The Cello Concerto was composed in a burst of creative inspiration at the beginning of the last truly happy period of Schumann's life, just after he had moved from Dresden to Düsseldorf in September 1850 to take up his appointment as music director there. He completed it in just two weeks, then immediately wrote the ‘Rhenish’ Symphony. Though the concerto was not written with any known context, occasion, or even cellist in mind, it was perhaps not a coincidence that just three months earlier, at a concert to celebrate his 40th birthday, his friend Andreas Grabau had played the only other surviving work he wrote for solo cello, the Fünf Stücke im Volkston, op.102. Four years passed before publication, by which time Schumann was tortured by ‘inner voices’, but he was able to see the work through the press, and it was published in 1854 though not performed until 1860, four years after his death.

Apropos the Saint-Saëns concerto (above), it is interesting to note that Schumann did originally entitle this work Konzertstück; it is a few minutes longer than Saint- Saëns’s, but the way in which all the movements are linked is of course similar.

sources

A  Autograph score, housed in the Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Krakow; at the bottom of each page, below Pk, is Schumann's own Pf reduction

V  First edition Vc + Pf reduction, published by Breitkopf & Härtel, Leipzig in 1854

S  Solo Vc part, published together with V Where V = S (almost always), they are referred to below as E.

P  First edition orchestral parts, published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1854

No full score was published until:

Br  Breitkopf & Härtel Gesamtausgabe full score, published in 1883; the Eulenburg miniature has almost the identical text

Pe  Vc + Pf reduction published by C.F. Peters, Leipzig c.1887, essentially based on Br; for this report a more recent printing was used with a separate Vc part edited by Rudolf Metzmacher c.1965, published by Peters, Frankfurt; this often (interestingly) reverts to E

EE  Miniature score, published by Eulenburg c.1938; text taken from Br

Ub  Breitkopf & Härtel Urtext edition Vc + Pf reduction, edited by Joachim Draheim and published in 1995; generally, simply follows E