Elegia
- Instrumentation
- Cello, Piano
- Composed
- 1914
- Publisher
- Musica Brasilis (free edition from the manuscript at the Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro; edited by Thadeu de Moraes Almeida, revised by Marcílio Lopes; CC BY-SA; ISMN 979-0-802324-81-7)
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About this piece
Homero de Sá Barreto dedicated this C minor Elegia to his 'dear teacher and friend' Frederico do Nascimento. The autograph is dated 20 October 1914, but newspapers record an Elegia by him, probably this one, played in Rio de Janeiro in 1907 and 1908 by the cellist Eurico Costa with the composer at the piano; one 1908 review called it 'a meditated, sober and gently moving page'. The work stayed unpublished until an edition introduced by musicologist Maria Alice Volpe appeared in the Revista Brasileira de Música in 2014. Over soft piano chords the cello opens with a rising arpeggio that sinks back by step, the line builds through a brief 3/4 episode and three climbs into the treble register, and the opening phrase returns at the end before dying away pp in the low register.
Technical overview
Lento non troppo in C minor and 2/4, with a short 3/4 episode. The cello reads tenor clef almost throughout, and three treble-clef passages climb to the E-flat in the top space of the treble staff and stay up there for several bars, so secure thumb position or very high positions on the A string are needed. Quintuplet and triplet figures, constant chromatic accidentals, fermatas and repeated rall. and a tempo changes call for flexible legato phrasing.
Technical focus
- Accidentals
- Collaboration with Piano
- Hairpin Dynamics
- Legato
- Meter Changes
- Shifting
- Tempo Changes
- Tenor Clef
- Thumb Position
- Treble Clef
- Triplets