Kreisler: Schön Rosmarin: For Cello

This delightful violin piece, composed by Fritz Kreisler in 1905, is perfectly playable on the cello in the original key with no note changes necessary. The original violin articulation (bowing) features a lot of flying portato which is considerably harder to do on the cello than it is on the violin. In both the Edited and Easier versions offered here for cello, these articulations have been substituted by gentle spiccato but for those of us who would like to try the flying portato bowings, we can take the Literal Transcription, with Kreisler’s original bowings, as our starting point.

Schön Rosmarin was published together with “Liebesleid” and “Liebesfreud” in a collection called “Three Old Viennese Dances”. Just like the other two pieces in this collection, it is characterised by a lot of non-legato dotted rhythms for which we need hooked bowings. If we listen to a recording of Kreisler himself playing this piece we may notice that he plays the slower middle section (bars 33-80) with double-dotting and this way of playing it has been used in the notation of the Performance Versions.

These rhythms and articulations (bowings), along with huge doses of rubato, contribute greatly to the gentle, lilting, elegant, charming and flirtatious viennese character of these three pieces.

Kreisler Plays “Schön Rosmarin”

And here is the downloadable/printable sheet music cello parts. For best results, print on A4 paper with no margins. The piano accompaniment for the cello transcription is exactly the same as for the original violin version and can be downloaded from imslp.org.

Edited Performance Version     Clean Performance Version   Literal Transcription   Easier Version

A play-along audio of the piano accompaniment can be found here below. If we actually download it then we can play it at different tempi with the wonderfully useful and simple Amazing Slowdowner program: