At the age of 32, the avid mountain walker and skier Mieczysław Karłowicz was buried by an avalanche in the High Tatras and died. His compositional output is therefore small, some early works, then the Violin Concerto and finally eight symphonic poems, which he composed back in Poland's city of Zakopane inspired by the mountains of the High Tatras. He joined the group of "Young Poles" together with the musicians Grzegorz Fitelberg, Ludomir Różycki and Karol Szymanowski, but was considered a loner who liked to retreat to the mountains.  The eight symphonic poems are influenced by the world of Symbolism and Neo-Romanticism and bear witness to a sound style all their own, which knows how to tell orchestrally of human existence and infinity. Although these works are still performed in Poland today, they are virtually unknown outside of Poland.

At the age of 26, Mieczysław Karłowicz composed his Violin Concerto in Warsaw. However, it was written for Berlin, where it was premiered by Karłowicz's violin professor and violin virtuoso Stanisław Barcewicz and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and then repeated in Vienna. From the surviving music reviews of these premieres:

""The 'Violin Concerto' is also a very beautiful work, especially in the second movement, where it approaches the style of a Bach violin cantilena. And the orchestral accompaniment is so subtle and fresh, in contrast to the banal accompaniments of Sarasate, Vieuxtemps, etc."
"Karłowicz loves lively and rich orchestration, which may sometimes seem too dense to us, but everything he writes sounds beautiful. His themes may not be entirely original, but they have a special inventiveness".

Karłowicz had the best prerequisites to position himself in the European world of music at that time. As the son of an important scholar, he travelled through Europe with his family as a child and resided alternately in Heidelberg, Dresden, Prague and Warsaw. He was encouraged in many ways, learned to play the violin professionally, but then decided to compose. The models for his early works were Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Richard Strauss. Even in the Violin Concerto, Karłowicz quotes the beginning of Tchaikovsky's B-flat minor Piano Concerto, albeit in the inversion of the tonal sequence. As a trained violinist, he knew the violin literature of his time. Enlightening for the understanding of his violin concerto is the following self-positioning on the violin music of his time:

"Violin music can be divided into two categories: some works invite a demonstration of the musician's technique, bristling with difficulty but poor in content; others place the content in the foreground, without regard to the nature and special characteristics of the instrument. The former are written by violin virtuosos who are not always endowed with creative talents and have insufficient knowledge of the music; the latter are the work of talented composers who want to write for the violin but do not know enough about the nature of the instrument. Only a few works fall in the middle."

Among these violin concertos in the middle is the Violin Concerto by Mieczysław Karłowicz. Compositionally, it is structured in terms of motifs. And indeed, the numerous multiphonics and figurations of the violin part with its very high tempi and trills are demanding. It takes a technically very accomplished violinist to master these difficulties.

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