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About this piece
Elaine Fine wrote Ferdinand on 4 October 2020 for unaccompanied cello or viola, and recorded the viola version herself the next day. It draws on Munro Leaf's 1936 children's book The Story of Ferdinand, about a bull who would rather smell flowers than fight, and the score is subtitled ". . . sitting under a cork tree, smelling the flowers." Marked Moderato espressivo, it sets lyrical slurred phrases against bursts of staccato double stops against the open D string with accented low Cs, then a soft pizzicato passage on the C string that ends in a rolled four-note chord. Cellist Erica Lessie featured it in her "That's What She Said" series for the Cello Museum. She called it "a great piece for students in the first part of Suzuki Book 3" and said students preparing for the Bréval Sonata in C "would do well to learn the staccato triplets in this sprightly and entertaining piece." Fine has posted the score free on IMSLP under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 licence, and her thematic-catalogue blog lists it as "downloadable for free." A companion piece, Ferdinand II, is for cello or euphonium.
Technical overview
One movement, about 5 minutes (113 bars, 3 pages). It stays mostly in first position, with forward and backward extensions (half to third position according to the Cello Museum). It uses changing meters (3/4 to 6/4), triplets, staccato, double stops against an open string, and pizzicato that includes a rolled quadruple stop.
Technical focus
- 2 Note Slurs
- Double Stops
- Pizzicato
- Dynamics
- Hairpin Dynamics
- Dotted Rhythms
- C String Notes
- Rhythm