Opening Paths: Mexican Composer Ricardo Castro and Latin America’s First Cello Concerto

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Duerme, pobre alma sola, alma jamás amada

que sin saber de amor vino y fuese a la nada,

y en el temblor sagrado de tu vida infecunda

diste sólo tu música que este recinto inunda.

 

Rubén M. Campos.

Berceuse a Ricardo Castro

 

Ricardo Castro died too soon, on September 28, 1907, when he was 47 years old, from pneumonia complications. Four years later, on May 25, 1911, the dictatorship of Oaxacan Porfirio Díaz ended, opening the way to the consolidation of the Mexican Revolution that had started in 1910. Shortly before his unexpected death in 1907 and on the tails of a successful return from Europe, Ricardo Castro was appointed director of the Mexican Conservatorio Nacional de Música by Porfirio Díaz himself. Even though Castro didn’t have time to carry out an administrative trajectory that would have allowed him to develop and institutionalize his ideas at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música, he left his works, along with stories connected to a life devoted to art. As a man of his time, Castro developed an artistic activity that looked to Europe, particularly France, for models that shaped his musical ideas. As a man of his time, his works suffered a long silence caused by the Revolution and the accompanying sociopolitical and cultural change.

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Ricardo Rafael de la Santísima Trinidad Castro Herrera was born on February 7, 1864, the son of Licenciado Vicente Herrera Castro and doña María de Jesús Herrera. Castro had an early start in music. He began studying piano at age 6, under the tutelage of Pedro H. Ceniceros, and later started composing short parlour pieces that were well-received. Castro moved with his family to Mexico City in 1877, and there he continued his piano studies and composition at the Conservatorio Nacional de Música with Juan Pablo Salvatierra and Melesio Morales respectively, and later with the distinguished pianist Julio Ituarte. As a result of a policy on foreign affairs that had as a goal to internationally project a certain image of México, Castro’s career grew to the point where he was “the first Mexican pianist with an international trajectory and one of the most outstanding composers of his time.” Thus, his works Norma. Fantaisie de concert pour piano sur des motif de l’Opera de Bellini, Op. 8, Aires Nacionales Mexicanos. Capricho brillante para piano, Op. 10, and  Enriqueta were sent to Venezuela for the commemoration of  Simón Bolívar’s centenary in 1883. Castro also traveled to New Orleans for the World Cotton Centennial (1884-85), where the composer performed his Fantasía. National Hymn of Brazil y Fantasía. Elegant, followed by concerts in Philadelphia, Washington and New York. With the support of Díaz’s government, Ricardo Castro arrived in Paris at the end of December of 1902, and started working with pianists Teresa Carreño and Eugen D’Albert. He stayed in Paris until 1906, when he was appointed by Díaz director of the Conservatorio Nacional de Música upon his return to Mexico.

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As a part of the Grupo de los Seis, Ricardo Castro and composers Gustavo E. Campa, Juan Hernández Acevedo, Carlos J. Meneses, Ignacio Quesada and Felipe Villanueva “decanted for a search of stylistic alternatives to Italian bel canto style, moving towards the French and German schools.” More precisely, Ricardo Castro’s stylistic search was first identified with late-romanticism as it was displayed in parlour music that was “defined by its ornamental values, lightness in style, brevity and a modernism more in the attitude than in the concept.” Nevertheless, the composer’s later style moved towards an exploration of the “major forms of romanticism as the symphony, the concerto, the opera, and the string quartet.”

The transitional nature of his life, one that was split between two centuries, that moved from the waltz to the symphony, from the parlour’s intimacy to the spacious concert hall, is also expressed in other aspects of Ricardo Castro’s music. Despite his clear European influences modeled on the interpreter-composer European tradition of figures such as Franz Liszt, Teresa Carreño and Eugen d’Albert, Castro’s music also showed national colors. However, it was not until the work of Manuel Ponce, Silvestre Revueltas and Carlos Chávez that nationalism became a relevant musical movement in Mexico.

 

The Cello Concerto

 

It is a mystery how Castro, who apart from being a composer was also a pianist of extraordinary ability, embarked on the composition of a cello concerto, the first written in Latin America. Although there had been associations between cellists and composers in important 19th century works for the instrument (e.g. Beethoven-Duport, Brahms-Hausmann, Chopin-Franchomme, Tchaikovsky-Fitzenhagen amongst others), Castro had no known personal association with any particular cellist who might have ignited his creative inspiration. Nevertheless, it is known that Castro was familiar with the work of the famous Russian virtuoso Karl Davydov (1838-1889), as he made and conducted an arrangement for cello and orchestra of a Lied composed by the Russian cellist. There are also documents in which Castro expresses his admiration for the great Catalonian cellist Pablo Casals, but no evidence has been found to suggest the two ever met.

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Even though there is no data that point towards a moment for the genesis of the cello concerto, it is presumed that Castro composed it Mexico before his trip to Europe in January 1903. However, there is a possibility that he wrote it in Europe between January and March, since it was first performed on April 6, 1903. This would have constituted an exceptional achievement for Castro. It would have naturally taken considerable effort to compose the work, look for a soloist willing to learn it in such a short time, and finally find an orchestra to accompany him, all within the stressful environment of new surroundings.

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Castro dedicated his concerto to the Belgian cellist Marix Loevensohn (1880-1943) who premiered the work at the Salle Erard in Paris. Loevensohn was a prominent cellist who was possibly a member of the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. Later, Loevensohn continued his friendship with Castro and was an important link between the Mexican composer and other teachers and composers of the time.

Castro publicly showed his admiration for French music, particularly that of Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921), as he stated in an interview with the newspaper El Diario (November 13, 1906):

 

I have a very high opinion of ​​it (French music)… although it has been scarce in symphonists....but they have one very great for me (Saint-Saens). He has not yet been fully appreciated, not even in France itself.

 

This influence, in addition to that of German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883), seems to be definitive in the composition of Castro’s cello concerto. Some scholars speculate that in some of his tours through Latin America and the United States, Castro heard Saint-Saens concerto No.1 for cello Op. 33, composed in 1872. This may have caused a great impression on him, perhaps sparking his creative muse. Castro's work shows many similarities to the Saint-Saens Concerto, not only in style, but also in form, theme, and texture. In these regards, we observe the following comparisons: 

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1. Uninterrupted movements: Saint-Saens links the three movements, while Castro links only the first two. Castro writes this transition as a cello cadenza accompanied at the end by the orchestra while Saint-Saens’ uses the same resource without the final accompaniment. 

2. Comparing the opening of each concerto we observe a few stylistic coincidences:

a) An initial strong chord followed by tremolos on the strings

b) A first theme of a nervous character on the tremolando strings (in this respect the beginning of measure 17 is practically a copy of the beginning of the Saint-Saens).

3. In the second movement of Castro’s concerto, the chords in the orchestra followed by semi-formal passages by the soloist, emulate a similar passage in the third movement of the Saint-Saens Concerto (8 measures before the rehearsal letter N).

4. The cyclical nature of the work, an aspect widely used by French musicians, is reflected in both the use of the main theme of the first movement at the end of the concert, as a unifying element to the work and appearance of the transition theme in measure 48 in rehearsal number 48 in the second movement. 

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Although the writing in his cello concerto reveals knowledge about the capabilities and resources of the instrument, Castro probably sketched the work from the piano. Therefore, the instrumental and orchestral resources belong more to the pianistic world. Notwithstanding the great advances in the construction of musical instruments, the cello could never compete with the powerful sound of the piano. The large orchestral forces used in the work and the dense orchestration are more appropriate for a piano concerto. The resulting solo part relies heavily on utilizing the high tessitura register with very few moments in the middle range and almost none on the lower strings, representing a challenge for the performer. The soloist must handle impeccable tuning within a musical narrative that demands sound clarity, as well as purity of phrasing. On the other hand, instrumental writing in octaves, idiomatic for the keyboard as a sound power resource, does not have the same musical effect on the cello, producing passages of virtuosity without the musical ease that occurs when interpreted on the piano. This edition proposes alternatives for some of these passages. 

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Seventy-eight years after its premiere in Paris, Ricardo Castro's cello concerto was performed a second time on July 11, 1981, with the cellist Carlos Prieto and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería conducted by Jorge Velazco at the Sala Nezahualcóyotl in Mexico City. Prieto and Velazco later recorded it in 1985 with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. Prieto also gave the North American premiere in 1987 under the baton of Sergio Cardenas in San Bernardino, California.

 

Sources

 

The present edition uses as its primary source a microfilmed copy of a handwritten score owned by the Edwin E. Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music of the Free Library of Philadelphia. The Fleisher Collection acquired the score from Mexican scholar José María Luján in May of 1942, under the sponsorship of the Work Progress Administration Music Copying Project. A copy of the score was presumably sent back to Mexico in 1964, as a part of an interchange of scores with the Conservatorio Nacional de Música where the Fleisher Collection obtained microfilm images of works by Ricardo Castro, Blas Galindo, and Luis Sandi Meneses among other composers. 

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Even though the origin of the source hasn’t yet been established, a comparison between Ricardo Castro’s handwriting as sampled in autograph documents and the handwriting of the Fleisher Collection’s score points towards the fact that the score was handwritten by the composer himself.

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Two of the other sources that exist for the Castro cello concerto are owned by Mexican institutions: a score owned by the Orquesta de Minerías; and a piano reduction authored by Eduardo Hernández Moncada published at the Heterofonía Magazine in 2007. There is a high probability that those two sources stem from Fleisher Collection’s score.

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A third source reviewed for this work is an edition based on the Fleisher Collection’s score that includes a piano reduction authored by Jorge Alejandro Mendoza Rojas as a part of his Doctoral Thesis at The University of Texas Austin: “The cello concerto by Mexican composer Ricardo Castro (1864-1607): A performance edition for cello and piano” (1994). 

 

This Edition

 

The edition includes a solo part that is a literal transcription of its primary source without any editorial interventions, as well as a fully edited part that is meant to provide ideas to those that embark in the study of the concerto. The editorial work also included the preparation of an orchestral score as well as individual orchestral parts.

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It is important to mention that the Fleisher Collection’s score presents certain problematic areas in the writing of parameters such as markings on articulation, expression, and dynamics. For example, there is an occasional difference in the writing of slurs in the motives of sixteen-note-quintuplets plus an eight note in the first theme of the first movement. The motive is written with a slur for the quintuplet and another for the next two notes (mm. 18 and 20); a slur for the quintuplet and the next two notes without a slur (mm. 34, 48, 140); without any slurs (mm. 38, 141); and no slur for the quintuplet and a slur for the next two notes (measure. 106). These differences could be considered misprints or variety-related resources.

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Another example of differences in articulations are the seemingly inconsistent detached sixteen notes in measures 179 and 180 of the second movement, and the slurred sixteen notes in all of the other statements of the same motive in measures 181, 211, 212, 213, and 214. In this last case, it is possible to argue that the absence of slurs in measures 179 and 180 answers to the need of a full sound that would clearly project over the forte present on the second voice that strings and flutes play in these two measures.

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The standpoint of the edition of the solo part regarding slurs, including the resolution of apparent inconsistencies, has been dictated by a search for ways to fulfill the instrument’s needs in terms of sonority. The need of a full, ringing tone was the predominant aspect in the decision of adding slurs to all the quintuplets, and in general to shorter values -as in the octaves in measure 75 of the first movement and 674-76 of the third movement. In other cases -as in mm 179 and 180, and 212-214 of the second movement- what lead the decision on slurs was the need of an option that would avoid unintended accents due to a sharp lack of balance in duration of contiguous slurs - as happens in measure 212, where a single sixteen note is preceded by seven slurred sixteens and followed by three sixteens that are also slurred. A third aspect we considered when editing the slurs was the need of projecting a full, soloistic sound uniformly connected in sections where such kind of sound was relevant. A clear example is the first theme of the first movement (mm. 17-24), where Castro combines bowings of a duration in quarter-note beats of three and a half, two and a half, two, one, and a half of a beat. In these cases, we opted to balance the duration of bowings in order to facilitate the creation of a continuous phrase that could be executed with a full sound, and with an appropriate character. 

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There are also occasional differences in expression and articulation markings. and dynamic markings that might seem ambiguous as well. Some examples are the differences in the patterns of written accents in measures 81 and 83 of the first movement, or the differences in the writing of dynamics of similar passages - as in mm. 39 and 40, with crescendi that look as if they were leading to the third beat, but that later are differently annotated in a different, more logical manner in the repetition of that motive in mm. 94 and 95 that however is still inconsistent in the annotation of dynamics with cresc. in measure 94 followed by < in 95. In those cases, we transcribed the information as it is on the source, leaving the decision to the player.

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In addition to being the first of its kind written by a Latin American composer, Ricardo Castro's Cello Concerto presents an interesting addition to the repertoire due to its refined musical language which successfully combines both French and German influences. It exhibits his deep knowledge of the instrument as well as a creative musical genius befitting his reputation as one of the most important pianists of the time. This edition seeks to bring this extraordinary work to the attention and delight of performers and connoisseurs alike. Moreover, this edition helps restore Ricardo Castro to his rightful place in the history of music.

 

Natali Herrera Pacheco, Germán Marcano and Horacio Contreras, 2022

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For more detailed information, including bibliographic sources and research methods, please refer to the foreword of the printed edition.