Dvořák Cello Concerto: how a heartbroken composer’s lost love inspired his greatest work

A yearning for his homeland and the devastating loss of a beloved friend give the Czech’s work an almost unbearable pathos, explains Jo Talbot

Antonín Dvořák © Getty Images

Jo Talbot

Published: September 29, 2025 at 5:00 pm

---

Who was Antonín Dvořák?

In September 1892, the 51-year-old Antonín Dvořák arrived in New York to take up the position of director of the National Conservatory – a move that would not only swell his bank account but also see him fêted as something of a celebrity in his adopted home. On top of his teaching duties, Dvořák also performed and travelled widely, absorbing much of the local culture. His compositions from his period in the US are among his most famous, including his Symphony No. 9 ‘From the New World’, ‘American’ String Quartet No. 12 and, shortly before returning back to his Czech homeland in 1895, his Cello Concerto.  

Dvořák Cello Concerto: the work

Discovering the cello's potential

As Robert Hausmann played Dvořák’s Cello Concerto through, Johannes Brahms turned round to the composer and said, ‘If I had known that it was possible to write a cello concerto like this, I would have tried it as well!’ High praise indeed.

Dvořák’s Concerto is indeed an inspired work, but he hadn’t always been so taken with the cello. He considered his youthful First Concerto, written at the age of 23, to be incompetent, and it was almost 30 years later, on hearing Victor Herbert’s Second Cello Concerto in New York, that he realised the instrument’s potential. He studied Herbert’s score and six months later began sketching his own work, completing the first version in February 1895. Returning to Prague in April, he revised his Concerto over the summer and offered it to Simrock, his publisher.

Yo-Yo Ma performs the Dvořák Cello Concerto with Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra

• Ranked: the 11 best cello concertos of all time

Tragedy and tribute: the death of Dvořák's beloved sister-in-law

This gives us the timeline of the composition, but misses the personal tragedy that defines its creative impetus. While working on the sketches, Dvořák knew that his beloved sister-in-law Josefina was ill. She wrote to him: ‘Forgive me for not writing, but I have been seriously confined to bed, and unable to do so. I have not heard from you for such a long time. This is not as it should be! However, I shall resign myself to the fact I have nothing to look forward to anymore.  

With the knowledge that Josefina’s health was failing, Dvořák wanted to pay tribute to her in his new work. He includes in the second movement some quotes from the song ‘Lasst mich allein’ (Leave me alone) which was a favourite of Josefina, and a reference to the three-note ‘Lebewohl’ (Farewell) motif from Beethoven’s Sonata ‘Les adieux’. On learning of Josefina’s death, Dvořák was utterly devastated, adding a Coda in the last movement that quotes the same song – a mesmerisingly tender moment. 

• 
  

Was this an open love letter and farewell?  Dvořák’s early passion for Josefina had come to nothing and she married a German-speaking aristocrat – a better match than his position then as a lowly orchestral player. But the two remained close – Dvořák married her younger sister, and his family visited her estate at Vysoká every summer. The passion and intimacy in the music perhaps tells the story best.

Dvořák Cello Concerto: a stormy route to the first performance

The dedicatee of the Cello Concerto, friend and cellist Hanuš Wihan, stepped in with some virtuosic figurations and advice and was originally going to give the premiere in London. But then he and Dvořák had a major rift. The cause? Wihan had decided his own cadenza should be inserted into the Finale, ruining Dvořák’s intricately wrought tribute to Josefina. Dvořák angrily wrote in October 1895 to Simrock: ‘I have some differences of opinion with friend Wihan. I do not like some of the passages – and I must insist on my work being printed as I have written it. I shall only give you my work if you promise not to allow anybody to make changes. There is no cadenza in the last movement. I told Wihan straight away when he showed it to me it was impossible just to stick such a bit on.’    

Jacqueline du Pré performs the Dvořák Cello Concerto with the LSO conducted by Daniel Barenboim

Wihan dropped the work, and the British cellist Leo Stern took over. It had been a vitriolic spat, as Dvořák’s biographer Otakar Šourek elucidated in a letter: ‘He esteemed Josefina not only as a dear friend, but also as the charming young actress who, long years ago, had awakened in him a secret passion.’ Šourek also mentions the songs Dvořák quoted by way of farewell: ‘For this reason, Dvořák insisted on his own definitive conclusions.’

• 
  

The Concerto meant everything to Dvořák. In a letter to his friend Alois Göbl he admitted his relentless rehearsal of the work in Prague, taxing Leo Stern to his limit: ‘We studied and practised every day – he was quite in despair and I was insisting that it was good, but that it must still be better.’

Dvořák Cello Concerto: the premiere

It served them both well – the premiere, with Dvořák conducting the Philharmonic Society Orchestra in London in March 1896, was warmly received. ‘All three movements are richly melodious,’ wrote The Times, ‘the just balance is maintained between orchestra and solo instrument, and the passages written for display are admirably devised. Mr Stern played the solo part with good taste and faultless technical skill.’ On the Viennese premiere two years later, Eduard Hanslick, critic of Neue Freie Presse, wrote that ‘Dvořák has written a magnificent work which has brought to an end the stagnation of violoncello literature.’   

• Rostropovich: the virtuoso who redefined the cello forever

Dvořák Cello Concerto: form and style

While teeming with Romantic gestures, there are also interesting modern elements. It is more of a cello symphony than concerto, the solo part integrated into orchestral dialogues. Textures are multi-layered, with a leaning towards Wagnerian chromaticism, and programmatic elements are suggested – the numerous trills perhaps allude to the bird song from the composer’s notoriously early morning walks at Vysoká. And the march that opens the Finale even foreshadows Gustav Mahler, while the Bohemian inflection in the melodies lends a flavour of nationalism to this towering work.   

Widowhood and a Murder: Dvořák’s Holoubek

 by Maureen Buja, Interlude

 Antonín Dvořák  (1841–1904) loved the poetry of Karl Jaromir Erben, particularly his collection of Czech folk ballads, The Garland, published in 1853. Starting in 1896, once he’d finished his nine symphonies and his other major orchestral works, Dvořák used the ballads from The Garland as the basis for a series of ‘orchestral ballads’. He started with Vodník (‘The Water Goblin’, b195), Polednice (‘The Noon Witch’, b196), and Zlatý kolovrat (‘The Golden Spinning-Wheel’, b197) all at the same time, completing them just a few weeks later, and then started on Holoubek (‘The Wild Dove’, b198) a few months later, completing it in November 1896.

Antonín Dvořák, 1882

This development of the symphonic poem, all based on one literary source, was not unprecedented for Dvořák. Earlier works had literary elements, the most familiar perhaps being in his works written in America (the New World Symphony and the American Quartet).

The Garland, or, to give it its full name, The Garland of National Legends, was a cycle of 13 ballads. Holoubek, or The Dove (The Wood Dove, the Wood Pigeon) story starts in a graveyard. A widow mourns her recently departed husband and is seen by a passing youth (handsome, of course). After three days of resistance, she accedes to his demands and in a month they are married. The story then turns – she’s a widow because she gave her first husband a deadly potion so she could marry the handsome youth, and then at the end of the poem, after 3 years with her new husband, the sound of the dove, cooing in the oak tree over her first husband’s grave, drives her to suicide.

The tone poem opens with a funeral march, with a recurring march-beat of the funeral procession under the melodies. The flutes and violins bring in the young widow, but the following subject, on oboe and trumpets, belies the presented innocence. The widow’s tears, sarcastically presented in the flutes and violins, are another indication of her false heart. The handsome young man is signalled by a distant trumpet. The funeral march continues, but in a more spritely manner – perhaps the inconsolable widow is approachable after all!

The central section is the wedding of the widow and her new husband.

In the final section we return to the graveyard and the mournful call of the dove in the oak tree above the husband’s grave. Dvořák gives this an eery setting with harp and strings, wailing flutes, and a crying oboe. The widow / bride is driven to remorse and drowns herself, and the funeral march returns at the end. Although Erben’s poem ends with a pitiless description of her grave – no tombstone and her head laid only on a rock, buried in the middle of a field – Dvořák gives us an optimistic ending with a return of the dove’s song and the minor key turned to major one.

Antonín Dvořák: Holoubek, Op. 110, B. 198

Nikolai Ravinovich

This recording was made in 1954 with Nikolai Rabinovich conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra.

Nikolai Rabinovich (1908–1972) graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory in 1931 and was appointed professor of conducting there in 1968. His students included Yuri Simonov, Neeme Järvi, Vladislav Chachin, Vitaliy Kutsenko, and Victor Yampolsky, all of whom had exemplary conducting careers.

The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, now the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic, was founded in 1802 and started as the orchestra for the Court of Alexander III of Russia. Its period of greatest achievement occurred under the leadership of Yevgeny Mravinsky, who led it for 50 years (1938–1988). This saw its first tours to the west and the start of their studio recordings. Under Mravinsky, the orchestra recorded seven of Shostakovich’s symphonies.

Performed by

Nikolai Rabinovich
The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra

Recorded in 1954

Official Website

For more of the best in classical music, sign up for our E-Newsletter

A. Dvořák: Slavonic Dances (standing ovations) - amazing performance!

op.46 and op.72: 1.) No. 8 in G minor (Furiant) op.46 2.) No. 5 in A major (Skočná) op.46 3.) No. 2 in E minor (Starodávný) op.72 4.) No. 7 in C major (Kolo) op.72 Concert was sold out in record time of two days (1500 seats, Gallus Hall, Cankarjev dom, Slovenia). Our kids played stunningly and set a new standard of playing and performing. This is first real film based Slavonic Dances. Conductor: maestro Nejc Bečan; concert master: Nejc Avbelj; sound design: Mitja Krže; head of production: Grega Jeraša; sound mastering: Iztok Zupan (Klopotec production); concert and film director: Primož Zevnik

The Lure of Light Music

by Maureen Buja, Interlude

Sometimes you get tired of the details, tired of the intricate formal structure, and you just long for a piece of simple music. This is where Light Music plays a role. Starting in the 18th century, light music was the contrast to absolute music. Here was music that was simple and that, as one writer put it, satisfied all the Ts: Tunes, Tonality, Triads, and the Tonic. No complicated excursions to far keys, but rather an emphasis on the melodies and the rhythms.

A work such as a movement from Richard Rodney Bennett’s The Aviary, gives us a key to the genre: simple, melodic, and engaging. 

Malcolm Arnold’s sets of English Dances, created at the invitation of his publisher who wanted a response to Antonín Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances. Jollity mixes with melancholy here, and at the same time, is capable of brash brass statements, as in No. 4 of the first set of English Dances. When the BBC used this as the theme for a radio program, people phoned in to find out about that intriguing piece they’d just heard.

Saffron Blaze: Castle Combe, Cotswold

Folk dances figure largely in this genre, not only for their emphasis on melody and rhythm but also because they have a local familiarity, even when they’re new to the listener. Philip Lane’s Suite of Cotswold Dances, which takes its name from a second of central-southwest England, carries the designation of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. 

Many of the great British composers of Light Music had careers in the film and television business and so much of the familiarity we have with their music comes not from the concert stage but the glowing screens in our living rooms, such as the music of Geoffrey Burgon. The name may be unfamiliar, but the melodies aren’t. The music for the BBC series Brideshead Revisited is an excellent example of the evocation of an England of the past in a 1981 piece of music.

Brideshead Revisited , Jeremy Irons (Chales Ryder), Antony Andrews (Sebastian Flyte), and Diana Quick (Julia Flyte), 1981

A similar theme was used for the Miss Marple films in the 1960s, and reused for the television series in 1985 with Joan Hickson. The composer, Ron Goodwin, is probably better known for his film scores for movies such as Where Eagles Dare, Force 10 from Navarone, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, Of Human Bondage, and Hitchcock’s Frenzy.

Joan Hickson as Miss Marple

Eric Coates made his name with his Knightsbridge march, but it was By the Sleepy Lagoon, written in 1930, that gave him long-lasting fame. This slow waltz for orchestra was discovered and lyrics were set to it (with the composer’s permission) it became a popular music hit for Glenn Miller, trumpeter Harry James, and singer Diana Shore. It also has been the theme for BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1942.

Eric Coates

Another side of light music is humour. For the 1956 Hoffhung Music Festival, Malcolm Arnold wrote A Grand Grand Festival Overture, but the 4 soloists are not on the typical musical instruments but perform on 3 vacuum cleaners and a floor polisher.

Gerard Hoffnung: The Hoffnung Symphony Orchestra

Gordon Jacob made free with the music of Rossini in his 1960 overture The Barber of Seville Goes to the Devil.

The heyday of Light Music really happened in the mid-20th century. It was such a popular subgenre of classical music that the BBC even had an entire radio channel, the BBC Light Programme, for this music that ran from 1945 to 1967, whereupon it was replaced with BBC Radio 2 (older pop music) and BBC Radio 1 (current pop music). Ease of access seems to have fallen to the self-importance of modern music but it’s all still fun to listen to!