Henri Vieuxtemps

Belgian violinist and composer Henri Vieuxtemps was born into a musical family in Verviers in 1820. Encouraged by his father, an amateur violinist and violin-maker, he gave his first public performance at age six, and was soon taken under the wing of violinist Charles Auguste de Bériot. By 1829, he was performing across Europe, where he impressed leading Romantic composers such as Robert Schumann and Louis Spohr, and in 1835 he studied composition under Anton Reicha in Paris. His earliest works, mostly for violin, met with success, particularly in Russia, where he performed his Violin Concerto No. 1 in 1840; he lived in Saint Petersburg between 1846 and 1851. In 1873, a stroke paralysed Vieuxtemps’ right arm, and while he began to recover, a second stroke permanently ended his concert career. He continued to compose violin music—including concertos, string quartets and sonatas—but never matched the fame he achieved as a violinist. For much of his career he owned and played a violin made by Giuseppe Guarneri in 1741, later known as the “Vieuxtemps” Guarneri del Gesù, which has been played by Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman and Anne Akiko Meyers.