Romance for violin and orchestra No. 2 (Beethoven)

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The Romance No. 2 in F major (op. 50) was completed in 1798 by Ludwig van Beethoven, and it is still one of the most popular of Beethoven's chamber music works today.

Beethoven's early musical career saw a close association with the violin and viola. His first violin teacher was his second cousin, Franz Rovantini. Haydn passed through Bonn, noticed Beethoven's talents as a composer, and invited him to Vienna to take lessons. Yet, notwithstanding the string quartets, which stand as one of Beethoven's finest mature chamber works, his contribution to the repertoire of the solo violin has been, in terms of popularity and longevity amongst concert audiences, out of all proportion to its tiny size.

The "First" Romance was written between 1800 and 1802 and published in Leipzig in 1803, while the "Second" (also called F major & op.50) would seem to date from 1798 and appears to have been first played by Ignaz Schuppanzigh at a concert in Vienna on November 5 that year. It was not published, however, until 1805.

Ignaz Schuppanzigh (1776-1830) was one of Vienna's most famous violinists and let the resident string quartet which performed at the regular chamber music evenings held at the home of Prince Lichnowsky. There is some evidence to suggest that Beethoven had known Schuppanzigh before arriving in Vienna, and that he may even have had some lessons on the instruments from him. But they became good friends in Vienna; to the extent that Beethoven frequently poked fun at Schuppanzigh's corpulent physique by referring to him as "Falstaff" and writing for him a humorous choral piece called Lob auf den Dicken("Praise to Fatness")

Schuppanzigh may have been the first to play the Romance in F but it seems that the piece was originally intended to be the slow movement of a Concerto in C for violin which Beethoven had began to sketch out in Bonn. Its orchestration - flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, strings - matches that used in the rest of the surviving Concerto skecthes, while the violin phrase which opens the piece is closely related to the main theme of the Concerto's surviving first movement. The Romance in F is built largely around this theme, the violin producing ever more ornate and elaborate decorations around it.