Czech Philharmonic • Sol Gabetta

Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella came on the heels of the First World War, but they react in entirely different ways: while Elgar’s music turns inward with sorrowful reflection, Stravinsky radically alters his musical language with ironically stylised detachment.

The English composer Edward Elgar (1857–1934) grew up in the family of a church organist who owned a shop that sold sheet music and instruments. Little Edward began playing the piano at school, and he learned to play the organ by watching his father. He also borrowed a variety of instruments from the family shop and taught himself to play them without receiving any kind of instruction, so he soon mastered not only piano and organ, but also violin, viola, cello, and bassoon. He also began composing in a similar manner. At age 16 he became a free-lance musician, so he got experience mainly as an instrumentalist, church organist, and conductor. He mostly composed choral music, but he did not achieve true renown as a composer until he reached the age of 42, when he wrote his Enigma Variations, Op. 36. The great conductor Hans Richter held the work in high esteem and prepared and led its premiere. The idea of creating a set of variations with a secret, “encoded” theme is indicative of Elgar’s unusual imaginativeness, and as a self-taught composer, he was not under any restraints. The work is a covert tribute to the composer’s wife Alice and to the friends who supported Elgar during the years of uncertainty as he got his start as a composer.

Another of Elgar’s most important works is the Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85. Just choosing the cello as a solo instrument represents a great challenge for composers. Antonín Dvořák may have put it most succinctly, once warning his composition pupils that unlike the piano or violin, which are capable of carrying themselves in front of an orchestra as ideal solo instruments, the cello does not possess comparable tonal qualities: “It whines up high and mumbles down low.” It is possible that after Elgar’s Violin Concerto (1907–1910), he was taking on a challenge as Dvořák had done—dealing with a difficult compositional task. The solutions the composer selected definitely hint at this. Elgar chose an unusual four-movement layout that differs from most other concertos and is more typical of chamber music, and Elgar’s concerto has a great deal in common with the chamber music genre. The composer deals with the cello’s sonic limitations by using a very delicate instrumental touch, and the music itself is in fact very personal, even intimate in character. Elgar’s musical language achieves perfection in its musical expression of pain and sorrow. The melancholy phrases that descend ever more deeply into despair and gloom are the key to the interpreter’s grasp of the entire work. The concerto dates from a time of great resignation immediately after the First World War. The composer himself was battling illness, but above all he was affected by the decline of his beloved wife’s health. She managed to attend the concerto’s premiere, but she died the following year. Although the premiere on 27 October 1919 featured the superb cellist Felix Salmond, the London Symphony Orchestra, and Elgar conducting, the performance did not turn out well because of a lack of sufficient rehearsal time. The failed premiere proved to be too much for the concerto. Despite the efforts of many outstanding cellists, it was not until 1965 that the work gained wide recognition thanks to the legendary recording made by Jacqueline du Pré, who was 20 years old at the time.

The ballet Pulcinella by Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) from 1919–1920 is a post-war work of an entirely different kind. Unlike many other compositions reacting to the First World War, Pulcinella does not resort to pathos, grieving, or expressive gestures. Stravinsky was reacting to the post-war situation indirectly by moving away from emotional immediacy and consciously returning to the music of the past. The resulting composition is one of the most original musical reactions to the end of the war, and it ushers in a new creative period in Stravinsky’s career, now known as Neoclassicism.

The stimulus for the ballet’s creation came from Sergei Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, with whom Stravinsky had already been collaborating before the war. The results of their partnership, which began in 1909, included The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring—works that radically transformed both modern music and ballet. After the war, however, the ballet

company was facing financial and organisational difficulties, and Diaghilev was looking for a new artistic direction, so in 1919 he showed Stravinsky musical sources from the early 18th century that were attributed at the time to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, and he proposed using them for a ballet based on the character Pulcinella, a traditional figure of the Italian commedia dell’arte. Stravinsky’s initial reaction was cautious; he was hesitant to engage in the mere arranging of old music. It was only after he had studied the material in more detail that he realised he could use the music of the past as the basis for a new compositional process. He retained the melodic outlines, bass lines, and formal models, but he transformed the rhythms, harmonies, and orchestration. Instead of a return to the Baroque, the result is a dialogue with the past, where the old and new continually collide.

The Ballets Russes gave the premiere of Pulcinella on 15 May 1920 at the Paris Opera with Ernest Ansermet conducting, choreography by Léonide Massine, and stage design by Pablo Picasso, whose cubistically stylised costumes and sets made a strong contribution to the work’s overall aesthetics. Stravinsky later characterised this collaboration with his usual detachment: “Picasso accepted the commission to design the décors for the same reason that I agreed to arrange the music—for the fun of it.”

The ballet’s simple, episodic scenario is based on situations typical of the commedia dell’arte—mistaken identity, jealousy, feigned death, and a final reconciliation. Rather than a psychological drama, we have a stylised play with masked characters. Musically, Stravinsky conceived the ballet for singers and instruments, with three vocal soloists (soprano, tenor, and bass) singing Italian texts borrowed from period sources and making conscious reference to musical practice of the 18th century, when the boundaries between ballet, opera, and cantata were often blurred. The transparency of the modest orchestral forces employed here contrasts deliberately with the monumental sound of Stravinsky’s pre-war ballets and of the Rite of Spring in particular. The 21 brief, self-contained numbers create a linked sequence of contrasting dance and vocal scenes. Besides the short concert suite that Stravinsky himself fashioned from the ballet in 1922 and that is often played separately, the complete ballet music is also sometimes performed without staged action, and that version will be heard today.

At the time, the reception of Pulcinella differed vastly from the tempestuous reaction to The Rite of Spring: instead of a scandal, the new ballet provoked intellectual discussion about originality, authorship, and attitudes towards the music of the past. Stravinsky later commented on the importance of Pulcinella with detachment: “Pulcinella was my discovery of the past, the epiphany through which the whole of my late work became possible. It was a backward look, of course—the first of many love affairs in that direction—but it was a look in the mirror, too.” In this sense, Pulcinella is the post-war work par excellence—not an evocation of wartime experiences, but rather a light-hearted, ironic, and yet decisive turn that profoundly shaped the course of 20th-century music.