Cello Concerto in B minor, Opus 104
Antonín Dvořák was born in Nelahozeves (Mühlhausen), Bohemia, near Prague, on September 8, 1841, and died in Prague on May 1, 1904. He composed his B minor Cello Concerto in New York, beginning the first movement on November 8, 1894, and the finale on New Year’s Day of 1895. He had meanwhile begun the full score on November 18, reaching the finale on January 12, 1895, and completing the whole, “Thanks be to God...9 February 1895, on the day of [our] son Otáček’s birthday, Saturday in the morning, 11:30 a.m.” A month after he returned home, Dvořák’s sister-in-law, Josefina Kaunitzová, with whom he had once been in love, died of a serious illness, leading the composer to substitute sixty bars of new music replacing four measures just before the end of the piece. After the last bar, he wrote in the manuscript: “I finished the Concerto in New York, but when I returned home to Bohemia I changed the end completely as it stands here now. Písek, 11 June 1895.” The score is dedicated to Dvořák’s close friend, the cellist Hanuš Wihan, but the first performance was given by Leo Stern as soloist with the London Philharmonic Society at Queen’s Hall on March 19, 1896, under the composer’s direction. The Boston Symphony Orchestra gave the first American performance on December 19, 1896, at the Music Hall in Boston, with Emil Paur conducting and then BSO principal cellist Alwin Schroeder as soloist.
In addition to the solo cellist, the score calls for an orchestra of 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 3 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses), plus triangle in the last movement only.
Antonín Dvořák once said that he “studied with the birds, flowers, trees, God, and myself,” and even late in life, at the height of his popularity, he described himself as “a very simple person...a plain and simple Bohemian Musikant.” In the spring of 1891 Dvořák received an invitation from Jeannette Thurber—a former music teacher who was the wife of a wealthy wholesale grocer, and who had unsuccessfully attempted to establish an English-language opera company in New York in competition with the Metropolitan Opera, thereby losing herself and her husband $1,500,000—to come to America as Director of the National Conservatory of Music, which Mrs. Thurber had founded in 1885. The decision to leave home was very difficult for Dvořák, but Mrs. Thurber’s persistence won out, and the composer arrived in New York on September 27, 1892, having agreed to the conditions of a two-year contract that included three hours’ daily teaching, preparation of student concerts, conducting concerts of his own in various American towns, and a salary of $15,000 each year. It was Mrs. Thurber’s aim that Dvořák provide a figurehead for her Conservatory and found an American school of composition, and this first extended stay in the United States produced his New World Symphony—composed between January and May 1893 and premiered by the New York Philharmonic under Anton Seidl on December 16, 1893—as well as his F major string quartet, Opus 96, and the E-flat string quintet, Opus 97, each dubbed “The American” and both written during his summer vacation in 1893 at the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa.
The father of Dvořák’s secretary and assistant Joseph Kovařík was schoolmaster, organist, and choirmaster in Spillville, and Dvořák decided to summer there with his wife, six children, a sister, and a maid rather than travel back to Bohemia. This was the happiest time Dvořák spent in America, for here he was entirely free of the hustle-bustle of the big city, where he had avoided social obligations whenever possible, where he had chosen apartment living over hotel accommodations (composing amidst the domestic clatter of the kitchen), where he regularly watched the steamboats depart for Europe (he was also fascinated with trains, but observing their departures was more difficult since he could not get onto the platforms without a ticket and so had to travel up to 155th Street to see them), and where the pigeons of Central Park evoked fond memories of those he raised at his country home in Vysoká, even if he could not get to know the American birds quite so well. But Dvořák obviously did like America enough to sign a second contract with Mrs. Thurber for a third year at the Conservatory—he was held in particularly high regard, he enjoyed the traveling, there were significant musical acquaintanceships (among them Anton Seidl of the Philharmonic and Victor Herbert, then head of the cello class at the Conservatory and who, together with Dvořák, was asked by Mrs. Thurber to provide music for a four-hundredth-anniversary observance at the 1892 Chicago World’s Fair of Columbus’ discovery of America), and there were financial advantages—although once again the decision process was a protracted one, partly because the Thurbers’ shaky finances at the time resulted in the composer’s salary coming in only on an irregular basis, and partly because Dvořák was once more hesitant to leave his homeland for a long period.
On November 1, 1894, he took up his post as Director of the National Conservatory for a third term—this one spent entirely in New York, thereby making him all the more nostalgic for Bohemia—and it was during this time that he composed his Cello Concerto in B minor. Three people figured prominently in its history besides the composer: Victor Herbert, Hanuš Wihan, and Josefina Kaunitzová. The Irish-born Herbert—best-known now as the composer of such popular operettas as Babes in Toyland and Naughty Marietta, but also a conductor, and himself a cellist fine enough to be principal at the Metropolitan Opera—gave the first performances of his own Second Cello Concerto with Seidl and the Philharmonic on March 9 and 10, 1894. Dvořák, in attendance at the premiere, was delighted with the work, and with his friend Hanuš Wihan in mind as soloist, he soon turned to composing a cello concerto in response to Wihan’s request of some time earlier. Cellist of the Bohemian Quartet, Wihan suggested a number of revisions to the solo line of Dvořák’s concerto, some of which were adopted by the composer.
On one point, however, Dvořák would not bend: Wihan wrote a fifty-nine-bar cadenza for insertion into the finale, but this would have conflicted with Dvořák’s conception of the ending as a tribute to his beloved sister-in-law Josefina Kaunitzová (née Čermáková; see photo on page 45). While working on the second movement of the concerto, the composer had received word that Josefina was seriously ill, and this prompted him to include, in the middle part of the slow movement, a reference to his song, “Leave me alone” (“Kéˇz duch muj sám”), the first of the Four Songs, Opus 82, from 1887-88, and a special favorite of Josefina’s. Shortly after Dvořák’s return home, Josefina died, and he wrote sixty bars of new, quiet music for insertion just before the end of the last movement. Here, in addition to a poignant reminiscence of the main first-movement theme (all the more touching for its “minor-modeness” in the context of the B major finale), Dvořák brings in another recollection of “Leave me alone,” giving it now to solo violin in its high register, lovingly harmonized by flutes, before it passes in a further variant to the solo cello. Yet Dvořák ends the music in a burst of high spirits, on, in Otakar Šourek’s words, “a note of almost incoherent happiness at being home at last in his beloved Bohemia,” and here we have a hint to the character of the work as a whole, which, though a product of the composer’s time in America, has nothing in it of that country.
The concerto is brilliantly and vividly scored from the very start, where Dvořák, in his typical fashion, alternates high and low registers to maximum effect before filling in the orchestral texture (compare, for example, the beginning of the Eighth Symphony). The writing for the solo instrument is exquisite and virtuosic throughout, and Dvořák’s unceasing care and invention in setting it against the orchestral backdrop is a source of constant pleasure. The themes are strongly characterized, yet readily transferable from orchestra to soloist: thus, in the first movement, the two principal themes sound just as fresh in the soloist’s hands as they do in the orchestral exposition (Tovey called the second subject “one of the most beautiful passages ever written for the horn”). At the end of the concerto, the return of ideas from the first two movements brings a touching unity to the whole, and the “turn figure” of the rondo theme in the last movement provides an unconscious link to the mood of the opening Allegro, whose main theme includes a similar sixteenth-note turn.
Dvořák also proves himself a wise master of formal architecture. In the first movement, after introducing both principal first-movement themes in the orchestra and then allowing the soloist to expand upon them at length, he lets the central episode of the development—a magical treatment of the first theme in the dreamily distant key of A-flat minor, the tune in the cello being set against a solo flute countermelody—build directly to the recapitulation of the second subject before a final joyous and further expansion of the main theme by the soloist leads to the brilliant series of fanfares that brings the movement to a close. Following the songful Adagio, the expansively lyric episodes of the otherwise exuberant rondo finale (one of them highlighting the solo violin against a series of trills and then harmony at the lower tenth in the solo cello) there lead the composer to a similar sort of architectural foreshortening.
The standard literature for solo cello and orchestra is not large. Besides the Dvořák, there are the two Haydn concertos, the two Saint-Saëns concertos, Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, and, in this century, the concertos by Elgar and Shostakovich. Add to this the Beethoven Triple Concerto for piano, violin, and cello, the Brahms Double for violin and cello, the hard-to-pull-off Schumann Cello Concerto, and, for the sake of completeness, if in another realm, Strauss’s Don Quixote. When Johannes Brahms, who had composed his own Double Concerto in 1887 as something of a lark, first saw the score of Dvořák’s concerto, he commented, “Why on earth didn’t I know that one could write a cello concerto like this? If I had only known, I would have written one long ago!” Indeed, as far as today’s audiences are concerned, the B minor Cello Concerto would seem to hold pride of place, and for good reason: it reminds us that for all his international fame, Dvořák never lost sight of who or what he was—“a plain and simple Bohemian Musikant,” yes, but one of uncommon skill, sensitivity, and genius.
Marc Mandel
Marc Mandel, former Director of Program Publications for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, joined the staff of the BSO in November 1978 and managed the orchestra’s program book from 1979 until his retirement in July 2020.
The first American performance of the Dvořák cello concerto was given by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on December 19, 1896, at the Music Hall in Boston, with Emil Paur conducting and then BSO principal cellist Alwin Schroeder as soloist.