The Legend of the Légende

Track seventeen was three and a half minutes taken from an hour. Track eighteen is the longest thing on the album.

The facts. Track eighteen runs six minutes and forty-six seconds. It is the Légende, Op. 17, by Henryk Wieniawski. The credit is the same as on track seventeen: Arr. Garrett / Haywood for Violin, Piano, Guitar & Orchestra, with Julien Quentin, Franck van der Heijden, Orchestra the Prezent and John Haywood conducting.

The piece usually takes about eight minutes.

Lublin, 1835. Wieniawski enters the Paris Conservatoire at eight and wins its first prize at eleven. At thirteen he is touring.

Paganini had died in 1840. Europe was looking for the next one, and many decided they had found him. Track eight caught the first one singing.

In April 1859 Anton Rubinstein takes him to meet a family in London, the Hamptons. They have a daughter, Isabella.

Her mother, Elizabeth, is the sister of the pianist George Osborne. She likes the young Pole.

Her father does not. He respects musicians, but he wanted a son-in-law with money behind him, and a travelling violinist isn’t that.

That year Wieniawski writes a slow piece for violin and orchestra, in G minor. He calls it Légende.

Here is the story the programme notes tell.

He plays the Légende for her parents. Her father hears it, is moved, and gives his blessing.

His biographers tell it differently. Mr Hampton gave in because his wife and daughter talked him round. And he had conditions.

Two hundred thousand francs.

That was the life-assurance policy Wieniawski had to take out. He also had to settle down. In 1860 he became soloist to the Tsar, in St Petersburg. A steady job.

They married in Paris on 8 August 1860. Reportedly, Rubinstein gave the bride away, Rossini was a witness and Vieuxtemps played.

The Légende is dedicated to Isabella.

Neither version comes with a document. We don’t know which one is true. Possibly a bit of both.

In the orchestral version it opens low, with a horn tune over plucked strings. The violin comes in quietly, with a simple song.

The middle gets faster, almost a march, with double stops and chords. Then the opening comes back, and the piece ends softly on a high G.

The credit on track eighteen names a guitar and an orchestra. What you hear is a violin and a piano: Garrett and Julien Quentin.

That is how the Légende first reached print. Kistner in Leipzig published it for violin and piano in 1861. The orchestral version followed three years later.

They had children. Their daughter Régine became a composer, under the name Poldowski.

His heart gave out early. In his last years he often had to break off in the middle of a concert. In February 1880 Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky’s patron, took him into her home. He died in Moscow on 31 March, aged forty-four.

Track five was a dedication that never got an answer. Track eighteen’s got a yes.

On Garrett’s published repertoire list, the Légende has one recording against it: Immortal.

This series keeps asking what carries music past the people who made it.

Track six was a piece Kreisler signed with someone else’s name. Track eighteen has been travelling for more than a hundred and sixty years with a story attached, and the story may not be quite true.

Either way, they married. And we got six minutes and forty-six seconds.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — from 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep walking through it.

Sources & notes: the album credit as printed by Deutsche Grammophon and david-garrett.com; the composition, publication history, dedication and length from IMSLP’s work entry and the PWM edition; the music from the published score as described by IMSLP and the reference literature; Wieniawski’s early career from Britannica and the Berliner Philharmoniker’s programme note; the Hampton family, the father’s conditions and the wedding from the Wieniawski biography at wieniawski.com and from Interlude; the popular version of the story from the reference literature on the Légende; his last months and Poldowski from the reference literature on Wieniawski; Garrett’s recordings from david-garrett.com. We don’t say which version of the courtship is true, because nobody has the document that would settle it.