For cello and orchestra
Concerto
Diary of a Madman
A cello concerto inspired by Gogol’s visionary tale of Poprishchin’s descent into madness: a work of obsession, distortion, political nightmare and destructive transformation.
World Premiere
27 January 2022. Isarphilharmonie, Munich — Gautier Capuçon, cello; Münchner Philharmoniker; Giedrė Šlekytė, conductor.
Title
Diary of a Madman. After Gogol’s story of Poprishchin, a minor official whose diary records his collapse into megalomania and madness.
Context
Gogol’s nightmare becomes contemporary. A work written before the full political resonance of its subject became impossible to ignore.
Structure
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A continuous large-scale concerto for cello and orchestra.
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Diary · Descent · Delusion · Totentanz
Work Information
Abbreviations PDF
Composer’s Note
At the beginning of 2021, Lera Auerbach wrote the cello concerto Diary of a Madman, inspired by Gogol’s famous story about Poprishchin, a government employee who gradually descends into madness. Gogol — or, more correctly transliterated from Ukrainian, Mykola Hohol — has fascinated Auerbach throughout her life.
Ten years earlier, while composing her opera Gogol, Auerbach immersed herself in everything Gogol had written. In the concerto, Gogol’s story returns through the voice of the cello: an instrument capable of human speech, confession, delirium, lament and rage.
The story’s uncanny resonance became sharper after the concerto was written. Poprishchin, a minor government official, begins to believe that a state “cannot be without a king,” and eventually imagines himself to be king on “43 April 2000.” Gogol wrote the story in 1835; Vladimir Putin was first elected President of Russia in May 2000.
- Gogol / Hohol The concerto draws on Gogol’s visionary tale of madness, bureaucracy and delusion.
- Madness The solo cello becomes a voice of obsession, fracture, fantasy and collapse.
- Totentanz While working on the concerto, Auerbach also completed her bronze sculpture Totentanz.
The Work
Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra “Diary of a Madman” is not an illustration of Gogol’s story, but a musical confrontation with its underlying forces: bureaucratic absurdity, megalomania, visionary terror and the thin membrane between social order and collective insanity.
The cello stands at the center as both narrator and victim, an embodied diary voice whose lines can turn inward, become obsessive, or erupt against the orchestral world surrounding it. The orchestra, compact but strongly colored, includes winds with doublings, brass, timpani, percussion, harp, celesta and strings.
Auerbach often approaches large-scale musical themes through visual art. During the creation of this concerto, she completed the bronze sculpture Totentanz from her Music in Bronze series — a reflection on death, fire and destruction, engraved with burning music: Memento mori.
Publisher and Materials
Published by Boosey & Hawkes / Sikorski. This work is available from Boosey & Hawkes / Sikorski for the world. Score and rental materials are available through Zinfonia.