Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode

He was, by the reckoning of his own age, the most perfect violinist in Europe — the violinist for whom Beethoven wrote his final sonata, and whose twenty-four caprices every serious student still plays today.

Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode was born in Bordeaux on 16 February 1774, the son of a perfumer. He showed his gift early, and from about the age of eight he studied for six years with André-Joseph Fauvel, a respected violinist of the city. Fauvel recognised that the boy had outgrown what Bordeaux could teach him, and around 1787, when Rode was roughly thirteen, took him to Paris.

In Paris he came to the attention of Giovanni Battista Viotti, the most celebrated violinist of the day and the founder of the modern French violin school. Viotti judged the boy so talented that he taught him without a fee. From Viotti, Rode inherited a noble, singing style — to which he added a gentler sweetness, a refined tone, and a famously expressive use of portamento, the sliding connection between notes.

He made his public debut in 1790, aged sixteen, playing Viotti's Thirteenth Concerto at the Théâtre de Monsieur. The success was complete. Since Viotti no longer appeared in public himself, he entrusted the premieres of his later concertos to his young protégé. By the middle of the decade Rode had taken a place on the violin faculty of the newly founded Paris Conservatoire.

Rode is remembered alongside Rodolphe Kreutzer and Pierre Baillot as one of the three great representatives of the classical French violin school — the trio who effectively shaped modern violin technique. Around 1803 the three jointly wrote the Méthode de violon, the official tutor adopted by the Conservatoire. It codified the school's principles of bowing, tone and posture and standardised violin teaching for generations. Of the three, Rode was often considered the most finished player; the critic Boris Schwarz later described his playing as full of a characteristically French verve and a kind of nervous brilliance.

For much of the 1790s and 1800s Rode lived the life of a travelling virtuoso, carrying his reputation through the Netherlands, the German states, England and Spain — where, in Madrid, he met Boccherini. Around 1800 he was named solo violinist to Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul, and introduced his own Seventh Concerto with great success. A Leipzig journal of 1800 reported that visiting virtuosos had come to Paris expecting to find the finest violinist in Europe, and agreed that the man was Rode.

From about 1804 he spent several years in Russia, at the imperial court of Tsar Alexander I in Saint Petersburg, in the company of the composer Boïeldieu, before returning westward. When he came back to Paris his reception had cooled: a younger taste, and a rising rival in Charles Philippe Lafont, had moved on.

In 1811 Rode resumed touring, and at the end of 1812 he reached Vienna. There Beethoven, who had a violin sonata in progress, finished it with Rode's playing in mind — the Sonata in G major, Op. 96, his tenth and last for violin and piano. Rode gave the premiere on 29 December 1812 at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz, with Beethoven's patron and pupil the Archduke Rudolph at the piano.

Tellingly, Beethoven shaped the finale to suit Rode rather than himself. In a note to the Archduke he remarked that he had restrained the brilliant, rushing passagework he might otherwise have written, because that manner did not suit Rode's taste — a small but revealing tribute to the elegance, rather than the mere fireworks, that defined Rode's art.

From 1814 Rode settled for several years in Berlin, where he married and became an intimate of the Mendelssohn household; the mother of Felix and Fanny later wrote that when Rode and his wife departed, the charm of their musical winter evenings faded away. It was in these years, roughly 1814 to 1819, that he composed and published the work for which he is now best loved: the 24 Caprices en forme d'études, Op. 22 — one caprice in each of the twenty-four major and minor keys, each at once a miniature work of art and a searching technical study. They remain, beside Kreutzer's études, indispensable to the training of every violinist.

Rode eventually retired to his native south-west of France. In 1828 he attempted one last public concert in Paris. It failed badly — the playing of his prime was gone, and the audience's applause was felt to be merely dutiful. The disappointment is widely said to have broken his spirit and hastened his decline; one account records that a stroke in 1829 left him partly paralysed. He died on 25 November 1830, at the Château de Bourbon near Damazan, in the Lot-et-Garonne of his native Aquitaine. He was fifty-six.

In all Rode wrote thirteen violin concertos — of which the Seventh, in A minor, has held the stage longest — together with around a dozen string quartets, several quatuors brillants for a virtuoso first violin and string trio, sets of variations (his G major air was a favourite of singers and fiddlers alike), and the Caprices. His concertos matter in the early history of the Romantic concerto, even if they are seldom played now.

His deepest mark was on the players who came after. Through his example and his music his influence reached the German school: Joseph Böhm — teacher of Joseph Joachim — and Eduard Rietz, the friend of Mendelssohn, both studied with him for a time. The line from Rode runs, in this way, into the great violin playing of the nineteenth century and beyond.