![]() Brahms said after hearing this concerto, “If I had known that it was possible to compose such a concerto for the cello, I would have tried it myself!” To me, the music of this concerto does start on earthly grounds but eventually take us into the spiritual realm. The composer quotes his own song “Leave me alone,” a favorite tune of Josefina who developed serious health problems during the composition of the concerto. Almost 30 years later, he did take up a cello concerto again, and Josefina reappears in the lengthy “Adagio” movement of the B minor concerto. ![]() She didn’t much care for him, and Dvořák ended up marrying her sister. I have written a cello concerto, but am sorry to this day that I did so, and I never intend to write another.” That comment actually refers to an early cello concerto he had written when he was passionately in love with Josefina Čermáková. Dvořák wasn’t very happy with that concerto, and he once wrote, “The cello is a beautiful instrument, but its place is in the orchestra and in chamber music. The cello concerto by Antonín Dvořák is one of the all-time greatest works in the repertoire and it is scored in B minor. It transports us to a realm of recollection and dreams.” There certainly is a lot of raging passion in this piece, and I think it is one of the best songs in B minor ever. The inner world brings anxiety and menace, whilst the outer world offers us refuge. Rather, as scholars have written, “it resembles the collision of two world. In some early editions it was actually called “Le banquet infernal.” Schumann was also slightly confused by the title “Scherzo,” as he writes, “How should gravity array itself when jest is already darkly robed?” It certainly is a fast and fiery musical world that Chopin composes in B minor, with various pianists hearing a “furious storm of motives,” “tongues of flame bursting upwards,” and “two shattering cries at the top and the bottom of the keyboard.” It certainly doesn’t sound like a submission to divine dispensation, or a very gentle complaint. ![]() Scholars are still arguing when that eruption of emotion was actually composed, but we know it was published in 1835. ![]() And then we also have his first Scherzo in B minor, Op. He wrote an etude, a prelude, a waltz and the devilish 3rd Piano Sonata in that particular key. Beethoven didn’t like the key of B minor, but Chopin certainly did. ![]()
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