Cello Concerto No. 1

“... A little more than three months after finishing the viola concerto, I began work on the cello concerto. As I said before, I suffered a stroke during those three months, and I was able to see ‘there’ three times. I was unconscious for about twenty days ... i.e. I only perceived everything with a superficial consciousness, so to speak. I thought that if I finally escaped with my life, it would be so marvellous that it didn't matter whether I could move and work again. But thank God I actually started to move and work again. So I started the cello concerto and composed it quite quickly - it was finished in score form after five months. I had planned it in three movements. But when I was almost at the end of the third movement, I was given a finale, so to speak - a fourth movement as a climax, as a conclusion, which I hadn't actually planned or imagined. And suddenly ... this was one of those two or three rare cases in my life ... I hadn't yet finished the third movement when I started the fourth, only then did I somehow finish the third.
This turned into a superficial finale that was ‘exemplary’ but not meaningful. I now realised, even more clearly than before, what had already happened to me several times: one or two consecutive movements of a work overshadow the preceding ones, pushing them aside, as it were; in the present work, their true level only becomes understandable here - in the final movement ... A very critical musician once asked me: ‘Wouldn't it actually be enough to only ever compose final movements?’ But the person who asked such a question forfeits the right to ask questions on such a topic ...” (Alfred Schnittke)