“I have a beautiful Strad. viola which I long to play in public. Will you write me a solo for it? I could not trust anyone but you.”
“To do that one ought to play the viola,” I objected. “You alone could do it satisfactorily.”
But he insisted:
“I am too ill to compose; it would be useless to try. You will do it properly.”
So to please him I tried to write a viola solo with orchestral accompaniment, feeling sure that his power would enable him to dominate the orchestra. It seemed to me an entirely new idea, and I burned to carry it through. However, he called soon after and asked to see a sketch of his part.
“This won’t do,” he said, looking at the pauses, “there is too much silence. I must be playing all the time.”
“Did I not tell you so?” I answered. “What you want is a viola concerto, and you are the only one who can write it.”
He seemed disappointed and dropped the subject; a few days later, suffering from the throat trouble of which he afterwards died, he left for Nice and did not come back for three years.
Still ruminating over my idea, I wove round the viola solo a series of scenes, drawn from my memories of wanderings in the Abruzzi, which I called Childe Harold, as there seemed to me about the whole symphony a poetic melancholy worthy of Byron’s hero. It was first performed at my concert, 23rd November 1834, but Girard, the conductor, made a terrible hash of the Pilgrim’s March. However, being doubtful of my own powers, I still allowed him to direct my concerts until, after the fourth performance of Harold, seeing that he would not take it at the proper tempo, I assumed command myself, and never but once after that broke my rule of conducting my own compositions.
We shall see how much cause I had to regret that one exception.