Felipe Libón, the first travelling Spanish Virtuoso and his Violin Concerto No.6 (1812). A Performance Practice case study: I. Poco Allegro

Saya Ikenoya

One of the first Spanish virtuoso violinists to achieve international recognition, Felipe Libón enjoyed a successful performing and composing career. He worked and performed alongside other celebrated violinists: Rode, Kreutzer, and Baillot, who were founders of the so-called "19th Century French Violin School". We will experiment with applying the extensive indications of the treatises (Baillot, Campagnoli, Woldemar, Spohr, Cartier, and Libón himself) to build a performance practice case study.

3.3 Libón’s Violin Concerto No. 6: dedicatees, publishing & performance dates

Now finally, we return to Libón and his Concerto No.6. Before deciding on this concert, I decided on the other Concertos, but this task was much harder than I thought. In principle, the only one digitized and available for public consultation was this one, Number 6. All the copies of the concertos I could locate were not manuscripts, but commercialised scores by Pleyel.

I found out that the Concerto No. 1 was located in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; No.4 in the Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, and No.5 in the Bibliothèque du Conservatoire Royal de Liège. I decided I was interested in the later concerts rather than the early ones, so I tried to obtain digital copies of these last two. The copy I received from Liège comprised all the orchestra parts but unfortunately, it was missing the central violin part. The scores sent by the ONB, of Concerto No.5, happily were completed. However, reviewing the music, I ultimately opted for his Concerto number 6, as it appeared to embody better the canon of heroic concerto modelled after Viotti.

As already mentioned in the list of Libón's work in the first chapter, no opus number is assigned to the Concerti. It does not look like Fetis' list was taking into account a chronological order either. All this leads us to believe that the concerti were written in alternating order to the rest of the works.

We do not know the exact date of composition of many of his works, but we can make a tentative estimate, according to García1: This publisher, Nadermann, began to use plate numbers in an orderly manner from 1797 onwards. Considering the information available on other published pieces and this concerto's plate number (1535), this work corresponds to the period between 1812 and 1813.

Apart from giving us this essential data for dating the work, the title page provides valuable information about Libon's activities and whereabouts: firstly, the dedication: a certain M. Ph. Wertmiller d'Elly, probably a rich burgeois from Zurich, of whom I could not find much. Secondly, it is noticeable that the title states: avec Accompagnement de la Orchestre (ad-libitum). We shall wait until the next chapter to know if this indication had any impact on the writing of the orchestral part.

Below the author's name, we observe an inscription: the piece was performed by Libón himself at the Salle Olympique at the Odeon.

Fig. 1: Title page of the Concerto No.6 of Felipe Libón

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Saya Ikenoya - Felipe Libón, the first travelling Spanish Virtuoso and his Violin Concerto No.6 (1812). A Performance Practice case study: I. Poco Allegro - 2023