and with the violinist Carl Flesch
Josef Suk, born in 1874 as the youngest son of the organist and cantor of St Luke’s Church in Křečovice, near Prague, was a violinist himself, yet he composed very little for his own instrument. Even in his Fantasia for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 24, he was never tempted to play the solo part himself. Instead, he had his sights set on the violinist František Ondříček, one of the most important violinists of his time, who had also given the first performance of Antonín Dvořák’s only Violin Concerto in 1883. But this plan came to nothing, and at the premiere in January 1904, the solo part was played by Karel Hoffmann, a close confidant of Suk’s. Hoffmann was first violinist of the Czech String Quartet, in which Suk played second violin for more than four decades and with which he gave more than 4,000 concerts.
In 1891, Suk became a pupil of Dvořák at the Prague Conservatory. Their relationship grew still closer when Suk married Dvořák’s daughter Otylka in 1898. In works such as the String Serenade op. 6, or the early E major Symphony op. 14, his teacher’s influence is unmistakable. When Dvořák died in 1904, this marked a decisive turning point in Suk’s life. Only a few months later, his young wife, too, succumbed to heart disease. Suk never got over this double trauma – it was to leave a lasting imprint on his musical language.
The Violin Fantasia, however, was written before these blows of fate, in the summer months of 1902, a time of early major successes and even greater hopes. Josef Suk was already regarded as one of the leading Czech composers. The work is in a single movement and stands in the tradition of the concert fantasia as Beethoven had shaped it. It has repeatedly been described as a disguised violin concerto, yet its free form, rhapsodic character, and the absence of a clearly defined slow section argue against this assessment.
In the highly virtuosic solo part of the Fantasia, Suk offers a whole array of instrumental feats and multiple-stopping. The free form allowed him to pour out an entire cornucopia of ideas, themes, episodes, and moods. Four dramatically contrasting thematic spheres can be identified, which return at various points in the work and thus lend this free fantasia a stable formal framework. Also typical of Suk’s musical language are his manner of thematic invention, the economy of his motivic work, and occasional harmonic boldness, such as constantly modulating chromatic harmony with frequent shifts between major and minor. Allusions to Bohemian folk music play only a subordinate role in the Fantasia. Suk does use a few folk-song-like melodies, and the accentuation of the first beat, found in all the central themes of the piece, is characteristic of Czech music. Compared with his early works, however – such as the incidental music to Pohádka op. 14, or Pod jabloni op. 20 – the national character is of secondary importance in the Violin Fantasia.