The Other Nováček

Track twelve never stopped. For two minutes and fifty-seven seconds the violin ran without a breath, and when it finally did, it left a man standing in the silence: Ottokar Nováček, the violinist whose heart made him put the instrument down in his early thirties.

Track thirteen is night music. And the Nováček story isn’t over.

First, the facts. Track thirteen runs three minutes and four seconds. It is the Nocturne from Jean Sibelius’s Belshazzar’s Feast, Op. 51. If that opus number rings a bell, it should: Tchaikovsky’s Valse sentimentale, track five, is an Op. 51 too. Pure coincidence.

The credit is one we know by now: Arr. Garrett / Haywood for Violin, Piano, Guitar & Orchestra. Julien Quentin at the piano, Franck van der Heijden on guitar, Orchestra the Prezent under John Haywood. It’s the same team and the same pair of arrangers as on track eleven, where we said Haywood would be back for the Sibelius. Here he is.

• • •

Helsinki, 7 November 1906. The Swedish Theatre is sold out for a new play by Hjalmar Procopé, Belsazars gästabud: Belshazzar’s feast, in Swedish, out of the Book of Daniel. The king of Babylon drinks from the sacred vessels of the Temple, sees a hand write on the wall, and is dead before morning.

Procopé gave the king two women. Leschanah is a Jewish girl sent to kill him. Khadra is his dancer and lover; she dances a dance of life and a dance of death, and a cobra kills her. By the end of the evening all three of them are dead.

Sibelius wrote the music for a small theatre band and conducted the first night himself. The play ran for twenty-one performances, into January 1907. Then it disappeared. You’d struggle to find anyone who has seen it staged since.

The music stayed. In 1907 Sibelius took four numbers from the score and made a concert suite, Op. 51, and the suite is now far better known than the play ever was. What Garrett plays is its third movement. In the theatre it was the prelude to the second act, Notturno: music heard in the dark, before the curtain went up on the night.

The words on the wall in the Book of Daniel are mene, mene, tekel: numbered, numbered, weighed. You have been weighed in the balance, the prophet tells the king, and found wanting.

Now go back two years, to the same city.

Helsinki, 8 February 1904. Sibelius conducts the first performance of his Violin Concerto in D minor, the only concerto he ever wrote. The soloist is the concertmaster of the Helsinki orchestra, who also teaches violin at the city’s music school. He had come north from the Banat ten years earlier.

His name is Victor Nováček. He was Ottokar’s younger brother.

They had the same father, Martin, and as boys they toured with him as the Nováček family string quartet. While Ottokar was playing in Leipzig, Boston and New York, Victor had gone to Finland. According to the history of the orchestra in Timișoara, the city where Victor was born, he became Sibelius’s adviser on the violin writing while the concerto was being composed.

The first night went badly. The concerto had been meant for Willy Burmester, a German virtuoso, and why he didn’t play it has been told more than one way. By one account, Nováček grumbled in rehearsal about the swift runs.

The review that stuck came from the Helsinki critic Merikanto:

“Nováček was not really a masterly player.”

He could give the concerto, Merikanto wrote, only part of “that brilliance and radiant assurance which is absolutely necessary in this kind of virtuoso piece.”

Sibelius took the concerto back. “The first movement must be rewritten,” he wrote. He cut it and tightened it, and in October 1905 it was heard again, in Berlin, with Karel Halíř as soloist and Richard Strauss conducting. That is the concerto the whole world plays today. As far as we can find, Victor Nováček never played it in public.

Ottokar had been dead for four years when his brother walked on stage in Helsinki. Victor died there in 1914.

There is one more person in this story who wanted to be the man with the violin.

Sibelius himself. “The violin took me by storm,” he remembered, “and for the next ten years it was my dearest wish, my overriding ambition, to become a great virtuoso.” He started late, as a teenager, and he had stage fright. In January 1891, as a student in Vienna, he auditioned for the Vienna Philharmonic. He failed, and by one account he broke down and wept.

He wrote for the violin instead. The Nocturne he wrote for a theatre band, with no solo violin in it at all.

The violin has been borrowing it since at least 1911, when Michael Press published an arrangement for violin and piano in Berlin. On track thirteen it goes to a violinist who did make it: the boy who lost sleep in Zakhar Bron’s class, as track twelve remembered.

• • •

Say “Sibelius” to a violinist and you get one answer before you’ve finished the name: the Concerto.

From track eight to track eleven, the famous name arrived without its famous piece, because Garrett had already recorded it. Track twelve broke the pattern by picking the famous piece.

Track thirteen brings the pattern back, turned inside out. Garrett has recorded concertos by Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Brahms and Bruch. As far as we can find, he has never put the Sibelius on a record. What he took instead is three minutes from a play nobody stages.

And he put it straight after Nováček.

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

Track ten’s answer was that immortality hands out the credit whether you want it or not. Track eleven’s, that it will give your music a name you never gave it. Track twelve’s, that sometimes the music simply outlasts the body that made it.

Track thirteen’s answer is less comfortable. Immortality keeps its own guest list, and being there first doesn’t get you in. Victor Nováček played the Sibelius Concerto before anyone else in the world, and the concerto’s history remembers him mostly as the reason it had to be rewritten. Procopé’s play filled a theatre for twenty-one nights, and it’s gone.

The Nováček brothers are one track apart on this album. Only one of them is on it.

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 Deutsche Grammophon, the DG store and david-garrett.com print it (checked 26 September 2026); Procopé’s play, its premiere and run, the theatre score and the 1907 suite, from Sibelius One and the standard reference works on Sibelius; Victor Nováček’s family and career from the German-language reference biographies and the history of the Banat Philharmonic, Timișoara; the 1904 premiere, Merikanto’s review and Sibelius’s letter as quoted in English by Interlude; Sibelius’s words on the violin and the 1891 audition from the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s programme note; Michael Press’s 1911 arrangement from IMSLP. We don’t give Victor Nováček’s year of birth, because the sources disagree, and we leave out the question of why Willy Burmester did not play the premiere, because the accounts differ.