Henri Vieuxtemps

Vieuxtemps toured Europe as a boy violinist and grew into one of the founders of the Franco-Belgian school. Born at Verviers, he took his early direction from Charles-Auguste de Bériot and performed Beethoven's Violin Concerto in Vienna in 1834. He wrote seven violin concertos; the Fourth in D minor and the Fifth in A minor are the two that stayed in the repertoire, Berlioz describing the Fourth as a symphony with a principal violin. He was court violinist in Saint Petersburg from 1846, and later took a professorship at the Brussels Conservatory, where Eugène Ysaÿe was his pupil. He stopped performing in 1873 and died in Algeria in 1881. Beside the violin concertos he left two for cello, a Duo brillant for violin, cello, piano and orchestra, three string quartets and a viola sonata, with shorter pieces for violin and orchestra written for his own use on tour, among them Souvenir de Russie and a caprice on English airs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The American tour begun in 1843 took him from Boston to New Orleans; early in it he wrote Souvenir d'Amérique, variations on Yankee Doodle.