Ferdinand David

Mendelssohn consulted him while writing the E minor Concerto, and it was Ferdinand David who gave the work its premiere in 1845 — by then concertmaster of the Leipzig Gewandhaus, a desk he occupied for close to four decades. Born in Hamburg, he studied violin with Louis Spohr and theory with Moritz Hauptmann, and held early posts in Berlin and Dorpat before the Leipzig appointment; from 1843 he was the first professor of violin at the conservatory there. He composed five violin concertos and a good deal of chamber music, as well as the Concertino for Trombone and Orchestra, Op. 4. His editions of Bach's solo violin works and of Veracini, Locatelli and Vitali put older music back into circulation. He was born in 1810 in the Hamburg house where Mendelssohn had been born the year before, played at the Königstädtisches Theater in Berlin from 1826 and led Baron von Liphardt's quartet in Dorpat from 1829, touring Riga, Saint Petersburg and Moscow, before the Gewandhaus took him as concertmaster in 1836. With Clara Schumann he gave the official premiere of Schumann's first violin sonata in Leipzig in March 1852, and he also directed the Gewandhaus orchestra as Kapellmeister. He died in 1873, at sixty-three, while on a mountain excursion with his children near Klosters.