My Pedigree 1

This time I like to discuss my musical predigree, my lineage, not from father to son, but from teacher to student, though in my case it’s both, when I follow my dad back in time to his teacher Antal Friss (pronounced “freesh”) to his teacher Adolf - wait for it! - Schiffer, and his teacher, the famed David Popper - and from there to the great string players of all time. Every musician has such a pedigree, mine is in no way more impressive than others, but isn’t it great that we all partake of such a rich cultural history? Here I am taking a closer look at the four cellists mentioned, to map out how the performance of music has surreptitiously but substantially changed during a period of about a century, while the music itself didn’t get changed any more: all four cellists, from Popper, born in 1843, to my dad, born in 1933, played Dvorák, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Wagner, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Bach. And cards. Poker has always been big in my Hungarian family. that’s right, all four were connected with Budapest and thus directly or indirectly with the Austria-Hungarian Empire, that authoritarian, aristocratic, ultra-conservative bulwark of internationalism, inclusiveness and diversity.

Austria Hungary. The colors reflect the ethnic majorities, German speakers (burgundy), Hungarians (white), Slavic speakers (different shades of green), Romanians (gold) and Italians (yellow). Note the white and the red in Transylvania, the very southeast, now lost German and Hungarian majorities (sometimes up to 90%) in Kronstadt and the Csík and Gergely regions

Of all four, my dad, György Schiffer, or actually Schiffer György (pronounced “jerge” rhyming with “church”, though he’s always called Gyuri, “jury”) may have had the most eventful; life from a “Bond, James Bond, shaken-not-stirred” viewpoint. Imagine losing three of your four grandparents in the Holocaust, or your dad walking seven miles to the house of his sister to find the sole survivor of the camps, a little boy, all by himself in the house with no one but the neighbors to care for him - so he took him home, and how the boy ended up starting a family in Israel is not my story to tell - or imagine guarding a kibbutz for two years in the newly founded state of Israel, armed to the teeth - or making your way through forest and fields the middle of the night to escape the Iron Curtain - the one thing the communists tried everything they could to prevent was people leaving - avoiding the Russian soldiers who were just staying there idle, but who might just kill you anyway. —- My dad ended up in France, where he became Monsieur Chiffère, and where he studied with Maurice Maréchal, landed a job in Holland, met a girl, and as I would say, the rest is history.

I still fondly remember …

… the gorgeous sound which my dad enriched the bottom of every ensemble he played in, with his generous relaxed vibrato, his passionate phrasing, and the richness in his note shaping: he never played a straight sound ….

My dad played string quartet for half a century. I fondly remember the gorgeous sound with which he enriched the bottom of every ensemble he played in, with his generous relaxed vibrato, his passionate phrasing, and the richness in his note shaping: he never played a straight sound, as I so often hear from players rather than musicians.

(My wording in the last line reminds me of a joke that I am reminded of every time I relieve myself in a public restroom next to an acquaintance. Two men “facing the wall”, says the one: “Are you from Chicago?” Says the other: “Yes, how did you guess?” Says the one: “It’s Rabbi Silverstein, he never had a straight cut”)

Of Antal Friss (“freesh on tall”) I mainly hear in his quality as a teacher. Like Suzuki, his contemporary, he had a child-friendly approach to teaching: you don’t teach music to the child, you teach the child … music. No two students are the same, there are as many methods as there are students - Friss actually did publish a cello method for children - and the teacher should not teach from a superior position, but condescend to the level of the students and be his elder brother. This makes sense if regarded against the background of the school system of the time, of which we get a good idea from Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy, who in his delectable little booklet Tanár Úr Kérem (“Please Sir”) invariably shows the teacher as something like a Big Buddha statue, who never spoke to you unless with a command or a punishment, whom you never spoke to unless being tested, and who, like a high priest, required perfection and severely punished anything short of that. That’s what Friss did not want …

Friss took pride in having gotten to know music, through his teaching, in all its facets. What he means is classical music in all its facets. For anyone who strove to intellectual growth in most of Europe, this was music: classical music was what everyone breathed, the ocean everyone swam in. Hungary had of course a rich tradition of folk music, and the gypsies had their music - but classical music was as alive, and still as close to many as Appalachian music is to someone like Tina Bergman, or football to Peyton Manning. I will get back to this later.

Friss may have been a subtle, intimate musician. He sometimes told my dad not to play too loud: the cello is not a trumpet! … Later in Paris, Maréchal would ask my dad: Monsieur Chiffère, avez-vous peur du concierge - “arhh you afrhhaid of de concierggge when you play yourhh cello …?

Adolf Schiffer may actually not have been Friss’s teacher - I so hoped he had a teacher and a student called Schiffer - instead he seems to have studied with Harry Son and in Berlin with the great Hugo Becker, who is responsible for the eight-note slur in Bach’s first Prelude. Harry Son - Henri Mozes Son, about whom it is very hard to find anything on line after in England, Prince Harry got a son - was a Dutch cellist from Rotterdam, who came to Budapest to study with Popper - so my pedigree is safe, it just may not go through Uncle Adolf. This Harry Son was the co-founder of the Budapest String Quartet. When my dad told me about the many great string quartets Hungary had in the first half of the 20th century - the Hungarian Quartet, with Székely, the Végh Quartet with Sándor Végh; there was also the Waldbauer Quartet with Kerpely as cellist, and we will soon see the Kemény-Schiffer Quartet - they were all students of Jenö Hubay, “with his wide vibrato”, and Popper, who together had the Hubby-Popper Quartet, the mother of all the others. And the Budapest Quartet? Oh, those are four Russians, my father said, and that was all. But it started out, in 1917, with three Hungarians, and Harry Son. Tragically, Harry is one of two cellists I discovered on this little research that perished in the Holocaust. The other was Paul Hermann, or Hermann Pál, because he was Hungarian, a Schiffer student. He was a founding member of the Hungarian Quartet, in 1935, with Sándor Vegh (!), because Székely was attracted only after two years, when Végh was demoted to second violin. Only in 1940, Végh left to four his own string quartet. Paul Hermann moved to Holland in the 1930s, so he and Harry Son kind of crossed paths. Hermann may have been much better known had he lived, because he was only in his forties, and had a good twenty years of performing in him when the recording industry took off.

I always thought that Adolf Schiffer was a Czech cellist from Prag, because Wikipedia told me so, and why should I doubt Wikipedia ? This year I discovered however that Hungarian Wikipedia had him be born in Apatin. A suburb of Prag, perhaps? Surely, the same way Cleveland is a suburb of Copenhagen or San Francisco of Amsterdam, they speak a language from the same language group. In fact, Apatin is a town in Northern Serbia, it used to be southern Hungary: it is a tri-country area there, rather a four nation area at the time, with Hungarian towns, which tended to be bigger and less numerous, Serbian villages, Croatian towns across the Danube (west), and German towns.

The red arrows show Apatin (east) and Osijek (west) , the black arrow shows Prag. The circle in the Habsburg colors black and gold shows of course Vienna, and the Hungarian red-white-green Budapest, or “Boo-oh-pest”, as my sister used to say when she was three.

In 1910, the Kingdom of Hungary had 2 million Germans living in it, that’s 10% of the population - and I mean true Germans, Apfelstrudel, Weinachtsstollen and Dirndl Trachten and all; that was 10% of the entire population. Apatin was such a town, with 89% Germans and 8% Hungarians —- So I dug a little deeper and found that Magyar Wiki based itself on the Jewish Hungarian Lexicon from 1929, where Uncle Adolf - with his younger brother Artúr (“are-tour”), a painter, born in Osijek, Croatia, but only 35 miles away, still very much the region - had an entry. I take this information very seriously, because everything else that’s said about both brothers checks out. Schiffer did go to Budapest to study with David Popper, he did become teacher there - where he taught not only Paul Hermann, but also many future celebrities like János Starker, Gábor Rejtö, László Varga and Tibor de Machula, whom I know, again, from Holland (quite some traffic between the two countries back then). Finally, Uncle Adolf did play in the Kemény-Schiffer quartet, of which Wikipedia used to say, before I changed it, that Rudolf Kemény, or Kemény Rezsö, founded it in 1918, but of which I found publications as early as 1905, and which Deák mentions had been newly founded in 1902. There is also a marriage certificate from 1920 (when he was 46), with a woman called Elisabeth Weiß (or Weiss Nicht, don’t know), in which he is registered as Roman Catholic. He must have converted, for whatever reason (it was not for his bride who was Reformed). Friss also seems to have converted to Catholicism in 1934. It happened a lot, and for a possible reason why, the joke that Bram converted to Catholicism though he had already converted a week before to Protestantism, for in case they asked for his previous religion, gives us an idea. My own conversion in 1993 however, was real, at least at the time, so there is that too.

The Hubay-Popper Quartet was founded in 1886, and played until well into the 20th century. Imre Waldbauer would later start his own quartet, with which he premiered four of Bartók’s string quartets. Popper was famous for his lush white hair ;-)

From a death certificate from 1950 it becomes clear that Uncle Adolf lived in Budapest ever since he moved there to study with Popper. My dad recently told me he once saw the old Schiffer walk in the streets. He never mentioned the possibility of our being related.

Maybe it’s me, but I wonder what language these four musicians spoke in their childhood. The fact that I’m not sure is fascinating in itself. I have no trouble guessing what Maurice Maréchal, Hugo Becker, Rostropovich, Churchill and Fred Willard spoke when they were young. My dad spoke Hungarian, but would another biographer have known that about him? My grandfather who grew up in what’s now Slovakia, but then, unlike Apatin, a solid part of Hungary with all Hungarian towns - the Slovaks lived further north - spoke Yiddish. His little town was called Nagymagyar (“nudge mud jar”), Zlaté Klasy in Slovakian, Groß Magendorf in German, just to paint the scenery. I assume Friss spoke Hungarian, but I have already made one wrong assumption about him. He magyarized his name - I made that word up, sure I don’t have to explain - from Frisch to Friss, the Hungarian spelling: patriotism, or did he feel a patriotic wind blowing? I know about at least two such Hungarianizations in my own family. Would Schiffer have spoken Yiddish, German, or Hungarian? We know he corresponded in German with Popper, but that could have been a second language for him. Popper is interesting by himself: he was a German speaker, whatever else he spoke: we have or had letters from him in French, English (in which he felt insecure), he once publicly spoke in Italian; he never learned Hungarian. His humor included a fair share of German puns, and he was known to imitate Brahms in his north German and Wagner in his Saxon dialect, and others in Plattdütsch. The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team (“HEART”) confirms that in Prag in Popper’s time, assimilated Jews learned the German language and culture. Even 40 years later we find a good example in Kafka. The big question is: did Popper ever speak Czech? I found no trace of that.

In this context I am however reminded however of the bus driver with whom I had a conversation on most of the drive from Bratislava - Pozsony in Hungarian, Preßburg in German - to Budapest on a tour of La Petite Bande, and who was fluent in Slovakian, Hungarian and German.

Of Maurice Maréchal, here shown at the Western Front with the cello his buddies fabricated for him, I have no doubt what language ge spoke as a child …

The question today rises if a Jew who grew up in a closed-off Jewish ghetto - Popper almost must have started out in Yiddish - then expressed himself mainly in German for the rest of his life, could be called a Czech cellist*. I was once rightfully corrected when I called a young cellist born and bred in Romania a Romanian: he was Hungarian. Nationalities are not the most important thing in the world, but we must respect each individual’s true culture. So Popper could then be called a Bohemian cellist, even though ironically he wrote a Hungarian, never a Bohemian Rhapsody.

Popper was the son of a Jewish cantor, and never forgot the synagogue songs as his father sang them. When he was 18, he left for a position in Löwenberg in Lower Silesia (now Lwowek Slaski in Poland), where he played in a fantastic orchestra that lived and died with its benefactor, the Prince of Hohenzollern-Hechingen (1801-69). Ten years later Popper became principal cellist in the Vienna Staatsoper, at that time including the Vienna Philharmonic. After a subsequent period of concert travels, he finally settled down in Budapest where he lived from 1886 till his death in 1913. From everything I have seen I get that this must have been a one- in-a-century musician, like Casals and Dietrich Fischer Dieskau. My 1908 Grove’s Dictionary of Music writes of the then still living Popper that his tone is large and full of sentiment, his execution highly finished, and his style classical. He was also a formidable improviser, not just on the cello, but also on the piano. Once at a banker’s party in London, a violinist, was it Seurat? - no, that’s a painter, thanks for pointing that out, Marie! - Emile Sauret, decided at midnight he wished to play Beethoven’s violin concert. His pianist didn’t have the music, but Popper cut in, and played the whole orchestral reduction, including all the big tuttis, from memory. And unlike many virtuoso composers, Popper’s pieces. including his etudes, are always beautiful, fresh, inventive, full and flowing.

(I once witnessed such an event. At the Bartók seminar of 1985, a Hungarian musicologist had a lecture with as translator a 2nd generation Hungarian Austrialian young woman, who every time she named a Hungarian name would drop her voice to her “Hungarian pitch”, as for instance in “In the summer of 1943, in New York, -Barrrtók- began composing his Concerto for Orchestra”. Zoltán Kocsis was there to play the musical examples and I don’t think I have ever seen a man so bored. He sat on a chair, backwards, leaning on the back, picking his nose. Yes, picking his nose. That evening, in the “living room”, a cafeteria for teachers and students with a bar and armchairs and couches, there he was, Kocsis, playing the piano, giving his own, fascinating, improvised lecture about Bartók, the true lecture, “aus was sich noch etwas zu lernen läßt”, as Mozart said, from which “one can still learn something” meaningful. He played all the orchestral world flawlessly on the piano, Bluebeard, Mandarin, Concerto, etc. It was an unforgettable experience. It says of course something about organized society that the real experience had to happen outside of the planned curriculum).

Popper encountered some enmity from the Hungarian patriotic faction, including a slander campaign —- slander, really?!!! —- They wanted Hungarian teachers at the Academy. They didn’t understand that Liszt had established the Academy specifically in order to create great Hungarian teachers - by attracting the best teachers of Europe, who then attract Hungarian students, who would then become Hungarian teachers. The Academy was founded in order to stop the emigration of Hungarian talent, who, once they were gone, rarely returned - as Liszt himself had become a Hungarian born Austrian Frenchman. And it paid off, judging from the enormous amount of great Hungarian string players, pianists, conductors and composers the 20th century had to offer. The patriots however, as they always do, just wanted Hungarian teachers, they were not that interested in quality. Also, by the very nature of their patriotic ideals, Hungary was reduced in 1918 to 1/3 of its size. It was Slovakian patriotism that gave Slovakia to the newly constructed country Czechoslovakia, it was Romanian patriotism that made Transylvania part of Romania and South-Slavic patriotism that tore Apatin’s region away to Yugoslavia. The result is today’s boring uniformity in these splinter countries, with borders instead of cultural exchange, provincialism instead of international quality, and people speaking one language instead of three.

In my next post I will break down the paying of these four cellists into four categories: endpin, strings, vibrato, and portamento, and map out how those developed over the century we are examining.

Notes:

• If it is true that Popper did not speak Czech, and did not partake of the Czech culture, then calling him a Czech cellist is what I would call “cultural appropriation” - rather than using nomenclature to prevent people from engaging into a cultural activity of their choice. Culture is and must always be for everyone. But to give someone a label that does not fit is to deny that person his or her cultural identity.

• with apologies to my Czech brethren, who, I assume, still “have” Dvořák, Smetana, John Hus, Václav Havel, Leoš Janáček, Good King Wenceslas and Czech-American Madeleine Allbright …

(Pictures below, clockwise: Uncle Adolf, from the World of Music according to János Starker; David Popper, portrait by (not Justin) Bieber; Harry Son with parts of his colleagues of the Budapest Quartet; outtake with Schiffer’s entry from the Hungarian Jewish Lexicon); Paul Hermann (I said clockwise!!!); Dirndl; the girl my dad met in Holland, named “Honey”*: “Great string players of all time” from the Standard of Ur, 2600 BC, British Museum)

* Hanny Kooij, assistant principal viola in The Brabants Orchestra from the 1970s till around 2000