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Cello is a group biography that weaves together four narratives of cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury, and misfortune. The stories are those of the forgotten Jewish cellist Pal Hermann, who is likely to have been murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania during the Holocaust; Lise Cristiani, another forgotten performer, who is considered to be the first female professional cello soloist and who embarked on an epic concert tour of Siberia in the 1850s taking with her a Stradivarius cello that can be seen to this day in a museum in Cremona in northern Italy; Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who played in the orchestra at Auschwitz and survived spells in both that camp and in Bergen-Belsen; and Amedeo Baldovino of the Trieste piano trio, whose ?Mara' Stradivarius was lost in a shipwreck in the River Plate between Buenos Aires and Uruguay but later recovered from the water and repaired.
Interwoven with their remarkable and often moving stories are a series of ?detours' that offer a foil to the group biographies. These examine the themes explored in the narratives from different perspectives, drawing together essay-like musings, historical research, personal experience, and the author's many interviews and encounters with contemporary cellists.
About the author
Kate Kennedy is one of the foremost critics of twentieth-century music of her generation. She has published widely, including The Silent Morning: Culture and the Armistice, 1918, Literary Britten, Lives of Houses and Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney (shortlisted by the Royal Philharmonic Society for their 2021 awards). She is a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-writing, Director of the Centre for the Study of Women Composers, Director of the Museum of Music History, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Summary
'Just as a cello's voice is divided across four strings, each with its own colour and character, this is a journey in four parts, in search of four players and their instruments...'
In Cello, Kate Kennedy weaves together the lives of four remarkable cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury and misfortune. The Hungarian Jewish cellist and composer Pál Hermann managed to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo for much of the Second World War but was eventually captured and murdered. Lise Cristiani, the first female professional cello soloist, undertook an epic - and ultimately fatal - concert tour of Siberia in the 1850s, taking with her one of the world's greatest Stradivari cellos. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was incarcerated in both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps, only surviving because she was the cellist in the Auschwitz-Birkenau women's orchestra. Amedeo Baldovino of the Trieste Piano Trio was forced to jump from a burning ship with his 'Mara' Stradivari, losing the cello, and nearly losing his own life when the boat was shipwrecked near Buenos Aires.
Counterpointing the themes raised by these extraordinary stories are a sequence of interludes that draw together the author's reflections on the nature and history of the cello, and her many interviews and encounters with contemporary cellists. Kate Kennedy's own relationship with the cello is a complicated one. As a teenager, she suffered an injury to her arm that imposed severe limitations on her career as a performer on the instrument that was her first love. She realised that, in order to start to understand what the cello meant to her, she needed to find out what the cello - and, crucially, the absence of the cello - had meant to some other cellists, past and present.
Kate Kennedy has written an eloquent and multitextured homage to this warmest of stringed instruments - part quest narrative, part detective story, part philosophical meditation.
