Joseph Joachim Raff: Cello Concerto No. 2 in G Major, WoO. 45

Joseph Joachim Raff (1822-1882)

Cello Concerto No. 2 in G Major, WoO. 45

I. Allegro
II. Andante 10:08
III. Allegro vivace 19:35

Daniel Müller-Schott, cello
Bamberger Symphoniker
Hans Stadlmaier, conductor

Raff was born in Lachen in Switzerland. His father, a teacher, had fled there from Württemberg in 1810 to escape forced recruitment into the military of that southwestern German state that had to fight for Napoleon in Russia. Joachim was largely self-taught in music, studying the subject while working as a schoolmaster in Schmerikon, Schwyz and Rapperswil. He sent some of his piano compositions to Felix Mendelssohn who recommended them to Breitkopf & Härtel for publication. They were published in 1844 and received a favourable review in Robert Schumann's journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which prompted Raff to go to Zürich and take up composition full-time.

In 1845, Raff walked to Basel to hear Franz Liszt play the piano. After a period in Stuttgart where he became friends with the conductor Hans von Bülow, he worked as Liszt's assistant at Weimar from 1850 to 1853. During this time he helped Liszt in the orchestration of several of his works, claiming to have had a major part in orchestrating the symphonic poem Tasso. In 1851, Raff's opera König Alfred was staged in Weimar, and five years later he moved to Wiesbaden where he largely devoted himself to composition. From 1878 he was the first Director of, and a teacher at, the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. There he employed Clara Schumann and a number of other eminent musicians as teachers, and established a class specifically for female composers. (This was at a time when women composers were not taken very seriously.) His pupils there included Edward MacDowell and Alexander Ritter.

He died in Frankfurt on the night of June 24/25, 1882.

Once he had completed the manuscript of his Cello Concerto No.2 in G, Raff seems to have made no effort to get the work performed. It remained unplayed and unpublished until 1997 when it was both published and premiered. Raff's indifference is extraordinary when one remembers that it was written when he was at the height of his fame and had been preceded by a very successful First Concerto, but the reason for its neglect may well have been a rift between the composer and the cellist for whom he wrote the work.

David Popper (1843-1913) was a Bohemian virtuoso who became the foremost cellist of his day. As early as 1865 he had written to Raff describing the thought of the composer writing a concerto for his instrument as "belonging to my most ideal dreams" and wishing that it could be "transform[ed] into beautiful reality". Nothing came of Popper's youthful wishful thinking and it was over a decade later in 1876, when both men were at the height of their fame, before Raff started to create his "beautiful reality".

Letters between the two men make it clear that Raff did compose the G major concerto expressly for Popper, although who or what prompted the move has yet to be discovered. In September 1876 Popper wrote, "I have already worked in detail on your Concerto, dearest master ... [and it] offers no substantial difficulties". A month later, he wrote impatiently "with longing I look forward 14 days for the score. What is the reason for the non-appearance?". No more correspondence between them has come to light and one wonders what happened once the score arrived. Clearly some problem developed between the two men, the memory of which was sufficiently painful for Raff to put the manuscript quietly to one side. Unfortunately he had a similar experience with his Second Violin Concerto only a year later. It was written for Pablo Sarasate who also suddenly and inexplicably lost all interest in the piece.

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