Cello Concerto No. 1

Bohuslav Martinů was born in a small town in Bohemia, where he showed early promise as a violinist, giving his first public concert at age 15. The proud townspeople raised money for his schooling and he enrolled at the National Conservatory in Prague a year later. He turned out to be a rather poor student, however, being twice dismissed from the Conservatory because of his “incorrigible negligence.” Despite these early setbacks, Martinů spent three years as a violinist in the Czech Philharmonic, where his exposure to the music of Debussy piqued his interest in composition. In 1923, he moved to Paris, where he encountered the Neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Les Six, American jazz, and other novel sounds, which he blended with his native Czech traditions and techniques derived from Renaissance polyphony and Baroque orchestral music to forge a uniquely personal style. Over the course of his career, he composed over 400 works in many genres, becoming one the 20th century’s most prolific composers.

Among Martinů’s numerous compositions were some 30 concertos or concerto-like works, including three for cello. The first of these, written in 1924, was a concertino for cello, winds, piano, and percussion, an ensemble that was typical of the emphasis on wind instruments in Neoclassical circles during the early 1920s. (Stravinsky, for example, wrote his Symphonies of Wind Instruments and his Concerto for Piano and Winds at about the same time.) 

Martinů’s First Cello Concerto dates from 1930. The accompaniment was originally scored for a small Baroque-inspired chamber orchestra, but the composer re-scored the work for full orchestra in 1939, dedicating this new version to the French cellist Pierre Fournier. In one final revision, dating from 1955, the composer thinned out the orchestration a bit for greater clarity, and again dedicated the score to Fournier, who played it often over the rest of his career. (Martinů composed a second cello concerto while living in the US during World War II, which was premiered in New York in 1945.)

The first movement begins with a lively orchestral introduction that features a great deal of syncopation, perhaps reflecting the rhythmic energy of the American jazz bands that were taking Paris by storm in the years after World War I. The cello’s first statement introduces the faint hint of a blues melody and one of the most important features of Martinů’s music: that it rarely follows the regular phrasing and metrical feeling characteristic of most Western music of the past 300 years. Instead, Martinů incorporated the odd meters of Czech folk music as well as the irregular phrasing of Renaissance polyphony, which he admired greatly. Eventually, the energy of the opening section dissipates and gives way to quieter, more reflective music. These two contrasting moods alternate until, with an abrupt quickening of tempo, a short, sparkling coda brings the movement to a close.

A quietly unsettling chorale, played by clarinets, bassoons, and solo trumpet, introduces the second movement. The cello expands on this plaintive melody, accompanied by woodwinds and unobtrusive strings interrupted only by a brief but ominous appearance of the full orchestra. An extended meditative cadenza for the cello sits at the heart of the movement, which eventually builds to an anguished climax for full orchestra. The chorale melody reappears, its mournful nature confirmed by the orchestra’s outburst, and the movement concludes with a feeling of quiet lamentation.

Martinů’s debt to Baroque music is most apparent in the final movement. The texture of the opening section, with its constant alternation between orchestra and soloist, recalls a Vivaldi or J.S. Bach concerto, and the pulsating “spinning out” quality of the cello’s melody mirrors that of Baroque writing for solo string instruments. The liveliness of this opening music is continued in a second, more conventionally melodious section whose bouncy, irregular rhythms evoke the feel of a Czech folk dance. The excitement comes to an abrupt halt during an extended cello solo that recollects the second movement’s mournful atmosphere. Again the cello intervenes with a long cadenza-like solo that gradually increases in intensity and tempo, setting the stage for a return of the movement’s energetic opening music, which brings the movement, and the concerto, to a thrilling conclusion.

— Michael Strasser

Michael Strasser is professor emeritus of musicology at Baldwin Wallace University. He has published numerous articles and reviews and presented papers at international conferences on fin-de-siècle France, Arnold Schoenberg, and colonial music in British North America and Mexico.