| Summary: | This book highlights the unique insights that Jean Sibelius's Violin Concerto in D Minor (op. 47) offers into the composer's musical imagination, violin virtuosity, and connections between violin-playing traditions. It discusses the concerto's cultural contexts, performers who are connected with its early history, and recordings of the work. Beginning with Sibelius's early training as a violinist and his aspirations to be a virtuoso player, the book traces the composition of the concerto at a dramatic political moment in Finnish history. This concerto was composed when Finland was going through a period of intense struggle for self-determination and protest against Russian imperial policies. Taking the concerto's historical context into consideration leads to a new paradigm of the 20th-century virtuoso as a political figure, which replaces 19th-century representations of the virtuoso as a magical figure.
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