The Man Who Had to Stop

Track eleven was the gentlest walking pace on the record, a song that remembered to breathe. It ended by pointing at what comes next.

Track twelve doesn’t breathe. It’s Perpetuum mobile, “perpetual motion”, the album’s single, and from the first note to the last the violin never stops moving.

First, the facts. Track twelve runs two minutes and fifty-seven seconds, only seven seconds longer than the gentle Mendelssohn before it, and it feels about half as long. It is in D minor, marked Vivace non troppo, “lively, but not too much”, which may be the least obeyed tempo marking in the violin repertoire. And it was written by a man almost nobody could pick out of a lineup: Ottokar Nováček.

Look at the credit first, because on this album that is where the story usually starts, and this time the credit tells you almost nothing.

Garrett’s own site gives the fullest version: PERPETUUM MOBILE / from 8 Concert Caprices, Op. 5: No. 4, Ottokar Novácek, 1866 – 1900. It is a piece from a set of eight, the fourth, for violin and piano. The Deutsche Grammophon store, which printed a whole catalogue number for Mendelssohn on track eleven, gives this one three words: Nováček: Perpetuum mobile. No opus, no key, no set. It’s the barest credit on the whole album, for its best-known track.

And look closely at the name on Garrett’s site. It is printed Novácek, with a sharp accent over the a and nothing over the c. The little mark that belongs there, the one that turns c into ch, is missing.

In Czech that mark is called a háček. The word means “little hook”. So on the page of the man who made this piece famous again, the composer’s name has lost its hook, and with it the one letter that tells you the family was Czech. It’s a small thing. It’s also the sort of thing that happens to a composer who is remembered for one piece: the piece travels, and the name gets a little worn along the way.

The dates on that credit tell the rest, if you do the subtraction. 1866 – 1900.

• • •

Ottokar Nováček was born in 1866 in Weißkirchen, in the Banat, today Bela Crkva in Serbia: an Austro-Hungarian violinist of Czech descent. His father, Martin Nováček, came from Horažďovice in Bohemia, and he was also Ottokar’s first teacher. As a teenager Ottokar was in Vienna studying with Jakob Dont, whose violin studies are still on music stands today, and then in Leipzig, where he won the Mendelssohn Prize.

He was a working violinist, not a star. In Leipzig he played in the Gewandhaus Orchestra, and he was the founding second violin of Adolph Brodsky’s string quartet, and later its violist. Then America: the Boston Symphony, and principal viola in Walter Damrosch’s orchestra in New York. He spent most of his career in the middle of the texture, playing the inner lines that hold the harmony together and that audiences rarely notice.

He also composed, and in 1895 the Leipzig publisher C. F. Peters brought out his Perpetuum mobile in two versions: one for violin and piano, and one for violin and full orchestra, which Nováček scored himself, down to the harp, the triangle and the glockenspiel.

Then, in 1899, his heart, by most accounts, forced him to stop playing. He was in his early thirties. He turned to composition for the time he had left, and it wasn’t much. Ottokar Nováček died in New York on 3 February 1900. He was thirty-three.

He left a piano concerto dedicated to Busoni, string quartets, songs on texts by Tolstoy. You’d struggle to find any of them on a concert programme. What outlived him is three minutes of motion, and it has never stopped being played. Nathan Milstein recorded it, and so did Yehudi Menuhin and Itzhak Perlman. Violinists have always treated it as a piece you have to get through at least once.

Most violinists meet this piece early. It is one of the rites of passage of a young player’s life: a torrent of even, rapid notes, all bowing and no breathing, where any lapse of concentration is immediately audible.

David Garrett met it as a boy. In a short Track by Track video for the album, he remembers it this way:

“This is a piece I probably did not sleep well before performing it the first time, when I was a kid. I remember playing that in the class concert of Zakhar Bron. One of those pieces where you kind of need to practice, because it’s so fast that if you don’t practice, it’s gonna be a mess.”

Then he picks up the violin, plays a few seconds of the opening, and stops himself: the rest, he says, you’ll see on stage. His description is as short as the piece is fast: “about three minutes, full speed, full throttle,” and fun for the audience, “and also fun for me, if I have a good night.”

That last clause is the most honest thing a violinist can say about this music. There are no slow bars to recover in. A good night and a bad night are separated by one missed shift at full speed.

• • •

For four tracks running, this series has watched Garrett pass over a composer’s most famous violin piece because he had already recorded it. On track eight it was Paganini, on nine Massenet, on ten Brahms, on eleven Mendelssohn.

Track twelve breaks the pattern. Here the famous piece is the pick. As far as we can find, Garrett has never put Nováček’s Perpetuum mobile on a record before, and it is the piece chosen to introduce the whole album, with its own music video.

It is also, oddly, a return to the original. The credit on Garrett’s site says from 8 Concert Caprices, Op. 5, which is the version for violin and piano. But the recording is Arr. Garrett / van der Heijden for Violin, Piano, Guitar & Orchestra: Julien Quentin at the piano, Franck van der Heijden on guitar, Orchestra the Prezent under John Haywood. After Haywood’s turn as co-arranger on track eleven, van der Heijden is back beside Garrett. And a Perpetuum mobile with an orchestra behind the violin is exactly what Nováček published himself in 1895. The credit points to the small version. The recording, piano and all, sounds closer to the big one the composer scored.

And it sits where it sits for a reason. Put the gentlest walking pace on the record in front of a piece that never walks at all, and each makes the other sound more like itself.

This series keeps asking one question: what actually carries music past the people who made it?

Track nine’s answer was that immortality doesn’t care what you call it. Track ten’s was that it hands out the credit whether you want it or not. Track eleven’s was that it will give your music a name you never gave it.

Track twelve’s answer is the plainest one yet. Sometimes the music simply outlasts the body that made it. Nováček’s heart stopped him in his early thirties. The notes he wrote down were built never to stop at all: a century later a boy in Zakhar Bron’s class lost sleep over them, and in 2026 the grown man chose them as the first thing the world would hear from his new album.

So when the notes start pouring out on track twelve, that’s a man who spent his life in the middle of the quartet, getting three minutes in which nobody else gets a word in. He lost the hook on his name somewhere along the way. The motion is still going.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — arrives 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, with pre-orders open now on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep counting the album in.

Sources & notes: the album credit as david-garrett.com, the Deutsche Grammophon catalogue and the DG store print it (checked 24 September 2026; Garrett’s site spells the name “Novácek”); Nováček’s life — his Czech family, his studies with Jakob Dont, the Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Brodsky Quartet, Boston and New York, the heart condition that ended his playing in 1899 and his death on 3 February 1900 — from his standard biographies; the 1895 C. F. Peters editions for violin and piano and for violin and orchestra from IMSLP; David Garrett’s words from his Track by Track video for Immortal (Deutsche Grammophon); recordings by Nathan Milstein (with Ernest Lush), Yehudi Menuhin and Itzhak Perlman (with Samuel Sanders). We have not given a year of composition: 1895 is the year the piece was published.