In 1958, violinist Hans-Heinz Schneeberger gave the first performance of a fifty-year-old work whose existence had scarcely been suspected, an early violin concerto by Béla Bartók. The manuscript had been in the possession of Hungarian violinist Stefi Geyer ever since the composer presented it to her after its completion in 1908. At Geyer's express wish, the manuscript was released only after her death in 1956. Bartók had written the work as a testament to the love he developed for Geyer when she was a student of Jeno Hubay at the Budapest Music Academy, where Bartók was a professor of piano. Bartók's feelings were ultimately never reciprocated, perhaps because Geyer, an outgoing personality with strong religious convictions, felt alienated by the composer's introversion and Nietzschean atheism. Bartók expressed his subsequent bitterness in his music, and this Concerto is among the works inspired by the composer's feelings toward Geyer." In fact, this work is nothing less than Bartók's portrait of Stefi Geyer. The first movement is, in the composer's own words, "the idealized Stefi, celestial and inward." The five-note otto signifying Geyer is announced by the soloist, who is shortly joined by a solo violin from the orchestra playing the theme in modified inversion. One by one, string instruments join the contrapuntal discourse—for a time the music takes on the guise of a string quartet—until the texture includes the full complement of strings. The winds then enter with a different view of the long and affectionate theme. (Bartók noted in a letter to Geyer that the movement was "written exclusively from the heart.") Even at this early date, the composer's preference for the variation principle over a more traditional sonata-form development is in evidence, providing an organic quality that emphasizes the beauty and serenity of the musical material. In the final bars of the movement, the soloist carries the theme to a high D over shimmering strings and harp. The second movement portrays the more cosmopolitan Geyer—in Bartók's words, "cheerful, witty, amusing." The opening theme features four heavily stressed notes related by inversion to the "Stefi" motto; now it is playful, teasing, even a little gimlet—but always good-natured. Here, Bartók achieves a new high in the resourceful deployment of musical material, as well as in the movement's colorful orchestration. The scherzando quality suggests the spirit of folk dance immanent to so much of Bartók's music. Flying figurations in the woodwinds that lead to a comic fugato suggest touches that later appear in the Second Violin Concerto (1938) and the Concerto for Orchestra (1943), while the swirling harps and distant horn calls accompanying the final reprise of the "Stefi" motto in the coda recall the textures of such works as The Wooden Prince (1914 -16) and the Four Orchestral Pieces, Op. 12 (1912). Bartók had originally intended to write a third movement depicting the "indifferent, cool and silent Stefi Geyer," but abandoned the idea, deeming the two-movement structure sufficient. Bartók later orchestrated the last of the Fourteen Bagatelles, a brief and sarcastic dance based on the "Stefi" theme, and appended it to the first movement of the concerto; this diptych was published in 1911 as Two Portraits, Op. 5.

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