Charm, an artistic temperament, powerful musicality and technical bravura. Wunderkind Hungarian violinist Stefi Geyer had all of these attributes and was only in her teens when she and her playing both bewitched Europe and America. Béla Bartók, too, was touched, and he painted her musical portrait in his Violin Concerto No. 1 (1907). “We have already had the idealised musical portrait of Stefi Geyer, celestial and inward, and of course the vehement one which is humorous, ingenious and entertaining. Right now we should construct the portrait of the indifferent, cold and mute Stefi. But this would be ugly music.” Bartók supposedly completed the two-movement piece on the same day that the girl wrote him a letter to inform him she was breaking up with him.
Stravinsky's Violin Concerto came about as the fruit of a joint effort between composer and performer. Samuel Dushkin initially judged the thematic concept outlined by Stravinsky to be unplayable, but, after much deliberation, they eventually hit on a solution. From that time on, he helped the composer with the violin's labyrinth of technical difficulties and possibilities, and the piece was completed quickly. It was not a traditionally structured concerto that Stravinsky had created, but a four-part cycle in which the two more stirring and virtuosic movements (Toccata and Capriccio) envelope two that are more serene and melodic (Arias I and II).
Had Leopold Auer, one of the most popular violinists of his era and another Hungarian, been asked to assist Tchaikovsky in creating his violin concerto, considered one of the most popular and difficult such works in the musical literature, he surely would not not have rejected the composer's request – deeming the work “unplayable” – to première the composition. Fortunately, posterity has not borne out Auer's opinion: the piece's popularity remains undiminished today.

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