What is generally known of Pierre Rode's significance as a figure in music history is threefold: his Twenty-Four Caprices remain a staple of violin pedagogy, he helped establish a strong violin division along with Baillot and Kreutzer at the Paris Conservatoire, and his particular style of playing inspired Beethoven to compose his Violin Sonata Op. 96 for him. It is probably futile, yet nonetheless tempting, to speculate how different Rode's historical standing might look to us today had a certain Italian virtuoso never existed. Only eight years Paganini's senior, Rode was already the toast of Paris when the boy in Genoa was still practising behind a locked door. At a time of great musical and social upheaval, Rode was the star pupil of Viotti, and from the age of eighteen he had a glittering virtuoso career – triumphant concerto performances, and an appointment as solo violinist to Napoleon, with whom he supposedly shared a mistress (the singer Madame Grassini). He travelled to Russia to play for the Tsar and enjoyed great success both artistically and financially.

Upon his return to France in 1808 aged thirty-four, however, his former admirers found him greatly changed. Audiences missed his once energetic performances; the ‘perfect violinist’ had become ‘cold and full of mannerism’, in the words of Louis Spohr (quoted in Arthur Pougin's Notice sur Rode, violiniste français (1874); translated and with a foreword by Bruce R. Schueneman as The Life and Music of Pierre Rode (Kingsville: The Lyre of Orpheus Press, 1994), 11). Rode spent the rest of his life a semi-recluse, residing in Berlin and then Bordeaux, occupying himself with married life, playing chamber music with the Mendelssohn family among others, composing and teaching – and planning his comeback. His last public concert in Paris, in 1828, was supposedly ‘such a fiasco that some commentators believed it hastened his death’ (according to the liner notes to the present disc, page 2); he had a stroke in 1829 and died the following year. Pougin suggested that he suffered from debilitating nervousness that compromised his bowing and intonation (Life and Music of Pierre Rode, 44).

It just so happens that 1828 was Paganini's break-out year – the beginning of his conquest of Europe, starting with Vienna and extending to Paris, where he arrived the year after Rode's death. Paganini performed his own music almost exclusively, but in the early days of his tour, before he had composed enough concertos to fill up his programmes, he also played Rode's concertos (No. 1 in D minor and No. 7 in A minor) – thus making Rode one of the very few other composers whose works he ever played in public. Paganini may have been the one to capture the zeitgeist – combining musical virtuosity, personal eccentricity and opportunistic entrepreneurship into one enticing celebrity package – yet Rode's own considerable virtuosity is evident from his oeuvre of concertos (thirteen in all), quartets, airs variés and other pieces.

The twelve études on this CD were composed much later than the Twenty-Four Caprices (which date from the early 1820s), and in fact were not published until after Rode's death (by Launer in Paris). They are closer to Kreutzer's forty-two études than to Paganini's Twenty-Four Caprices in that they serve better the needs of the student rather than of the stage. Each étude is designed, as one would expect, to exercise a particular technique or set of techniques, including double stops, chromatic scales, arpeggios, spiccato, bariolage, upbow staccato, and speed in both hands. (Numbers 1–10 stand alone; number 11 leads straight into number 12 without a break so that the C major Fantasia is followed by an A minor Allegro.) The musical language is stylistically akin to that of Cherubini and Méhul (as Boris Schwarz and Clive Brown have noted in the most recent Grove entry; ‘Rode, Pierre’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, ed. Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), volume 21, 492).

In the liner notes accompanying the CD, Bruce R. Schueneman states that the Études are ‘certainly pedagogical, but in the hands of Rode are musical works of art well worth public performance’ (2). This release offers at the very least an opportunity to test this claim, about which readers and listeners can make up their own minds. The question remains, though: is that opportunity reason enough to produce the CD in the first place? Without it, why record the Études? Perhaps the recording could serve a useful pedagogic purpose, along the lines envisioned by Suzuki, who encouraged his students to play along with recordings until discrepancies between the recorded line and the live rendition could no longer be heard. In which case, one wonders what is coming next from the Naxos catalogue (Otakar Ševčík's 40 Variations?).

None of this is intended to disparage the quality of the playing, which is superb. The young German-Brazilian violinist Nicolas Koeckert's execution is clean, with spotless intonation and a good sound throughout. Indeed, he does his best to conjure virtuoso fare out of all that finger-flexing, which is a bit like the paradoxically cross-purposive pursuit of playing scales expressively. (He does this by means of adding some of his own interpretative articulations, dynamics and expression markings, which in any case differ widely from one edition to the next: Karl Klinger's Peters edition, for example, contains minimal markings, while Emil Kross's Schott edition is heavily annotated.) My point about the CD's raison d'être is meant not against the performance per se, but rather to question the rationale behind the release.

The same question applies to the three violin duos that round out the recording (Op. 1 Nos 1 and 2, Op. 18 No. 2). The original purpose of these duos was for use in domestic music-making – private occasions like, for instance, when Rode visited Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn at home. Who in this day and age would sit in their living room and listen to them on a CD player? Of course, chamber music as a drawing-room social ritual is obsolete, yet in various recent revivals in the form of jam sessions in urban spaces (the ‘Classical Revolution’ events initiated in San Francisco, for example) these duos would perhaps find a more fitting home.

Again, none of this is intended to detract from the excellence of the performances, for which Nicolas Koeckert was joined by his father, Rudolf – a well-known chamber musician in his own right and for many years the concertmaster of the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks. Because the violin parts are equal (constantly trading off melody and accompaniment), the homogeneity of sound, similarity of technique and approach – in a word, the Koeckert Violinist-DNA – are particularly shown to advantage. It is also worth mentioning here that the Koeckerts both employ robust vibrato, portamento and modern pitch – you will not find much in the way of historically informed practices here.

Indeed, the question arises: what would an ‘authentic’ performance of Rode's music entail? The question stalls, even before entering the arena of debate, owing to the fact that no complete edition of Rode's works has ever been undertaken. In the absence of an established urtext, editorial notes and documentation of original sources, it is not just tempos, articulations and dynamics that are subject to artistic interpretation (as noted above), but even matters of pitch. For instance, in the first étude Nicolas Koeckert plays an a♮¹ instead of the a♯¹ printed in the three editions I consulted (at bar 18) – a change of minimal musical consequence, since the note in question is an appoggiatura up to b², the third of a G major chord, at a cadence point which coheres both with and without the chromatic alteration. Yet this small change flags up a larger issue, namely Rode's exclusion from the lively debates among performers and scholars concerning authenticity.

Rode's importance as a pedagogue is undeniable, and his contribution to the literature available to violin students and teachers should not only be acknowledged but respected for its intrinsic didactic value. But let's not forget to look past the uncontrollable nerves that shattered his career and his lop-sided fame as a teacher to the brilliant virtuoso and composer he once was. A bravura work known simply as the ‘Rode Variations’ was made famous by the most celebrated singers of the day, including Crescentini and Catalani. The last movement of Beethoven's last Violin Sonata, premiered by Rode, not only begins with double-stopped bell-fifths in G major – by the way, so does the first of Rode's Twelve Études, which would have provided an ideal warm-up exercise for performing the Beethoven – but also oscillates serenely between G major and E flat, as does Brahms's First Violin Sonata. That work was championed by Joseph Joachim, a pupil of Ferdinand David, who was in turn a pupil of Louis Spohr; and Spohr was greatly influenced by Rode – a case of violin genealogy paralleling musical developments in the sonata genre.

Six of Rode's concertos have already been recorded on Naxos, but there are seven others, including the First, which was one of Paganini's favourites. It is easy to see why from the first-movement passagework (some of it even echoed in Paganini's own first concerto), contrasting sections of cantilena and the strong polonaise rhythm in the finale. The affinity between Rode's First Concerto and another violin concerto, the one in D minor by a then-thirteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, has yet to be posed on a CD coupling. The vital role Rode played in shaping the history of nineteenth-century music has remained underexplored, though this is symptomatic of a more general trend in musicology to underplay the role of those who were primarily performers in favour of the alpha composers. Not until his life and work are better understood, in a wider historical context, will there be the requisite perspective and judgement to appraise fully the worthy if somewhat misdirected effort represented on this CD.