Bartók would not have recognised such a title; this was his ‘Violin Concerto’. It only became known as No.2 after the discovery of the concerto he wrote in 1907–8 for Stefi Geyer to whom he gave the manuscript; this was entirely forgotten during his lifetime (he had reused the first movement as the first of his Two Portraits op.5), only surfaced after her death, and the work was first performed in 1958 and published in 1959.

The Violin Concerto (therefore) was commissioned by Zoltán Székely with whom Bartók had already given many recitals. The original idea had been an extended set of variations, but Székely insisted on a proper concerto, and the result was a compromise: the slow movement is clearly a set of variations, while the entire finale is a variant of the opening movement, both thematically and structurally. The concerto was written in 1937–8 at a difficult time: with the onset of Fascism Bartók forbade broadcasts of his music in Germany and Italy and left Universal Edition, so that from 1937 his works were published by Boosey & Hawkes. But the war intervened, it was a miracle his manuscripts survived moves for safe-keeping to London and then to the USA, and the Violin Concerto was first published in 1946.

sources

A  Autograph score, in the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel

E,P  First edition of score and parts, published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1946

The first printing of E (both full and miniature) had an error in the bar numbering from III 416 to the end: bar 416 reads “415”, and so on. This is corrected in reprints of E from at least 1957 onwards, but P was never corrected, so that score and parts continue to be at odds with one another. The only pragmatic solution to this is to change the (‘correct’) score to agree with the parts; every number from 416 to the end has to be reduced by 1. This original (wrong, but practical) numbering is used in the notes that follow.

The first ending is always played, never the second (in which Solo Vl oddly drops out entirely).