Dvořák and the Cello: Concerto, Rondo and Silent Woods
Posted by Paul Wood on 15th Jul 2026
Every piece in this blog series so far has been about music that got overshadowed by something more famous. Dvořák's Cello Concerto in B minor doesn't have that problem. It's often called the greatest concerto ever written for the instrument, and it doesn't need MyMusicScores to make the case for it. What it does need is company. Two of Dvořák's other cello pieces, the Rondo and Silent Woods, were written for the same cellist within a few years of the Concerto, and between them they tell a story the Concerto only hints at: a composer leaving home, and then, on the other side of the Atlantic, wanting nothing more than to go back.
The Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104
For most of his career Dvořák wouldn't write a cello concerto at all. His first attempt, made in 1865 when he was twenty-four, never got past a rough draft for cello and piano, and he never even orchestrated it. He'd long dismissed the cello as an ungrateful instrument for a concerto, and for thirty years he stuck to that view despite the entreaties of his friend Hanuš Wihan, the cellist at Prague Conservatory, who kept asking him for one.
What changed his mind was a concert in New York. On 10 March 1894 Dvořák heard the premiere of Victor Herbert's Second Cello Concerto with the New York Philharmonic, Herbert himself as soloist. He was struck by how boldly Herbert had scored it, three trombones under the soloist in the slow movement among other things, and that encounter changed his mind about what the cello could do against a full orchestra. He began his own concerto that November.
He wrote it in New York, in the final months of a contract that had brought him to America to direct the National Conservatory and that, by 1894, he was increasingly eager to leave. He was homesick, tired of the workload, and missing the children who'd stayed behind in Bohemia. The Concerto's grandeur and heroic solo writing sit alongside a real undertow of longing, and there's a specific reason for that. While revising the ending in early 1895 he learned that his sister-in-law, Josefína Kounicová, was gravely ill. He wrote a phrase from one of his own songs, "Lasst mich allein" ("Let me be alone"), a piece she'd always been fond of, into the second movement, then again into the third. She died that May, shortly after his return to Prague, and he attended her funeral.
That quotation is also, by most accounts, the real reason Dvořák refused to let Wihan add a cadenza to the finale. Wihan had written an elaborate one and expected it to be included; Dvořák wouldn't hear of it, and the friendship was strained for a time as a result. Neither the London premiere in March 1896, conducted by Dvořák with the cellist Leo Stern as soloist, nor the Prague premiere went to Wihan. He didn't perform the Concerto in public until January 1899, in The Hague, by which point he'd joined the Bohemian Quartet alongside Josef Suk, Dvořák's own son-in-law.
The MMS edition reduces Dvořák's full orchestral score to string orchestra, redistributing the wind and brass writing (which carries real independent material, especially in the first movement) across the strings while leaving the solo cello part untouched. It was originally commissioned for a performance at the Taiwan Young of the Year competition and asks everything of a soloist: complete technical command and a singing tone sustained across a full 35 minutes at diploma or professional level. The string writing sits at a similarly demanding standard.
The Rondo and Silent Woods
Both of the shorter pieces predate the Concerto, and both exist because of the same relationship with Wihan. In late 1891, shortly after accepting the New York post, Dvořák set off on a farewell tour of Bohemia: more than forty concerts around the country before he left for America, with Dvořák himself at the piano. For that tour he arranged two existing pieces to play with Wihan: the Rondo in G minor, Op. 94, written as a Christmas present for Wihan in December 1891, and Silent Woods (Klid), Op. 68 No. 5, drawn from a set of six piano duet pieces called From the Bohemian Forest that he'd completed in 1884. Both were orchestrated not long afterwards, the Rondo in October 1893 and Silent Woods around the same period, so Wihan could also perform them with orchestra.
The Rondo is the more extroverted of the two: a single movement built on a recurring, folk-tinged main theme, warmly melodic and consistently good-humoured. It's a fine vehicle for a virtuoso player, Wihan's technical ability is written all over it, and its rondo structure asks something specific of a soloist: the returning theme has to feel fresh each time, which is harder to bring off than it sounds. Silent Woods is the opposite in temperament: unhurried and spacious, with a long singing line that suits the cello's warmest register, and Dvořák thought enough of it to arrange it for cello himself even though it began life as a piano duet.
Heard on their own, the Rondo and Silent Woods are simply attractive, well-made pieces. Heard alongside the Concerto, they read differently. They're the sound of Dvořák saying goodbye to Bohemia in 1891 and 1892, before he'd even left for America. The Concerto, written three years later on the other side of the Atlantic, is in large part the sound of him wanting to come back.
The MMS editions of both pieces work from Dvořák's own orchestral scoring, which is already relatively string-centred, so reducing the winds and brass to string orchestra loses little of substance. The Rondo runs to about 7 minutes at diploma or professional level for the soloist, with orchestral parts at intermediate to advanced standard. Silent Woods is shorter, about 5 minutes, at the same solo level, with a more sustained ensemble part to match its meditative character.
The MyMusicScores editions
All three works are available as cello and string orchestra editions, each reduced from Dvořák's own orchestral scoring rather than a later hand's arrangement. The Concerto is the major statement, a full 35-minute work for a professional or conservatoire soloist. The Rondo and Silent Woods are shorter and more contained, useful either as recital pieces in their own right or, taken together with the Concerto, as a complete picture of what the cello meant to Dvořák across one of the most eventful periods of his life.
All editions are professionally engraved, available as instant PDF downloads, with no performance licence required and permission to record included.