Program Notes

Concerto in B minor for Cello and Orchestra, Opus 104

Antonín Dvořák

BORN: September 8, 1841, Mühlhausen (Nelahozeves), Bohemia

DIED: May 1, 1904, Prague

COMPOSED:  Begun in New York on November 8, 1894, working simultaneously on sketches and the full score, and completed on February 9, 1895. In response to the death of his sister-in-law, Josefina Kaunitzová, Dvořák composed a new coda for the finale in June 1895
WORLD PREMIERE:  March 19, 1896. Cellist Leo Stern, with Dvořák conducting, in London

NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE: December 19, 1896. Alwin Schroeder was soloist, with Emil Paur conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra

INSTRUMENTATION: 2 each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons; 3 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings

DURATION: About 40 mins

Cello Concerto

THE BACKSTORY Dvořák’s fame at home began with the performance in 1873 of a patriotic cantata called Heirs of the White Mountain. In 1878, at the urging of Brahms, the Berlin firm of Simrock added Dvořák to its list. Simrock began by issuing the Moravian Duets (for soprano and mezzo‑soprano) that had so impressed Brahms in the first place, following this with the first set of Slavonic Dances for piano four‑hands. The success of the latter work was enough to make an international reputation for Dvořák. The first performance of the Stabat Mater in Prague in 1880 made an immense impression; meanwhile, the Joachim Quartet took on his chamber music, and his work was also coming to be known in America, especially in New York as well as in Cincinnati and Saint Louis, with their big settlements of music‑loving Germans. So it was that in the 1890s, this humble man, who had picked up the rudiments of music in his father's combination butcher-shop and pub, who had played the fiddle at village weddings and had sat for years among the violas in the pit of the Prague Opera House, would conquer America as well, even serving for three years as Director of the National Conservatory in New York.

Dvořák enjoyed his first American visit. Nonetheless, he was glad to go home in the spring of 1894 and reluctant to return that fall. Ultimately, however, Dvořák signed another contract with the National Conservatory, and on November 1 he was at work again. The previous spring he had heard Victor Herbert, then principal cellist at the Metropolitan Opera, play his Cello Concerto No. 2 in Brooklyn; now he began to realize a scheme that that experience had suggested. In 1865 he had written a Cello Concerto in A major, but he never bothered to orchestrate that unsatisfactory work. Moreover, Dvořák for some time had wanted to write a work for his friend Hanuš Wihan, cellist of the Bohemian Quartet and the composer's partner on a concert tour in 1892. Just as Dvořák had encouraged violinist Joseph Joachim to give him advice, to suggest and even to make revisions in the Violin Concerto of 1879, he now leaned on Wihan for technical assistance with the Cello Concerto. He was, however, less docile now, and there was some friction, particularly concerning an elaborate cadenza that Wihan added to the finale. A reconciliation was achieved easily enough, but ironically a series of misunderstandings over dates between Dvořák and the Secretary of the Philharmonic Society of London made it impossible for Wihan to give the premiere of the concerto that had meanwhile been dedicated to him. Wihan played the piece for the first time in 1899 with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra under Willem Mengelberg, and he later performed it on several occasions under the composer's direction.

THE MUSIC The first movement introduces two of Dvořák's most memorable themes. The one at the beginning—low clarinet, joined by bassoons, with a somber accompaniment of violas, cellos, and basses—lends itself to a remarkable series of oblique, multi-faceted harmonizations, and the other, more lyrical, is one of the loveliest horn solos in the literature.

The Adagio begins in tranquility, but this mood is quickly broken by an orchestral outburst that introduces a quotation from one of Dvořák's own songs, now sung by the cello in its high register and with tearing intensity. The song, the first of a set composed 1887-88, is “Kez duch muj san” (“Leave me alone”), and it was a special favorite of the composer's sister-in-law, Josefina Kaunitzová. Thirty years earlier Dvořák had been very much in love with the then sixteen-year-old Josefina Čermáková, an aspiring actress to whom he gave piano lessons. The love was not returned, and Dvořák eventually married Josefina's younger sister Anna, but something of the old feeling remained, and the song intruded on the concerto when the news of Josefina's illness reached the Dvořáks on East 17th Street in New York. Josefina died on May 27, 1895, a month after the composer's return from America, and it was in her memory that Dvořák added the elegiac coda to which he did not want Wihan to add a cadenza.

For the song returns in the finale, and that coda stops the dancelike momentum. Here is what Dvořák wrote about that passage: “The Finale closes gradually diminuendo, like a sigh, with reminiscences of the first and second movements—the solo dies down . . . then swells again, and the last bars are taken up by the orchestra and the whole concludes in a stormy mood. That is my idea and I cannot depart from it."

He had been skeptical about writing a concerto for cello. Now he had written the best one we have. And Brahms, his friend and benefactor, growled: "Why in the world didn't I know one could write a cello concerto like this? If I'd only known I'd have done it long ago!"