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Notes 57.1 (2000) 142-143



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Book Review

Dvorák:
Cello Concerto

Nineteenth Century

Dvorák: Cello Concerto. By Jan Smaczny. (Cambridge Music Handbooks.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. [x, 120 p. ISBN 0-521-66050-5 (cloth); 0-521-66903-0 (pbk.). $44.95 (cloth); $15.95 (pbk.).]

In this monograph, Jan Smaczny examines from various perspectives a work composed during a particularly creative transition point in Antonín Dvorák's career. The result is an engaging study of Dvorák's compositional process, his life in the United States, his views on American and Czech music, and his mysterious relationship with the cello, an instrument he seems to have championed unwittingly in one of the most famous concertos ever written. Smaczny bases his work on original sources, including revealing sketch studies as well as writings of Dvorák and his colleagues, students, and friends.

The study begins with Dvorák's enigmatic statement that "The cello is a beautiful instrument, but its place is in the orchestra and in chamber music. As a solo instrument it isn't much good . . . I have . . . written a 'cello-concerto, but am sorry to this day I did so, and I never intend to write another" (p. 1). This remark sets the stage for a series of ironic issues concerning the concerto. One is that the famous work was actually the composer's second concerto for the cello; his first dates from June 1865 and remains unorchestrated. Smaczny finds convincing parallels between the plans of the two works.

Another irony concerns the work's musical style. While I tend to see the concerto as a close companion to Dvorák's Ninth Symphony, most musicologists consider it a deliberate turning away from the American style to the composer's native Bohemia, for which he was homesick during its composition. Smaczny demonstrates how the concerto clearly possesses traits of both styles.

A third ironic issue is Dvorák's quotation of his emotional song "Lasst mich allein!" in the second movement. Before developing feelings for his future wife Anna Cermáková, the composer had had a "burgeoning love" (p. 78) for her older sister Josefina while the latter was his pupil. Late in 1894, as Dvorák began the concerto, he received letters from a distressed Josefina, who was confined to bed with heart disease. Dvorák associated the song with her; the tender manner in which it is incorporated into the second movement reveals his empathy toward (or possibly longing for) someone for whom he cared deeply.

Smaczny devotes three chapters to Dvorák's creative process, comparing preliminary sketches, the continuous sketch of the entire work, and the final score. Although the concerto's form was developed primarily during the writing out of the continuous sketch, Dvorák made many sublime changes to the melodies and rhythms when scoring the work. Comparison of the continuous sketch and the final score shows Dvorák's uncanny gift for timing, drama, and developing variation. Equally fascinating are his revisions of the virtuosic solo passages. Cellist Hanus Wihan, who initially asked Dvorák to write the work, aided the composer with ideas for these passages; nonetheless, Dvorák refused to honor Wihan's desire for an extended cadenza.

Although Dvorák initially indicated that he completed the score in the United States in February 1895, he was prompted to make extensive changes to the coda of the final movement in June of that year when he was back in Bohemia. It is likely that Josefina's death in May was the primary inspiration for the brilliantly elegiac coda, which recalls and combines themes from all three movements. This apotheosis grants the work an essential formal balance, [End Page 142] a concern of the composer even before Josefina's untimely passing.

Smaczny's brief study of the timings of ten different performances of the concerto appears to have one main conclusion: over the years, each successive generation of cellists has tended to play the work more slowly than the generation before. Smaczny believes that the primary reason for Pablo Casals's...

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