This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104 (B. 191). First performed in 1896, the concerto is one of the masterpieces of the late Romantic era--a work at once epic in scope, symphonic in conception and intensely personal in emotional content.

Dvořák had been reluctant to write a cello concerto. He considered the cello unsuitable as a solo instrument, believing its upper register was too nasal and its lower register too muffled to project over an orchestra. This judgment came from experience. As a violist and orchestral player himself, he knew the practical balance issues.

In 1892, Dvořák accepted an invitation from Jeannette Thurber, founder of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, to become director of the conservatory. His assignment was to help develop an authentically American classical music that incorporated folk and African-American idioms. During this American sojourn, he composed the majestic Symphony No. 9 in E minor, “From the New World” (1893); the String Quartet in F major, Op. 96, “American” (1893); and the String Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 97 (1893).

By 1894 though Dvořák was longing to return home to Bohemia. It was at this moment though that he conceived the idea of composing a cello concerto. He attended the premiere of Victor Herbert’s Cello Concerto No. 2 in E minor, Op. 30, in New York in March 1894, and was astonished by this demonstration of the cello’s expressive and technical possibilities. Herbert, the celebrated Irish-American composer (and principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic), was also a colleague of Dvořák’s at the National Conservatory.

Dvořák attended the premiere and was astonished by the instrument’s expressive and technical possibilities. The vivid orchestration of Herbert’s concerto impressed him, as did the lyrical eloquence of the cello’s voice. He wrote shortly afterwards:“Why in the world didn’t I know that a cello could sing so beautifully?”

Within a few months, he decided to compose cello concerto of his own. Dvořák began to work on it in New York, November 1894, and completed the full score by early February 1895. Since he was already planning to return to Prague, the composition became both a farewell to America and anticipation of Bohemia.

Back in Bohemia, just months after finishing the concerto, Dvořák learned that his beloved sister-in-law, Josefina Kaunitzová, was seriously ill and would soon die. Josefina had been his first love in youth—before he married her sister Anna—and he remained close to her throughout his life. Josefina’s favorite song of Dvořák’s was “Lasst mich allein” (“Leave Me Alone”), Op. 82 No. 1, from his Four Songs (1887). Dvořák revised the concerto’s finale by inserting, as a gesture of farewell, a quotation from this song in the lyrical secondary theme. In the end, the concerto became only a masterpiece of form, but also a requiem for Josefina—Dvořák’s most intimate emotional work.

The work premiered in London on March 19, 1896, performed by the London Philharmonic Society and conducted by Dvořák himself. Critics immediately hailed the work as one of Dvořák’s finest achievements, and it quickly entered the repertoire.

Dvořák’s concerto is not a virtuoso display but a symphonic dialogue: there is a real partnership between cello and orchestra. The three movements are cyclically connected. Motifs recur across the movements. The finale’s elegiac coda recalls the first movement’s main theme as well as the “Lasst mich allein” quotation, unifying memory, grief and resolution.

The concerto moves from heroic confidence in the first movement through lyric nostalgia in the second to acceptance and transfiguration in the third.

Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor stands beside the New World Symphony and the String Quartet Op. 96 as the summit of the Czech composer's mature style--a work in which folk lyricism, symphonic architecture and emotional sincerity converge.

In this performance from the Royal Albert Hall in September 1968, Daniel Barenboim conducts the London Symphony Orchestra, and the soloist is Jacqueline du Pré.