PROGRAM NOTES : EDWARD ELGAR

by Jeremy Reynolds

CELLO CONCERTO in E MINOR, Op. 85

I. Adagio — Moderato

II. Lento — Allegro molto

III. Adagio

IV. Allegro – Moderato – Allegro, ma non-troppo – Poco più lento – Adagio

DURATION: Around 30 minutes

PREMIERED: London, 1919

INSTRUMENTATION: Solo cello, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings

“My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.

“I always said God was against art and I still believe it.”

— Edward Elgar (Born 1857, England; died 1934)

CONCERTO: A composition that features one or more “solo” instruments with orchestral accompaniment. The form of the concerto has developed and evolved over the course of music history.

CADENZA: A virtuoso passage in a concerto movement or aria, typically near the end and often played without strict adherence to meter or time.

SUGGESTED READING:

Edward Elgar: Letters of a Lifetime, edited by Jerrold Northrop Moore

FURTHER LISTENING:

Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36, (“Enigma Variations”)

Violin Concerto Symphony No. 1 in A-flat major, Op. 55

Yo-Yo Ma may be the best recognized cellist of the 21st century, but in the 20th century, Mstislav Rostropovich was the household name as a cellist and conductor — but Elgar’s concerto was not in his repertoire: “The theme from the slow movement sounds like it’s about first love, so I think it’s more appropriate for a young person,” Rostropovich explained in an interview with the Internet Cello Society. “My pupil Jacqueline du Pré played it much better than I because I didn’t have the fresh perspective that a piece like that requires.”

And so the student surpassed the master. In this work, at least. (Yo-Yo Ma would later record the work in 1988, another triumph.)

As Elgar’s last significant orchestral work, the concerto was borne of frustration and despondency after the Great War. The piece’s opening strains are a plaintive, gut-wrenching cry in the cello, answered with what comfort winds and strings can provide. A modified scale in the cello gives way to the main tune in the violas, a sighing, lilting melody of melancholic strength that winds its way through emotional heights and depths in the cello and orchestra alike.

Under-rehearsed at its premiere, Elgar’s concerto failed to capture the imagination of a public more used to pyrotechnic virtuosity rather than this more intimate exploration of pain and disillusionment. At its premiere, critic Ernest Newman wrote scathingly, “There have been rumors about during the week of inadequate rehearsal. Whatever the explanation, the sad fact remains that never, in all probability, has so great an orchestra made so lamentable an exhibition of itself. ... The work itself is lovely stuff, very simple – that pregnant simplicity that has come upon Elgar’s music in the last couple of years – but with a profound wisdom and beauty underlying its simplicity.” Decades later, Rostropovich’s student du Pré’s 1965 recording with the London Symphony Orchestra would catapult the concerto into the public consciousness.

Continued on Page 11

Vaughan Williams, continued from Page 9 folk-like songs and tunes he weaves into the textures.

The second movement is chillier, more somber. The composer described the piece as “Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon,” and the movement unfolds as a set of variations on three different themes. The first appears in the English horn (a slightly deeper, woodier cousin of the oboe). The second is a plaintive horn call atop pulsing strings, and the third appears first as a viola solo.

Next, the scherzo movement is fleetfooted, a light-stepping dance: “If the listener will imagine himself standing on Westminster Embankment at night, surrounded by the distant sounds of The Strand, with its great hotels on one side and the ‘New Cut’ on the other, with its crowded streets and flaring lights, it may serve as a mood in which to listen to this movement.” (This is an outright programmatic description.) Finally, after a grand introduction in the full orchestra, cellos introduce the theme of the final movement, another folkish, stately tune.

Elgar, continued from Page 10

The second movement opens with a plucked version of the opening solo before a great crescendo and an ad libitum transition brings about the first fast music of the concerto, a nervous, skittering romp in the scherzo style that borders on lightheartedness at times. The third movement, Adagio, is a flowing, lyrical melody in the cello — Rostropovich called it “naïve,” a touch of bittersweet nostalgia animating the spirit of this most confidential music.

This transitions directly into the finale, which launches with another crescendo and free-flowing section before settling into a stately tune with the sort of pomp and circumstance audiences could expect of the English master. Numerous key changes, transformations, and restatements ensue, with callbacks to the third movement’s rhapsodic theme and, to close the opening bars of that first movement in cyclical fashion, a dramatic exclamation point by the orchestra stinging the final moment.

Despite maturing into the quintessential Edwardian gentleman, Elgar’s modest roots and continental musical influences contributed to a persistent feeling of being an outsider in his own circles. The cello concerto gives vent to some of those personal frustrations, so much so that on his deathbed the composer told a friend that if he heard the tune walking by the Malvern Hills, “Don’t be frightened. It’s only me.”