Zigeunerweisen (“Gypsy Airs”)
for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 20
Pablo de Sarasate (1844-1908)

Composed in 1878.

Pablo Martín Melitón de Sarasate y Navascuez — economized to Pablo de Sarasate when he became a star — occupied, with Niccolò Paganini and Joseph Joachim, the pinnacle of 19th-century fi ddledom. The son of a military bandmaster in Pamplona, Spain, he started violin lessons at five, gave his first public performance at eight, and rocketed past the pedagogical prowess of the best local teachers so quickly thereafter that he had to be sent to the Paris Conservatoire for further instruction with Delphin Alard at the age of twelve. So much promise for furthering the cause of Spanish culture did he show that Queen Isabella presented him with a Stradivarius violin (a handsome piece of booty acquired in a recent tiff with Naples), and personally authorized the subsidy of his expenses. Within a year, he won a premier prix in violin and solfège at the Conservatoire, acquired another prize, in harmony, in 1859, and then set off on the tours of Europe, Africa, North and South America and the Orient that made him one of the foremost musicians of his time. (His first tour of the United States was in 1870; his last in 1889.) His playing drew unstinting praise during the forty years of almost constant, world-wide concertizing that followed, the most impressive evidence of which is the spectacular list of works that were written for him by some of the era’s greatest composers: Bruch’s G minor Violin Concerto and Scottish Fantasy; Saint- Saëns’ Concertos Nos. 1 and 3 and the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso; Lalo’s Concerto in F minor and Symphonie espagnole; Joachim’s Variations for Violin and Orchestra; Wieniawski’s Second Concerto; Dvorák’s Mazurek; and Mackenzie’s Pibroch Suite. Whereas Paganini was noted for his flamboyant technical wizardry and emotional exuberance, and Joachim for his high-minded intellectualism and deep musical insights, Sarasate was famed for his elegance, precision, apparent ease of execution and, in the words of Eduard Hanslick, the Vienna-based doyen of Europe’s music critics, his “stream of beautiful sound.” The handful of recordings he made shortly before his death in Biarritz in 1908, the first commercial discs made by a world-famous violinist, attest to his remarkable skill.

Sarasate had already established his reputation in France, Spain, England and North and South America as one of his era’s greatest performers before he made his debut in the German-speaking lands with a concert in Vienna in 1876. His success in northern Europe for the next three decades nearly rivalled that of Joseph Joachim, Germany’s acknowledged master of the violin. (Joachim died in 1907, just one year before Sarasate.) To appeal to the predilection for a certain Eastern exoticism in the German and Austrian musical appetites of the day, Sarasate devised a concert work for violin and orchestra in 1878 based on melodies of Hungarian extraction that he titled Zigeunerweisen — “Gypsy Airs.” Zigeunerweisen is disposed in two large paragraphs of contrasting nature. A bold orchestral summons based on a grave theme introduces the soloist, who continues the opening mood with an accompanied cadenza and a sad lament utilizing a gapped-scale melody of considerable pathos. Though the musical substance of this first section is simple and direct, the soloist embroiders it with a rich overlay of trills, grace notes, harmonics, glissandi, pizzicati and spiccati. After a grand pause, the tempo quickens and the mood brightens for the closing section, a blazing dance in the most brilliant Gypsy manner energized by an entire battery of violin pyrotechnics.

Notes by Dr. Richard E. Rodda