Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85

Program notes

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.