The cello / piano score (numbered 12755) has a scan error: most of the first page is missing (a major error, I believe).
Can't see why the above remark (not by me) was undone, since most of that first page is still missing. -Nn 18:11, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
Two publishers (Friedrich Hofmeister and Carl Luckhardt) refused to publish the piece when Schumann first offered it, only the third, Breitkopf & Härtel accepted it. Schumann described the Concerto to them as "really quite a jolly piece." Unfortunately for us Breitkopf & Härtel refused to publish the arrangement for String Quartet and cello that Schumann proposed.
As cellists of that time showed no interest in performing the piece, Schumann made an arrangement for violin and gave it to Joseph Joachim, who promptly filed it away without ever playing it. It only turned up in 1987 in the Joachim archive. The same fate fell later on the Violin Concerto, which was to be located with the help of a medium in the 1930s.
The publishing of the Cello Concerto took place amidst dramatic circumstances just when Schumann's mental illness erupted for the final time. The night when he started having auditory hallucinations he tried to calm the voices in his head by burying himself in the proof-reading of the Cello Concerto. He did indeed finish it and sent it off on the 21st of February 1854, six days later he threw himself in the Rhine. So, while the Concerto was not the last piece he wrote it is one of the last he saw all the way to its publication.
Odd- has no more identification internally than "Julian Kovalsky's Album" Eric 03:24, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
