In Detail

"The Cello Concerto by Dvořák is one of the most frequently played concertos in the repertoire. But a strange, and rather tragic, story lies behind its composition which was Dvořák’s last major work. The search for that story began in the early 80s when I visited Prague looking for books about (what was then) Czechoslovakia’s most famous composer. To my surprise, I could find nothing. Nothing at all.

Then, through friends in Charter 77, the petition drawn up by Czechoslovakian writers and intellectuals demanding that the Communist regime recognized certain basic human rights, I came across a mass of letters, unpublished in England, some not published at all, from which I began to piece together how Dvořák’s much loved Cello Concerto had come to be written.

So when, in September 1988 I was asked to film a new recording of the Cello Concerto in Prague, with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by the great Czech maestro Václav Neumann (the soloist was to be Julian Lloyd-Webber, already making a reputation as one of the leading British cellists of his generation), I used this opportunity to explore two extraordinary facts.

First, in the 1880s and 1890s Dvořák had been a fierce nationalist who had campaigned relentlessly for a ‘free Bohemia’, free that is of external domination, then under the boot of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The idea of an internationally famous Czech composer wanting to rid his homeland of foreign rule was clearly not likely to endear him to the communist dictators still in power in the early 1980s, having ruthlessly crushed the Prague Spring only a decade earlier. Hence, I came to believe, my inability to find books about Dvořák during my visit in the early 1980s.

And second, from the letters I learned of a terrible love story that had befallen the young composer, which had then haunted him for the rest of his life, and finally achieved expression in the extraordinary coda of the great Cello Concerto. A love affair that never was, but was the inspiration for one of the most popular concertos ever written......and his last word.

The film was originally a co-production with Czechoslovak television, but when they saw the film and its political content, in tears they told me why it could not be shown in Communist-ruled Czechoslovakia. Two years later the Russians were finally thrown out, and this film was among the very first documentaries to be shown on the newly-liberated Czech television. The relevance of what Dvořák had to say through his Cello Concerto about today, what with the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine, could not be more important.

As to the love affair. the clue is in the Coda to the last movement. Suddenly the music changes gear from being exuberant to deeply melancholy. It was later discovered that Dvořák having learned that the love f his life had died, tore up the original Coda and replaced it with this new one, adding to the manuscript in his handwriting: “those who know me will understand this music; those who do not know my story, will not.”

- Tony Palmer

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