My Pedigree 2
In the first part of this triptych I introduced my dad, his cello teacher, his “grandteacher” and his “great-grand-teacher”. I will now compare their playing style to show how music performance imperceptibly changed over the period in which these four players were active. I have broken down cello playing in four categories: endpin, strings, vibrato and portamento. Portamento is the slide you hear when your hand changes position on the fingerboard. If you hear a slide, that’s the portamento. Violists don’t have portamento, because they only know one position and that’s how you can tell them apart from … but this you already read on the front page, and remember, never tell a joke twice!
In the chart below I have mapped out how each player fits in these categories. There are of course many more such categories (left hand, bow hand techniques, bowings, rubato, vocal chord use, swearing during practice), but I have limited myself to these four. In very general terms, we get:
As you can see, my dad played with a high endpin, on steel, played with continuous vibrato and only accidental portamentos. His teacher Antal Friss played with a moderate endpin - though he might have started out short - played the first half of his career on gut, later probably on steel, with continuous vibrato and quite some portamentos. Adolf Schiffer probably played with a short endpin, though he may have raised it during his life - on gut, at least by the third decade of the century with continuous vibrato, and with portamentos. Then the shocker: Popper played with no endpin, on gut, did not vibrate every note, and with portamento.
So we see an evolution from no endpin to high endpin, from gut to steel, from no continuous vibrato to continuous vibrato and from portamento to no portamento.
COMMENTS
My dad actually started out on gut when he was a child, but soon after WW2, as an adolescent, he moved to steel, “as we all did”, he recently added. So that checks out. Also, he actually played with a moderate length endpin most of his life, as you can see on all pictures; but those pictures taken when he still had his Testore cello show the Pique Tortelier, (in Dutch, “de pik van Tortelier”), the endpin with the bend in it that Paul Tortelier invented and patented for the high endpin position, to get rid of the miles of endpin you otherwise would have had. Also, when I tried out the high endpin position in my teenage years - my cello history reflects the general history of cello playing in reverse, I went from high to no endpin, from steel to gut, and replaced my continuous vibrato with portamentos - I asked my dad how we short people can still get the cello between the knees when it is so high. “Put your knees under (it),” he said. He would have never been able to say that, had he not done so himself, because that is completely against the rules of classical endpin playing.
I actually don’t know a thing about Friss or Schiffer’s playing style - I didn’t even have pictures when I made the chart; later I found one of Uncle Adolf in Starker’s History. I have to base my assumptions on their contemporaries. Emanuel Feuermann and Gregor Piatigorsrky were a few years younger, Maurice Maréchal a few years older than Antal Friss (1897-1973). Schiffer’s (1873-1950) contemporary was of course Casals, by far the oldest cellist still alive in my life time. So when I assume Friss played with quite a few portamentos, I base that on the fact that his first two score and half a dozen years as a professional player were before WW2: every pre-WW2 recording I have heard was full of portamentos. I still hear them incidentally in recordings of much later date, for instance Oistrakh’s Brahms sonatas with Richter and Daniil Shaffran’s 1970 Chopin recording. In 1968, Norbert Brainin plays two such portamentos in the beginning theme of Brahms’ G major string sextet.
I have always been told that David Popper played without endpin, but now I’m not so sure. He started out without, of that we are certain, besides, they all did around 1850. We have one portrait and possibly a vague drawing of his in this playing posture. The latter is actually a drawing of the octo-bass, invented by Vuillaume and praised by Berlioz, who of course loved cool weird sounds. The cellist we see dwarfed by the instrument looks like Popper. However, in Deáks biography there is also a drawing of someone looking like and identified as Popper playing string quartet with an endpin (I provide some of these pictures in the gallery below). Even more damaging is the photograph from 1909 or 1910 (two different assertions on the same page) of the old Popper with his ailing son and his cello in rest position. That’s the way you rest a cello with an endpin. The resting position without endpin is shown in the photo of Piatti (I can also show you in person, call me, the IRS has my phone number). Thirdly, Deák himself studied with Popper during the master’s last two tears on this planet. He sometimes got to play on the master’s Amati. If that cello had no endpin, Deák would not have been able to properly play on it - and wouldn’t Deák, who does not shrink from providing detailed technical cello related information in his biography, though very well explained to a layman, have mentioned the lack of endpin if Popper had indeed been the last cellist who still played without? Without much trouble I found two such mentionings from contemporaries about Piatti (granted, it was from Kennaway’s book about historical cello playing). Of the dozens of contemporary quotations I read about Popper, not a single one mentions an endpin, or lack thereof. In view of all this evidence, I believe we can safely assume, in his later years, Popper played with an endpin all right.
Even Popper’s discontinuous vibrato, however likely, is challenged. I base my assumption, again, on the many reviews I read, none of which accuses him of excessive vibrato or even theatrical and exaggerated playing, which would be associated with that practice at a time when vibrato was only sparingly used. But the reviews all take an opposite stand, stressing his refinement, his elegance and sensitivity. The first string player who I hear started the continuous vibrato (and even that, recordings show, was by no means as stringently executed as we do today), Martín Melitón Pablo de Sarasate y Navascués (1844-1908, don’t you love Spanish names?), was one year Popper’s junior, while the rest of the pioneers, such as Ysaÿe (1858-1931)and Kreisler (1875-1962), were already of Uncle Adolf’s generation. Also, Popper was part of the musically conservative Brahms circle. Brahms never adopted valve horns and trumpets. We know that Joachim, his go-to violinist, did not vibrate every note. His Bach Prelude in g Minor on youtube shows virtually no vibrato at all. I don’t believe that’s because of a mistaken idea of historical performance, in Joachim’s time there was no historical performance; rather, I believe it was out of reverence for the venerable old masters, whose music should not be defiled by “cute fashionable modernisms” like vibrato, portamento or even spiccato, which didn’t seem to exist before Viotti and which even after it had caught on was considered inappropriate for the great classical composers. In Joachim’s own Romance, you hear more vibrato, though small, narrow, and not on all notes. — —- —- But paradoxically opposing all this, a letter to the editor from 1863 in Leipzig does accuse Popper of “continuous vibrato”. The reviewer to whose review this letter was a reaction defends himself, saying that not only he, but “a number of important musicians who were present at the concert,” saw nothing wrong with Popper’s vibrato. Deák himself, who of course knew Popper’s playing style, emphasizes that this did indeed not mean what we define as “continuous vibrato” today. Music lovers often stick to the forms they have been accustomed to (can I name, as an outspoken exception to this rule, my lawyer friend Daniel Katz from Cleveland?); and the playing style this man was probably used to from even a couple of decades before had almost no vibrato at all, so I assume the man simply meant “more vibrato than he was used to”. Just to give you an example of that older style this man must have had in mind, Spohr, in his 1832 Violinschule, shows a concerto by Rode (Spohr, London, p. 180) in which he indicates which notes could be vibrated: In the first passage, I counted 44 notes that could and would be vibrated today; Spohr vibrated only 6.
But here is my point. Popper was my dad’s “great-grandteacher” - yet, the two have very little in common. Popper was an elegant player, sensitive, pure, intimate - my dad had a passionate robust playing style, full of power, with a lush vibrato. Popper would probably have played most of the classical bowings (more about that in the sequel to this article), my dad broke them all, using sweeping fast bows full of zzzzing. My dad played passionate portatos between slurred notes on one bow, Popper must have played them smoothly, legato, as notes under one slur were meant to be played. When I played Popper as a student or young professional, the idea that he played without (for Canadians withoot) endpin on gut, didn’t vibrate all the notes but had plenty of portamentos, was furthest from my mind. What gets transmitted from father to son, from teacher to student, is fantasy, not history. That isn’t always a bad thing: if the Trojan War had come to us in the form of how it really happened - if there even was a “Trojan” war - then nobody save a few specialists would know about it: now we have a deeply human story, never surpassed in its treatment of life and meaning - and beautifully translated by Fitzgerald and Fagles, the two most beautiful translations I have read in any language.
If the performance of music has changed so much over a century while the music itself didn’t change any more, how much would such performance have changed in 300 years, when not only the cello itself, the bow, got materially changed, but where the music became unrecognizably different was well? That’s why I insist that the way Bach was played has nothing whatsoever to do, and very little in common, with the way we play classical music today; that it was as foreign to us as are styles like jazz, country, and rock are.
In my next post take a closer look at these categories and show their history as far as cello playing is concerned (vibrato, steel strings, endpin and portamento may have entirely different meanings in the Amsterdam Red Light District.
Gallery Clockwise: 1. my dad, with the Pique Tortelier, and my Uncle Ervin (“Uncle Heppie”) in the Haydn Quartet. To the best of my knowledge, he never threw his Pique Tortelier at his brother. 2. An endpinless Popper at age 18 in 1861, after half of his skull had temporarily been taken off by a specific surgery called “cropping”. 3. 19th century drawing of the Octopuss, correction, octo-BASS, with Popper, or someone who looks like him, taking his beer from the instrument’s right waist. 4. 19th century drawing of Popper or someone who looks like him, with an endpin. His seating next to the first violin (Helmesberger?) is historical. 5. The octo-bass in Montréal (I told you it’s clockwise!). 6. Tortelier and Rostropovich showing the bent endpin, Tortelier playing on his own Pique Tortelier, too bad that is just not visible, oh well…. 7. Alfredo Piatti resting his cello without endpin. This is how I rest my cello if I’m not mad at someone. 8. Popper in 1909 (1910?) with his son Leo and his Amati (?). This resting position strongly suggests an endpin, dudn’dit? Popper was almost 6 feet tall …
