About this edition
Composed around 1765 for Luigi Tomasini, the brilliant concertmaster of Prince Esterházy's orchestra, Haydn's Violin Concerto in C major, Hob.VIIa:1, is the earliest of his surviving violin concertos and one of the most rewarding solo works of his Esterházy years. Written with Tomasini's virtuosity clearly in mind, the concerto balances galant elegance with genuine technical brilliance — a singing, ornamented Adagio framed by two outer movements of sparkling rhythmic vitality that reveal Haydn's early mastery of the concerto principle well before his mature symphonies established him as Europe's leading composer.
This score reproduces the authoritative edition prepared by the eminent German musicologist Max Seiffert (1868–1948) and published in 1909 by Breitkopf & Härtel of Leipzig as part of their distinguished catalog of orchestral repertoire (plate Part.B. 2134). Seiffert, a pupil of Philipp Spitta and later director of the Fürstliches Institut für musikwissenschaftliche Forschung, was among the most important editors of Baroque and Classical music of his generation, and his careful scholarship made this concerto — long neglected after its rediscovery — available to modern performers in a text prepared with the rigor for which the Breitkopf house was renowned.
About this edition:
- Full orchestral score (conductor's score)
- Page size: 8.5 x 11 inches
- Reproduced from the 1909 Breitkopf & Härtel edition edited by Max Seiffert
- Reproduced from a public domain historical source
- Published by Purple 4R Publishing
We're delighted to make this beautiful early Haydn concerto available in a clean, well-printed reprint of a historically significant edition now in the public domain — a small way of helping conductors, soloists, students, and scholars keep this music alive on stands and in libraries where it belongs.
