Elgar’s Cello Concerto with Alisa Weilerstein, and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth

About the Work

The Cello Concerto was Elgar’s last major work, and the London Symphony Orchestra gave its first performance. Its opening idea came to him in March 1918. He had been in hospital in London for an operation to remove an infected tonsil, and on his return home he wrote down a long, swaying melody without yet knowing what it was for. Soon afterwards he and his wife Alice withdrew to Brinkwells, a secluded cottage in the Sussex woods, where in the following months he composed three chamber works: a violin sonata, a string quartet and a piano quintet. In 1919 he turned back to the tune and built a concerto around it, finishing the score that August. He described it as ‘a real large work & I think good & alive’.

The music that resulted is unlike the opulent Elgar of the years before 1914. The orchestra is of normal size but is used sparingly, the movements are short, and the prevailing tone is private and autumnal. The war had just ended, and many listeners have heard the concerto as a lament for the world it destroyed. Alice Elgar’s diary, in the autumn of 1918, speaks of new music with a ‘lament’ that ‘should be in a war symphony’. Elgar himself left no programme.

The premiere, on 27 October 1919, opened the LSO’s first season after the war, and it went badly. The soloist was Felix Salmond and Elgar conducted his own piece, while the rest of the concert was in the hands of the orchestra’s new principal conductor, Albert Coates, who overran his rehearsal time and left Elgar almost none. Alice called Coates a ‘brutal selfish ill-mannered bounder’ in her diary. The critic Ernest Newman wrote in The Observer that the orchestra had made a ‘lamentable exhibition of itself’. It was more than a year before the concerto was played in London again.

Alice died the following spring, and in the fourteen years left to him Elgar completed nothing else on this scale. The concerto made its way slowly. Beatrice Harrison recorded it twice with the composer, and Pablo Casals took it up, but its great popularity dates from 1965, when the twenty-year-old Jacqueline du Pré recorded it with the LSO under Sir John Barbirolli. Barbirolli knew the piece from the inside: as a young cellist he had played in the orchestra at the first performance.

According to the LSO’s own archive, Elgar hummed the first theme to the orchestra’s leader, W. H. Reed, during his final illness and said that if Reed ever heard someone whistling it on the Malvern Hills after his death, ‘don’t be alarmed. It’s only me.’

What to Listen For

There are four movements, not the usual three, all of them concise, and the first two are joined.

The cello begins alone with a grand, declamatory flourish of full chords. This recitative is the concerto’s signature and will return twice. It dies away, and the violas, unaccompanied, quietly introduce the melody Elgar wrote down in 1918. The cello takes it over and the orchestra slowly gathers behind it, but the movement ends as bare as it began.

A plucked version of the opening recitative leads to the second movement. After several hesitant false starts the cello sets off in rapid repeated notes, a quicksilver scherzo that is over in a few minutes and gives the soloist no rest.

The Adagio is the heart of the work and its simplest music: a single unbroken song for the cello over a reduced orchestra of strings, clarinets, bassoons and horns. It is brief, and it ends on an unresolved harmony, as if the thought were unfinished.

The finale starts with another recitative and then strides out in a robust, march-like main theme, the nearest the concerto comes to the confident Elgar of earlier years. That confidence does not last. Towards the end the pace slackens, the harmony grows more painful, and the cello recalls a phrase from the Adagio. Then the opening recitative of the whole concerto returns in full, and a brusque few bars from the orchestra bring the end.

About the Work

Tchaikovsky wrote his Fifth Symphony in the summer of 1888, ten years after the Fourth, at a time when he had come to fear that his powers were failing. ‘I want so much to show not only to others, but to myself, that I still haven’t expired,’ he told his patron Nadezhda von Meck that June. A few weeks later he had the work sketched, and before the end of August the score was finished. As it neared completion he allowed himself a cautious verdict: ‘thank God, it is no worse than my previous ones.’

Before starting he had jotted down a plan in a notebook. The introduction was to represent ‘total submission before fate, or, which is the same thing, the inscrutable designs of providence’; the Allegro would bring ‘murmurs, doubts, laments, reproaches’; and for the second movement he asked himself, ‘Shall I cast myself into the embrace of faith?’ He never published this programme and it is not clear how closely he kept to it, but one feature of the finished symphony matches it plainly. The sombre theme heard at the very beginning comes back in every movement, usually as an intruder, and in the finale it is transformed from minor to major and from a funeral tread to a triumphal march.

Tchaikovsky conducted the first performance himself in St Petersburg on 17 November 1888, and took the symphony to Prague soon afterwards. Critical reaction was mixed, and he quickly lost confidence. ‘I have come to the conclusion that it is a failure,’ he wrote after the second performance. ‘There is something so repellent about such excess, insincerity and artificiality.’ It was the finale that troubled him, and the question he raised has never quite gone away: whether its victory is a real one or only loud.

He dedicated the score to Theodor Avé-Lallemant, a director of the Hamburg Philharmonic Society whom he had met in that city in January 1888, and he conducted the work in Hamburg in March 1889.

Audiences have not shared his doubts. The Fifth has long been one of the most often played of all symphonies, for its melodies and for the directness of its emotional journey. It is also the most classically proportioned of his last three symphonies, with four movements in the traditional order, a waltz standing in for the scherzo.

What to Listen For

First movement. Two clarinets in their lowest register, over quiet strings, give out the motto theme, a grave melody with the rhythm of a slow march. Fix it in your ear. The Allegro grows from a lilting, slightly uneasy tune for clarinet and bassoon and rises to several great climaxes, then sinks back into the depths of the orchestra where it began.

Second movement. After a few bars of dark string chords a solo horn plays one of the best-known melodies Tchaikovsky wrote, long-breathed and yearning. The oboe joins it with a second idea, and the music swells into an impassioned love song. Twice the motto theme breaks in at full force on the brass, and after the second interruption the movement ends in exhausted quiet.

Third movement. In place of a scherzo comes a graceful waltz, a reminder that this is the composer of the great ballets. Its middle section is a scurrying, feather-light passage for the strings. Just before the close the motto slips in softly on clarinets and bassoons, like a shadow crossing the ballroom.

Finale. The motto opens the movement, now in the major and broad and solemn in the strings. A stormy Allegro follows and drives to a tremendous halt on a held chord, a pause so emphatic that audiences sometimes start to clap. Then the motto returns as a grand march for the whole orchestra, and in the last bars the trumpets and horns bring back the main theme of the first movement, also turned to the major.