Dvořák and the Violin: Concerto and Romance
Posted by Paul Wood on 28th Jul 2026
A few bars of orchestra, and the soloist is already playing. There is no introduction to speak of, no cadenza anywhere in the movement, and when the first movement runs out of things to say it does not finish. Dvořák thins the texture down and hands straight over to the Adagio.
Every one of those decisions caused him trouble. Joseph Joachim, the violinist the concerto was written for, spent three years picking over the score and then declined to play it in public. Dvořák's publisher tried to get the first movement given a proper ending. Dvořák refused. The concerto reached print in 1883 in the shape he wanted, and it has sat in the shadow of the Cello Concerto ever since.
This post is about that concerto and about the Romance in F minor, the only other piece Dvořák wrote for solo violin and orchestra. Both are available from MyMusicScores as string orchestra editions. One of them exists because a customer asked for it, which turns out to have a bearing on the argument Dvořák was having in 1880.
The concerto Joachim asked for
The push came from the publisher. In January 1879 Fritz Simrock commissioned an inventive concerto full of melodic cantilenas with attractive virtuosity for the soloist, hoping, in all likelihood, to repeat the money the Slavonic Dances had made him. At the same time the violinist Karel Halíř asked Dvořák for a concerto of his own, and Brahms's Violin Concerto had been premiered on New Year's Day that year. Three reasons at once, all pointing the same way.
Dvořák wrote the first version over the summer of 1879 and sent the finished score to Joachim at the end of November. He dedicated it to him. Joachim was the most famous violinist in Europe, a close friend of Brahms, and had already performed some of Dvořák's chamber music. There was every reason to expect this to go well.
The following April, Dvořák went to Berlin to talk it through. Joachim praised his understanding of the instrument and then suggested a great many changes. Dvořák, who revised his own work more willingly than most, went away and did the job thoroughly. He wrote to Simrock afterwards: "Not one sole bar have I left untouched. The entire concerto now has a different appearance. I have kept the themes and added some new ones. In fact, the work's entire conception has changed in terms of harmonies, orchestration, and rhythm. The entire development section is new."
Then Joachim went quiet for over two years.
When he finally responded he had more rewrites to suggest, and he made his own adjustments to the solo part. There was a run-through in Berlin in November 1882 with the Musikhochschule orchestra, after which the orchestral writing was judged too heavy in places and revised again. Joachim still was not satisfied. He said the work was not yet ready for the public, played it once privately at the Berlin Conservatory, and never performed it in a concert.
Part of his objection was to the violin writing itself. In a letter to Dvořák he wrote that certain details made it clear he had not played the instrument himself for some time. That would have stung. The violin was Dvořák's first instrument, learned from the village schoolmaster, and his first public performances were alongside his father playing the polkas and marches of their part of Bohemia. He then spent nine years in the Provisional Theatre orchestra in Prague, latterly as principal viola, and was reliable enough to be asked to play in the private premiere of Smetana's first string quartet in 1878. He knew what strings could do. Antje Weithaas, who recorded the concerto in 2023, puts the tension well: the writing is uncomfortable in places, and no violinist feels entirely at ease walking on to play it, but the musical content is worth the trouble.
The premiere went instead to a young Czech, František Ondříček, in Prague on 14 October 1883. He took to it immediately and toured it around the world. Dvořák left the dedication to Joachim on the score regardless.
One footnote worth having. According to one of his composition pupils, Dvořák preferred this concerto to the Cello Concerto. Posterity went the other way, and Joachim's verdict probably had something to do with that.
The ending he would not write
The most revealing fight was not with Joachim but with Robert Keller, an adviser to Simrock. Keller wanted the end of the first movement changed so that it stopped properly instead of running straight into the slow movement. Dvořák said no.
His reason, as Keith Anderson records it, was that he considered the first movement too short to stand alone.
You can see what he was protecting. The first movement is rhapsodic rather than symphonic. It has no significant orchestral tutti, no solo cadenza, and a recapitulation that is cut short and interrupted by a transitional passage. Joachim had already accepted something similar in Bruch's G minor Concerto, which also runs its first movement into the second, but Dvořák pushed the idea further. Rather than closing with any kind of gesture, he lets the texture thin out until the Adagio simply arrives. Jan Smaczny calls that link one of the loveliest passages in the concerto, and he is right. It is the moment the whole first movement has been building towards, and it lands in the pure F major of the slow movement, which for many players is the real centre of the work.
Dvořák was defending the shape of a complete concerto. That is a reasonable thing to defend, and he won the argument.
The Romance in F minor
The Romance came out of a different world entirely. No commission from a Berlin publisher, no celebrated dedicatee, no three-year correspondence.
Its main theme belongs to the Andante con moto of Dvořák's String Quartet No. 5 in F minor, Op. 9, written in 1873. That quartet stayed unpublished for the rest of his life and well beyond, not reaching print until 1929, so for most players the Romance is the only way they will ever meet the music. He did not simply transcribe the movement. He reworked it, and Smaczny reckons the result a considerable improvement on the original.
The occasion was a benefit concert on 9 December 1877, raising money for the pension fund of the choir and orchestra of the Prague Provisional Theatre. That was Dvořák's own former orchestra, the one he had played viola in for nine years. He was writing for his old colleagues. The soloist was Josef Markus, though Dvořák later dedicated the published work to Ondříček.
The piece is scored for small orchestra and it moves without hurry. The orchestra states the theme first, and the solo violin enters gently underneath with the same material. A second melody follows, and it is that melody's quiet accompaniment which eventually closes the work. Between the two there are some genuinely surprising modulations and a stretch of elaborate figuration for the soloist. The opening theme comes back one last time in F major, so a piece that starts in the minor does not end there.
Ten minutes of long, exposed, singing line, with nowhere to hide and very little display for its own sake. It asks for tone, control and patience rather than fireworks.
Why the first movement is available on its own
Here is where I have to admit that the MyMusicScores edition of the first movement does exactly what Dvořák refused to do. The arrangement gives the movement a calm, settled ending so that it can be performed on its own.
I did not set out to argue with him. A customer asked for it. They wanted to give a pupil the chance to perform the first movement with a string orchestra on a course, and that was not possible with the music as it stood, because the movement has no ending and because most courses do not have a full orchestra sitting in the next room.
Dvořák's objection was that the movement is too short to stand alone. In 1880 that was a fair point about concert programming. It is less of one now. Ten minutes is a perfectly normal length for a concert item, and there is precedent within this very work: the Adagio was often performed on its own in the nineteenth century, which is one of the reasons Dvořák was so protective of the transition into it.
More to the point, he and I were answering different questions. He was deciding what a complete concerto should look like in a professional concert hall. I was answering a teacher who had a talented student, a string orchestra, three days of rehearsal, and a piece of music that would otherwise stay out of reach until the student had a career.
That second question is a large part of what MyMusicScores is for. A young violinist who is not ready for thirty-five minutes of Dvořák, and an ensemble that has neither the players nor the rehearsal time for the full orchestration, can still get inside this music and find out what it feels like to play it. That experience is how soloists are made. Nobody arrives at a full concerto performance without having stood in front of an ensemble a few times first, and the repertoire that lets them do it is thinner than it should be.
If it helps to think of it this way: the complete concerto is still there, exactly as Dvořák left it, and nothing about this edition touches it. What this edition does is give one movement a door at the far end so that a student can walk through it.
The MyMusicScores editions
Both works are available for solo violin and string orchestra, each reduced from Dvořák's own orchestration rather than a later hand's arrangement, with the solo part left exactly as he wrote it.
The Concerto edition covers the first movement, Allegro ma non troppo, running to about ten minutes, and closes with an ending written for this arrangement. So far it is only the first movement. If you would like the Adagio or the Finale arranged as well, ask me and I will do it.
The Romance runs to about ten minutes as well, and because Dvořák scored it for a modest orchestra in the first place, very little is lost in reducing it to strings. Both sit at diploma or professional standard for the soloist, with advanced string orchestra parts, and the two together make a satisfying Dvořák half for a recital.
All editions are professionally engraved, available as instant PDF downloads, with no performance licence required and permission to record included.