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Bruch and the Cello: Kol Nidrei and the Late Works

Bruch and the Cello: Kol Nidrei and the Late Works

9th Jul 2026

Over the last two posts we've looked at the violin concerto that made Bruch's name, and then at the two viola works his final years produced almost as an afterthought. This one turns to the cello, and to a single piece that did for Bruch's cello output exactly what the G minor concerto did for his violin output: Kol Nidrei gets played everywhere, and almost nothing else he wrote for the instrument gets an outing. That's a shame, because Kol Nidrei didn't stand alone the way it's usually treated. It came first, in 1881, and a decade later Bruch returned to the cello three more times in quick succession: the Adagio on Celtic Melodies in 1890, the Canzone in 1891, and the Ave Maria in 1892, the last of which he wrote as a deliberate companion piece to Kol Nidrei itself.

Kol Nidrei, Op. 47 (1881)

The melodies came from Berlin before the piece did. Conducting the Stern'scher Gesangverein choir there between 1878 and 1880, Bruch got to know two traditional Hebrew melodies through the choir's Jewish members: the prayer that opens the Yom Kippur evening service, Kol Nidrei, meaning "all vows", and a second melody from the same tradition. He wasn't Jewish himself, born into a German Protestant family in Cologne in 1838; his connection to the material was that of a composer moved by it, not a member of the tradition it comes from. He wrote the piece during his next post, conducting the Liverpool Philharmonic Society from 1880 to 1883, moving between the two melodies without much regard for conventional form. The music has the shape of a cantor's improvisation rather than a fixed structure, phrases expanding and contracting the way speech does rather than following a set pattern.

Bruch published the score in Berlin in 1881. He returned to the city for good in 1890, taking up the composition masterclass at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik that he held until 1911. The original scoring is for cello and orchestra, with a prominent harp part.

The MyMusicScores editions cover both a string orchestra reduction and a version for cello and cello quartet, useful where there's no orchestra available or for a masterclass setting.

Why the late cluster came about

Then there's a gap. Kol Nidrei appeared in 1881; the next cello piece didn't arrive until 1890. By then Bruch had planted himself firmly on one side of the biggest argument in German music. He sided with Brahms and Mendelssohn against the New German School of Wagner and Liszt, and, as the 1890s wore on, against Richard Strauss too. He wasn't quiet about it. He called Strauss's music "unqualified dreadfulness", described Strauss himself as "vermin", and said Strauss had turned the Berlin Philharmonic into "an artistic pigsty". In 1876 he'd written to his publisher that his life's work was to lead music's "unmelodic times" back to what he called the inexhaustible fountain of youth: folk melody.

Writing lyrical, folk-rooted pieces for solo cello and strings through 1890 to 1892, while Strauss and eventually Schoenberg's circle pulled music somewhere else entirely, was Bruch doing exactly what he'd promised. These three pieces are the sound of a composer holding a line he believed in. The music still repays the attention regardless of which side of that old argument you'd have taken.

Adagio on Celtic Melodies, Op. 56 (1890)

The first of the three came in 1890: an Adagio on Celtic Melodies in E minor, drawing on the same folk material that runs through the Scottish Fantasy for violin. Scored originally for cello and full orchestra, wind, brass and strings together, it's a substantial single slow movement rather than a multi-movement work, running to around eight minutes. The demands on the soloist are entirely musical: a sustained tone, long lyrical lines, and the presence to hold an audience's attention across one unbroken melodic idea for that length of time.

The MyMusicScores string orchestra edition redistributes the wind and brass parts into the string texture and leaves the solo cello line exactly as Bruch wrote it. Bruch's harmonic writing already leans heavily on the strings in the original, so the reduction keeps most of the orchestral warmth intact.

Canzone, Op. 55 (1891)

The Canzone followed in 1891, and the title tells you what to expect: a song, sustained from the first bar to the last, with no virtuosic display and no dramatic contrast to break it up. At four minutes it's the shortest of the four pieces, and in some ways the hardest to bring off. There's nothing to hide behind. The cellist has to hold a single melodic line with consistent warmth and shape from beginning to end, which asks for real command of tone production rather than technical fireworks.

Bruch's original score is for cello and full orchestra, though the piano reduction is what most cellists actually encounter; the orchestral version is far harder to find.

MyMusicScores publishes both a new edition working from Bruch's orchestral score and a string orchestra reduction, so there's a version to suit an ensemble with wind and brass and one for strings alone.

Ave Maria, Op. 61 (1892): the companion piece

The last of the three, and the one that closes the loop back to Kol Nidrei, is the Ave Maria of 1892. It began life as the Prayer Scene from Bruch's cantata Das Feuerkreuz (The Fiery Cross), Op. 52, based on Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake. In 1892 the cellist Robert Hausmann, who had premiered Brahms's Double Concerto only a few years earlier, persuaded Bruch to adapt the Prayer Scene for cello. Bruch transposed it from D minor to A minor and expanded it, and he did this with a specific intention: to write a companion piece to Kol Nidrei.

That's worth sitting with for a moment. Eleven years after Kol Nidrei made his name with the cello, Bruch went looking for a second piece to stand alongside it, drawing this time on a Christian devotional text rather than a Hebrew prayer, but reaching for the same devotional stillness and the same long melodic line. The two pieces were designed to be heard as a pair.

MyMusicScores publishes the Ave Maria for cello and string orchestra and for cello and full orchestra, following the same pattern as the Canzone: a version for strings alone and one that keeps Bruch's original wind and brass colours.

All seven editions are professionally engraved, available as instant PDF downloads, with no performance licence required and permission to record included.

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