Ferdinand David

Ferdinand David maintained a close professional relationship with Felix Mendelssohn and occupied a prominent position in German musical circles throughout the nineteenth century. He introduced Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, to the public for the first time.

David entered the world on June 19, 1810, in Hamburg, inside the very residence where Mendelssohn had been born one year earlier. His father earned his living as a merchant. Although he grew up in the Jewish tradition, David converted to Protestantism in 1828. During the first half of the 1820s he received lessons from Moritz Hauptmann and Louis Spohr. By 1826 he had secured a post as a violinist at the Königstädtischen Theater in Berlin. In the closing years of the 1820s and the opening years of the 1830s he traveled widely as a virtuoso, performing in cities as distant as Moscow and St. Petersburg. He also led the first violin section of a quartet maintained by the nobleman Carl Gotthard von Liphardt.

In 1835 David was appointed concertmaster of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig at the moment Mendelssohn assumed its conductorship. Although many of his own compositions center on the violin, others do not; the Concertino for trombone and orchestra, Op. 4, written in 1838, remains a standard requirement in university trombone examinations.

He joined the faculty of the newly founded Leipzig Conservatory of Music in 1843 as a violin instructor. Before the 1845 Leipzig premiere of Mendelssohn's violin concerto, David supplied the composer with practical technical suggestions. In 1852 he likewise gave the first performance of Robert Schumann's Violin Sonata No. 1 in A minor, Op. 105.

After Mendelssohn died in 1847, David took over as music director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra. He issued roughly fifty published works, most of which receive little attention today. His cadenza for Beethoven's Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 61, however, was performed by the twelve-year-old Joseph Joachim in 1844 and continues to appear in concert programs. His arrangement of Paganini's 24 Caprices for violin and orchestra, scored for violin and piano, has been recorded on several occasions.

Later in life he prepared performing editions of numerous compositions, including Bach's unaccompanied sonatas and partitas for solo violin. While spending a holiday with his family in Klosters, Switzerland, David died suddenly on July 18, 1873. As of the mid-2020s, some twenty-five of his works had been committed to disc, among them two of his five violin concertos, performed by violinist Hagai Shaham.