THE RODE LESS TRAVELLED

He is best remembered for his didactic 24 Caprices, but there’s much more to Pierre Rode. For the French virtuoso’s 250th anniversary, Charlotte Gardner reveals a colourful life story and hears from the German violinist Friedemann Eichhorn, who has revived and recorded all of Rode’s 13 violin concertos

Portrait of the violinist Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode (c.1801–04), attributed to Jacques-Antoine-Marie Lemoine (1751–1824)

COURTESY OF MAURIZIO NOBILE FINE ART, PARIS

Beethoven, or gnarly technical studies: which is it for you? Chances are it’s one or both of those that represents the sum total of any association you may have with Pierre Rode. In all fairness, there are worse ways to go down in history than as the violinist who premiered Beethoven’s Tenth Violin Sonata, or as the composer of 24 Caprices (one for each key), which today remain an essential plank of every aspiring professional violinist’s technical training, sitting between those of Kreutzer and Paganini in terms of difficulty. Yet with 2024 marking the 250th anniversary of Rode’s birth, there couldn’t be a better time to take a closer look at this largely forgotten French virtuoso – not least because anyone who does will find not just 13 violin concertos ripe for rehabilitation, but also a biographical story which, at points, is as colourful as that of his older contemporary and compatriot the virtuoso violinist Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, whose own life recently inspired the biopic Chevalier (2022).

Pierre Baillot, Rodolphe Kreutzer and Pierre Rode met as students in Paris and formed a lifelong friendship

The son of a Bordeaux perfumer, Rode was born on 16 February 1774 – and his life story hots up pretty quickly.

Aged 12, he was making his first concerto appearances in Bordeaux. At 13, his teacher André-Joseph Fauvel took him to Paris to play before Giovanni Battista Viotti. Rode stayed on to become Viotti’s star pupil, scoring a solo debut triumph – and thus career lift-off – in 1790 with the latter’s Violin Concerto no.13. These teenage years also saw Rode form lasting friendships with fellow young violinists Pierre Baillot, another Viotti pupil, and Rodolphe Kreutzer, future dedicatee of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata no.9. In the year of the Paris Conservatoire’s foundation, 1795, all three were appointed to its violin faculty (with Rode only 21 years old), and there appears to have been a notable lack of competition between them. Baillot wrote admiringly of the ‘charm and purity’ of Rode’s concerto playing in this period.

His playing also earned him the nickname the ‘Correggio of the violin’, apparently because it had a sensuous suavity similar to that of the works of the great Renaissance painter.

Yet far from the conservatoire appointment leading to a stable life of teaching and performing in Paris, the unfolding French Revolution saw Rode enlist (as a clarinettist, of all things) for the War in the Vendée, although he soon thought better of it, escaping first to the relative peace of Rouen before becoming a travelling international virtuoso and eventually ending up in London, where Viotti had immigrated. However, Rode’s French style seems not to have chimed with English taste, and he appears not to have considered it financially worthwhile to adapt, sniping later in a letter to Baillot, ‘You have to be a dancer or castrated to succeed there.’ Instead, in 1797 he returned to France where, talent undimmed, he was back performing with Kreutzer to a delighted audience at the Théâtre Feydeau, Paris. In 1799 came a prolonged stay in Spain, where he met and befriended Boccherini and where, now also composing, he dedicated his Sixth Violin Concerto to the Spanish queen.

Rode was back in Paris in 1800, co-authoring the famous Méthode de Violon (published in 1803) with Baillot and Kreutzer while also holding the position of ‘solo violin’ of the ‘First Consul’s musique particulière’, the small and select group with which Napoleon had replaced the King’s Music.

RODE’S FRENCH STYLE SEEMS NOT TO HAVE CHIMED WITH ENGLISH TASTE. HE SNIPED IN A LETTER, ‘YOU HAVE TO BE A DANCER OR CASTRATED TO SUCCEED THERE’

Rode co-authored the seminal Méthode de Violon (1803) with Pierre Baillot and Rodolphe Kreutzer

Portrait of Giuseppina Grassini by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Yet this latter appointment led Rode (now in his mid-twenties) to play with fire, for multiple sources cite him as having been the lover of Napoleon’s mistress, the Italian opera singer Giuseppina Grassini, to whom he dedicated his Eighth Violin Concerto. But Napoleon’s discovery of the affair, followed by Grassini fleeing Paris, took the wind out of Rode’s sails. In November 1801, clearly het up, he wrote to Baillot, ‘I have just arrived to take Madame Grassini 20 leagues from here […] I have been too preoccupied these days and I still have too much grief to have the courage to go to the conservatoire tomorrow. Until then, I hope to calm my head a little, because if this has to last, I swear to you that I will be very unhappy.’

Rode remained in Paris for the (delayed) laying of the first stone of the conservatoire in 1802. That year, he also joined five other composers, Kreutzer among them, to establish a publishing house that would run until 1811. However, announcing his departure for St Petersburg, he performed a farewell concert at the year’s end. ‘He was sublime in the first piece of his concerto,’ reported the Courrier des spectacles, reflecting upon his imminent absence. ‘Its rondeau and its varied tunes have attracted the votes of connoisseurs and amateurs.’

Rode seems to have then worked a concert tour into his 1803 journey to St Petersburg, and it’s during a stop in Hanover that he appears to have suffered the first attack of a debilitating, undiagnosed arm complaint. But the Russian welcome was a warm one, the tsar appointing him master of his chapel and ensuring he lived in great comfort. Eventually, though, homesickness and worsening health prompted a return to Paris in 1808 – where his homecoming concert immediately made it clear that he couldn’t take up where he had left off, as his playing had noticeably deteriorated. As luck would have it, a neat beforeand-after analysis has survived, courtesy of violinist and composer Louis Spohr. Having heard him perform on his way out to Russia, in 1803 in Brunswick, Germany, Spohr wrote, ‘The more I heard him, the more I was captivated by his playing.’ By contrast, Spohr’s 1813 account of his post-Russia hearing describes Rode’s playing now to be ‘cold, and full of mannerism’. Sensing his audiences’ disappointment, Rode largely retired from the stage, playing only privately, often with ever-faithful Baillot and Kreutzer.

MULTIPLE SOURCES CITE RODE AS THE LOVER OF NAPOLEON’S MISTRESS, THE ITALIAN OPERA SINGER GIUSEPPINA GRASSINI

So it seems that the famous 1812 Vienna visit which saw him premiere Beethoven’s Tenth Violin Sonata op.96 was made when he was known to be far from his peak (despite being only in his late thirties) and performing only rarely. It’s well documented that Rode’s playing style obliged Beethoven to write with a more fragile elegance than was his natural wont – ‘We like quick, full-toned passages in our Finales, which do not suit R., and this rather cramps me,’ wrote the composer.

Beethoven perhaps also had wider concerns, given the fact that he mentioned considering sending the score to Rode in advance, for him to practise.

The remainder of Rode’s life is, at first glance, a decrescendo. In 1814, he married in Berlin, where he became a doting father, struck up a warm relationship with the Mendelssohn family and devoted himself to teaching. In 1820, homesick again, he returned with his family to Paris, but soon decamped to Bordeaux. In 1828 came a disastrous Paris concert. ‘The intonation, formerly so pure and so fine, had become uncertain,’ wrote Belgian musicologist and critic François-Joseph Fétis. ‘The bow was timid, as were the fingers; the élan, the passion, the security of experience, which replaces the audacity of youth, all had vanished.’ This episode appears to have finished off Rode emotionally. It seems the following year he suffered a stroke, further exacerbating the problems with his arm, and on 25 November 1830 he died. Writing shortly afterwards, a heartbroken Baillot remembered a violinist ‘whose play, full of charm, purity, and elegance, reflected so well the amiable qualities of his mind and his heart’.

And yet, what Rode lost in the 1810s in terms of his concert career, the world gained tenfold in his pedagogical legacy, as he doubled down on what he had started as a founder of the French school, becoming a sought-after teacher, and in 1819 publishing his seminal 24 Caprices. Also in 1819, his most important pupil, Joseph Böhm (1795–1876), was appointed the first violin professor of the recently established Vienna Conservatoire; and from Böhm, Rode’s golden lineage continued, his own pupils including Jakob Dont and Joseph Joachim, with the latter – who sits in so many pedagogical family trees – still able late in life to play from memory Rode pieces he’d studied in Vienna. ‘Rode is a very important relative of all of us professional violinists. You can find him in the chain of nearly everybody,’ says violinist Friedemann Eichhorn, Kronberg Academy director and Rode specialist, who himself studied with Valery Gradow, who studied with Adolf Leschinski, who studied with Carl Flesch, who studied with Jakob Grün – who studied with Böhm.

Joseph Böhm

Eichhorn’s contribution to Rode scholarship is immense. Most recently, he contributed the additional markings for Henle’s definitive edition of the 24 Caprices, which he describes as Rode’s most important work, and one which a violinist cannot live without. ‘You play Kreutzer, then you play Rode,’ he says, ‘and if somebody can play these caprices, then they really know how to play the violin.’ What is more, the caprices even give us further clues as to how Rode sounded himself, such is the detail of the indications he provided in them. For instance, the way the same finger is often used from one note to the next suggests he played a lot of glissandos. Also, the bowings suggest both an incredible legato and an extraodinarily slow bow. ‘“Elegant” is exactly the word,’ says Eichhorn.

Eichhorn’s even more significant Rode project, though, has been rediscovering his 13 violin concertos, and partnering with Naxos to record them all – a twelve-year artistic and scholarly labour of love that came about when he was looking for recordings of the caprices with which to aid his teaching, and on finding Oscar Shumsky’s, his thoughts turned naturally to the concertos. ‘I knew very little about them, beyond having played the one that has remained in the canon, no.7,’ he says.

‘I thought that if there was a no.7, there must be at least six others, and was then astonished to find that not only were there 13 altogether, but that there wasn’t a single recording of any of them, even the seventh!’

With the help of his music-collector friend, Jonathan Frohnen, Eichhorn tracked down the music, at which point came a further surprise. He’d assumed the concertos would be similar in style to the caprices, but they turned out to be completely different. Whereas the caprices are clearly pedagogical, systematically working their way through the cosmos of violin technique, the concertos reveal a composer who simply wants to write beautiful music, in a language which sounds on the one hand familiar, as though it could be early Beethoven, or Mendelssohn, but on the other hand entirely individual.

Friedemann Eichhorn

Manuscript for the solo part of Rode’s Violin Concerto no.3

‘Rode is a singer on the violin,’ enthuses Eichhorn. ‘The second movements especially are in an operatic, arioso style. Looking at them, I can imagine how he must have been a very sensitive man who would have taken the later criticism of his playing very seriously.’ There’s also plenty of long-lined song in the first movements, which generally consist of three big violin sections with orchestral sections in between, sometimes playing out as a sort of ritornello form, and other times more in the direction of sonata form. Throughout, Rode doesn’t come across as a show-off virtuoso. ‘He’s not trying to compete with colleagues such as Kreutzer and Baillot in the way that Ernst and Paganini competed with each other,’ says Eichhorn, citing the comparative lack of double-stops as an example.

Friedemann Eichhorn recording with conductor Nicolás Pasquet and the Jena Philharmonic

EICHHORN PORTRAIT PHOTO GUIDO WERNER

 ‘PIERRE RODE’ STRAD PHOTO COURTESY OF ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, OXFORD 

However, there is more virtuoso fire in the rondo-form final movements (all the concertos have three movements) – vivid creations that often feature ideas from other cultures, such as polonaises or Russian songs.

Equally vivid is Rode’s orchestration, both in its oboe, trumpet and timpani colour, and in the dialogue. ‘It’s much more than a solo concerto,’ Eichhorn says. ‘It was at our first orchestral rehearsal – probably the first time in a hundred years that these pieces had been heard with orchestra – that we first really appreciated the extent of the interaction between the instrumentalists of the orchestra and the solo violinist.

Especially in the second movements, where suddenly there will be a bassoon solo, or flute. The violinist often acts as a sort of primus inter pares, almost like in chamber music.’

Another interesting element is that, in contrast to Rode’s meticulous indications in the caprices, the concertos contain significantly fewer performance markings, from bowings through to crescendos and diminuendos. He also presents many cadenza opportunities, especially in the first movements, but doesn’t supply much substance for them, beyond some fermatas, lead-ins and lead-outs. This was presumably because he was largely writing for himself, even though others –

Paganini, Wieniawski, Bériot – played them too. ‘This was actually the most fun and interesting part of the project,’ Eichhorn says. ‘With no performance tradition, it was beautiful to be able to be quite creative with the text, even as far as tempos, guided basically by the idea of playing them in an attractive way. For example, the final movements have places where there’s a double bar and a key change, so we got in the groove there, playing it slightly più mosso.’

As for which of Rode’s concertos are the most musically outstanding, while no.7 remains the most famous, thanks to Wieniawski (who also added a cadenza), Eichhorn particularly enjoys no.3: ‘It’s a very, very beautiful concerto, and I’d say the most dramatic, with its G minor first movement. Then the last movement is a polonaise, over which you can really project.’ Also noteworthy is the posthumously published no.13, dedicated to Baillot. ‘It’s special because it’s always switching between F sharp minor and A major, to the extent that you can’t tell which of the two keys it’s actually in, like a double tonality.’ Asked why he thinks these works aren’t played by other violinists, Eichhorn suggests the reason is twofold. First, Rode’s name hasn’t survived in the wider public consciousness in the way that Paganini’s and Wieniawski’s have. Second, there has been a lack of available sheet music, because while printed copies have existed, published by the likes of Edition Peters, Simrock and Johann André, often it has just been parts, with no conductor’s score, and these are frequently so difficult to read as to be completely impractical. By way of demonstration, Eichhorn holds an original publication up to his webcam (we’re on Zoom), and indeed it looks so messy that it’s little better than a manuscript. So a major project element was preparing new, clean parts and conductor’s scores.

‘RODE IS A SINGER ON THE V IOLIN, IN THE SECOND MOV EMENTS ESPECI A LLY’

Now that we have the context of the concertos, do the caprices deserve a reassessment for concert potential? ‘Many of them do work well in concert,’ Eichhorn affirms. ‘At the International Louis Spohr Competition for Young Violinists in Weimar, at the University of Music Franz Liszt – where I teach – you can choose to play a Rode caprice, and it works very well. Rode often writes his caprices in two parts: a singing introduction in a slow tempo, followed by a faster section, and it’s beautiful, even while not as spectacular as Paganini.’

Still, it’s the concertos that he wants to see benefit the most from this important anniversary year, believing as strongly as he does that they are musically worthy of being brought back into the repertoire; and with his Naxos cycle having now provided both recorded inspiration and physical parts, the stage is certainly set.

RODE’S STRADS

When Pierre Rode died in 1830, he left behind two Stradivari violins. The 1715 ‘Rode, Duke of Cambridge’ Stradivari (below left) was American virtuoso Oscar Shumsky’s instrument from 1975 (on which he made the world premiere recording of Rode’s 24 Caprices in 1987). He told The Strad in April 1985: ‘It was a case of “love at first sound”... A quick glance told me that the violin was not only a Stradivarius but one of the finest examples I had seen.’

The 1722 ‘Pierre Rode’ Stradivari (below right) is one of only around a dozen decorated instruments made by the master luthier. It is held in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK.