During the summer of 1911, Carl Nielsen was riding high on a major international success: his third symphony, whose premiere performance he had conducted that February in Copenhagen. Two months later, he was invited to present the work in Amsterdam with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and it met with great approval once again. Nielsen was delighted with this long-awaited critical acclaim outside his native Denmark. He was equally delighted when, shortly after the Amsterdam performance, an invitation arrived from Nina Grieg, suggesting that he spend part of the summer at the Grieg home in Norway.

Grieg did much of his work in a small lakeside hut, and it was in this hut over the course of the summer that Nielsen began work on his first instrumental concerto, the Violin Concerto, Op. 33. The piece was written for Peder Møller, a Danish violinist and leader of the Royal Danish Orchestra. Writing in the concerto format for the first time was an interesting task for Nielsen, who was a trained violinist himself. He said of writing it: "It has to be good music and yet always show regard for the development of the solo instrument, putting it in the best possible light. The piece must have substance and be popular and showy without being superficial. These conflicting elements must and shall meet and form a higher unity."

This work, like Nielsen's earlier works, were informed by a Classicist aesthetic, one that avoided aspects of late Romanticism. The Neo-Classical structure of the unashamedly melody-oriented violin concerto gives it a simplicity and delicacy of texture as well as an air of (as composer Robert Simpson has called it) "spaciousness." In the mid- to late 1910s, only a few years after this work was written, Nielsen began increasingly to orient himself more toward new developments in European music. One need only listen to this work in juxtaposition with his far more modernist 1933 flute concerto in order to witness this change of direction.

The work was completed in December of 1911, and Nielsen conducted the Royal Danish Orchestra in the premiere performance two months later, with Møller as the soloist. It met with relative success among most of the Danish critics, and Nielsen and Møller gave the concerto considerable international exposure by way of taking it "on tour" to several major cities, among them Stockholm, Oslo, Paris, and Berlin.

Nielsen himself was pleased with his first concerto, describing the task of its composition as "essentially difficult and therefore a lot of fun."

Compared with the moody and tempestuous third symphony, the concerto is full of easygoing melody. The overall plan is unusual: there are three movements, but the work falls naturally into two slow movements, each followed by quick ones, producing a pattern rather like the two sides of a coin. The opening "Praeludium" is spacious and calm; it is followed by a jaunty tune for full orchestra. The violin is allowed to play tricks with this tune, and a brilliant cadenza comes before the development section. Though the concerto starts in G major, it moves gradually into D major. This feature is tied generally to Nielsen's style of composition, in which ideas tend to evolve though modulations and passing references rather than strong thematic development. The second-movement Adagio is a long, slow prelude to the final Scherzo, a rondo that gradually strips the music of its virtuosity and (as Nielsen himself said) "renounces everything that might dazzle or impress." Nevertheless it is full of good humor. The work requires repeated listening to reveal its depths and subtlties—a pleasant task, for the work's outlines are clear and enticing.

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