Dvořák’s Cello Concerto: Love, Longing and the Sublime

Thu 17 Sep, 2026

Dvořák’s Cello Concerto is a work full of emotion, drama and unforgettable melodies. This October, Kian Soltani joins the London Philharmonic Orchestra to perform this much-loved concerto in London and Brighton. But what makes it so special, and how did Dvořák come to write it? Read on to discover more about the composer’s musical journey, the story behind the concerto and the details hidden within its pages.

The Concerto He Couldn’t Finish Twice: Love, Longing, and Dvořák’s Farewell in B Minor

There is a particular kind of homesickness that has nothing to do with geography. You can be standing in your own home and still feel it, a longing not for a place, but for a person. Antonín Dvořák carried that kind of homesickness for 30 years. It followed him across an ocean, and in the winter of 1894, in a small room in New York City, it finally found its way into music.

The result was his Cello Concerto in B minor, one of the most beloved works in the cello repertoire, and, we’d argue, one of the most quietly devastating love stories ever written.

First Love

Long before he was the famous composer of the New World Symphony, Dvořák was a penniless young violist in Prague, scraping by on teaching fees. One of his piano students was a young actress named Josefina Čermáková. He fell for her completely, but it was unrequited.

Josefina went on to marry a count. Dvořák, in what looks on paper like a consolation prize but became the great partnership of his life, married Josefina’s younger sister, Anna. They had nine children and 40 years of marriage together. The families remained close; Dvořák and Anna spent their summers at Josefina’s country estate at Vysoká, which meant that for the rest of his life, Dvořák’s first love was there, at the family table, every summer, belonging to someone else.

Homesickness, Compounded

By 1894, Dvořák was in New York, three years into a prestigious teaching post, homesick for the Bohemian countryside, his friends, the rhythms of home. Around this time he wrote to a friend that he’d be happiest back at his family’s country retreat, wishing simply to be home again.

Then, word reached him that Josefina was gravely ill.

Years earlier, as a young man still nursing his unrequited feelings, Dvořák had begun a cello concerto meant as an expression of that love, and never finished it. Now, in America, hearing that Josefina was dying, he started an entirely new one. This time, he included a message for her.

A Song Smuggled Into the Slow Movement

Josefina had a favorite among Dvořák’s own compositions: a song called ‘Kéž duch můj sám’ (‘Leave Me Alone’), the first of his Four Songs, Op. 82. Its lyrics speak of a spirit longing to dream undisturbed in its own private rapture, of pain and joy tangled inseparably together, of a soul that would die of longing without the peace that love alone can grant it.

In the Concerto’s aching second movement, the music is interrupted by that very melody, rising up out of the orchestra, all the more poignant as you know that he wrote it for a woman who would probably never hear it.

Dvořák finished the Concerto in New York in February 1895 and returned home to Bohemia soon after. Three months later, Josefina died of a heart illness.

Within weeks of his return, Dvořák went back into the finished score and tore out its original ending, replacing a handful of bars with 60 new bars, riddled with grief. In his own manuscript, he noted plainly that he had completed the Concerto in New York, but changed the ending entirely once he was home. He took what had been a bright, already-finished Rondo finale and appended to it a long, contemplative coda.

The song returns once more, in a long, elegiac passage where the cello grows quieter and quieter until its voice disappears entirely, leaving the orchestra alone with the echo of that melody, which resolves gently into the major key. A final goodbye said out loud, perhaps, after 30 years of not being allowed to say it?