One-hit wonders of classical music

Last Friday, I played Grieg’s Piano Concerto. It is one of my very favorite concertos in the world, and I’m always struck by the notion that it was the only one he ever wrote. He tinkered around with other concerto ideas, he had sketches, but the Piano Concerto remained singular throughout his long and storied career. It got me thinking… who else had famous “one hit wonders” of that sort?

Along the lines of piano concertos, both Robert and Clara Schumann also only wrote one each, though ostensibly for very different reasons. Clara completed her piano concerto young, at the age of 16, during a time when she was already madly in love with Robert, but several years before they would finally marry. He revised some of her concerto, and she premiered it herself 1835 at the Leipzig Gewandhaus with Felix Mendelssohn conducting. Clara would put a pause on much of her composing after the Schumanns married, focusing instead on supporting her husband (including through his battle with mental illness) and his work, and raising their eight children.

Robert, however, took several years to develop his piano Phantasie into the concerto it is known as today, and Clara had a heavy hand in this development, and perhaps more importantly, in its popularity. Together, they finalized the concerto during their first year of marriage, and she premiered Robert’s concerto in 1845. She would go on to program the work in her concerts for many years to come, and became Robert’s biggest advocate and helped to secure his legacy long after his untimely death.

Two of the most notable French impressionist composers each wrote only one string quartet, and eventually had a break in their friendship because of the works. Claude Debussy faced a real crisis of confidence while writing his quartet, and confessed to a friend that, “I’ve had to start all over again three times.” He finally finished the brilliant work in 1893, and it was premiered by the Ysaÿe Quartet in Paris.

About a decade later, his colleague Maurice Ravel premiered his own string quartet. Debussy’s quartet served as an obvious model for Ravel, and Debussy even had a chance to hear the piece before its premiere in 1904, and deeply approved. The audiences in France, however, after hearing Ravel’s quartet, argued about Debussy’s influence and were so impassioned about it that people nearly came to blows outside of concert halls! This divisiveness in France’s music community continued for many years, and eventually the pair had a falling out, with Ravel writing, ”it’s probably better for us, after all, to be on frigid terms for illogical reasons.”

Antonin Dvořák wasn’t a fan of the cello as a solo instrument- he wrote to a friend that, while it is a perfect orchestral instrument, “the upper voice squeals and the lower growls.” It was a performance of Victor Herbert’s cello concerto in Brooklyn that convinced him otherwise, and Dvořák finally put his pen to paper and ended up writing one of the most stunning cello concertos of all time. The work was originally meant to end in exuberance and joy, but while working on the concerto Dvořák learned that the great unrequited love of his life, Josefina, was gravely ill, and in turn the devastated Dvořák completed the concerto in a more contemplative, introspective and truly moving way.

Out of darkness comes light. At least, that was the case for Jean Sibelius’ sole violin concerto. Sibelius had been in the depths of his own battle with addiction, avoiding his duties to his family and his benefactors each night in the underbelly of Helsinki in the early 1900s. His wife Aino, after dragging him from the bars early one morning, begged him to move away from the city to the countryside to escape his demons. It was there Sibelius began to recover, and there he revised and completed his violin concerto, one that would become one of the greatest in all of the violin repertoire.