My Pedigree 3

In my last article Pedigree 2, I introduced the four categories of cello playing which against which I compared my four musical ancestors: endpin, strings, vibrato and portamento. We saw that from about 1860 to 1960, cello playing had developed from no endpin to high endpin, from gut to steel, from a relatively sparse use of vibrato to continuous vibrato, and from plenty of portamentos to no portamentos. Now I would like to explore the history of cello playing with a closer, historical look at those four aspects, beginning with the endpin.

André Rixens’ portrait of Jules Delsart (1844-1900), student of Franchomme, teacher of Gérard Hekking who taught Careltje who taught Anner, making him one of my musical ancestors as well. I find this the most beautiful image of playing without endpin I have seen so far. Everything looks lo relaxed…

Jan Jozef Horemans the Younger (1714-92), “A Romantic Scene” according to an art website. As far as the cellist is concerned, this painting is a copy of another one of his, The Singing Lesson, set in a homy interior. the costumes of both paintings seem a century off, probably “historical art”. Note the underhand bow hold, which is typical for all iconography we currently have of the century depicted, not the century in which this work was created. The four tuning pegs show clearly that this is a cello, not a gamba.

The endpin

As the picture on the left, oops! right shows, amateur cellists, and probably gambists as well, have always used whatever they could find to rest the instrument on. Professionals, however, had a universally approved position, or ballpark of positions, very much like we have with the endpin today. This position is best described in the methods of the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, like Romberg, Dotzauer, Lee, Kummer, etc., but shows in earlier paintings as well. Romberg tells you to sit up straight, like your familiar endpin position (not that Romberg would have known about that, I’m just adding that myself). You turn out your toes (I would say, turn in the heels, but that’s the same), and let the cello come and hang in the half circle you just formed with your legs. I say hang, not only because I love the English language for the difference expressed between a man well hung and a man well hanged, but also because if your legs are completely relaxed - which is the most important thing about this posture - the cello feels like it’s floating like a ship in the ocean: everything is fluid, feminine, except your torso, which is in a perfect relaxed masculine fix, so you get yin in the way the cello floats between your loose legs, and yang in way your torso is grounded on the chair, and that is the last time in this article I will use those words. Now for the trick: the cello balances in the midst of both calves (mine are fleshy so it’s easy, but it’s all muscles, you know that, right?), by the left back edge, (= where the side meets the back panel) and the front front edge (where the front panel meets the side). This way, the cello balances between two diagonally opposed points, and is tilted toward you so you can play a straight bow on the A string. There is one mistake you should try to avoid: do not attempt to retain as much as you can from your trusted endpin position. That would lead to cramps and tension, as the endpin position is meant for an endpin, a totally different ballgame - too keep the analogy, it’s no use to call a football running back for “traveling”. When in articles by respected cello scholars - I won’t name names - I read the nonsensical assertion that “playing with an endpin is awkward” (if it were, the endpin would have been invented centuries earlier and for different reasons), I know that the authors made one of two errors: either they tried to mix it up with their familiar endpin position, or they didn’t take or have the time to get used to the different dimensions of playing without. At age 24, I learned the position in a week, and never looked back. But it took me years before I felt comfortable finding an -e- on the D-string with my first finger, or before I really felt the zzzing in my sound.

Playing without endpin feels more intimate, it makes the cello more part of my body. Also, the approach is different, as you draw, pull the strings, which produces a more flexible, elastic, fluid sound, that can never be fully gotten with the classic endpin position, where the weight of the arm is more directly, vertically transferred to the string. I’m not talking about the endpin itself: When Servais added the 6 or 7 inches to his cello for support, he still sounded as he always did. It is the diagonal position caused by today’s longer endpin that makes the difference. And I’m not saying one is superior to the other either. It’s just a different court.

Enter François Servais (1807-66). He decided to add a short endpin to his cello for support, no doubt for the virtuoso passages so dominating in the nineteenth century. Here is what my unforgettable 1908 Grove’s Dictionary has to say about Servais: At the close of his life he became very stout, and the peg now used to support the violoncello is said to have been invented by him as a relief. However, the picture below, allegedly from 1862, clearly shows a man who could not possibly be called obese by anyone except today’s medical practitioners in the US, nevertheless already with an endpin.

With the endpin in place, two things followed. First, the circular form of the legs was no longer needed, and the grounded cello position of today was found - and the cello, now no longer dependent on the placement on the calves, could be raised. That had two advantages: one is that the high positions, as my mother called the permanent rosin zone (“eeuwige harsvelden”), become more accessible. In the very high positions we have seen from Tortelier, the snowy areas really seem presented on a silver platter, but in that position, the first position can become somewhat awkward, so for orchestra players, who have to sightread most of their music (there is simply too much music to practice), and who often play there, a moderate position should be preferable. The other advantage is that with a raised position, the sound goes up and more of it reaches the audience: the cello sounds louder. That was very important in a time where the halls became bigger. My teacher Anner did however point out that it is “old fashioned” to still care about a big sound while electricity has been invented a long time ago.

What gets to me is how long these two developments, especially raising the cello, took. In 1880, Jules De Swert still sets the endpin length to 7 to 8 inches, so a little bit shorter than my … but that information is not needed. In 1901, Hugo Becker, in his edition of Sebastian Lee’s cello school, to which he needed to add a chapter about the endpin, still shows the same vertical position. Many other cellists of the time show the same short length. Others, such as Casals and his pupil Wilhelmina Windowcleaner, had started a more diagonal placement. Wilhelmina Windowcleaner is my Suzuki inspired pet name for Guilhermina Suggia, the Portuguese prodigy who landed the most glamorous portrait ever made of a female cellist (Casals’ endpin was short, but that was because he was a short man). Van der Straeten and Carl Schroeder (both 1893) also show a more diagonal position in their pictures. Alfred Earnshaw still maintains it would be best to start playing without endpin, and to add the endpin only “when the correct adjustment is assured”. I am mentioning this statement because it shows the inertia of culture: clinging to old forms when they have become meaningless is indeed what half the population is really good at (the other half is quite skilled at replacing forms that have proven their value with new ones that are worthless). Once we use an endpin, an entirely new position should be explored; clinging to the old position, which is not made for the endpin, only slows down the search for the good new one.

Guilhermina Suggia (1885-1950), who clearly played with her cello raised

It took another half century - that’s an entire century since Servais - that Tortelier and Rostropovich adopted their extremely positions. I have the impression that nowadays, the pendulum is mostly back in the middle, that is, to the moderate length, as my dad and Casals show in their pictures.

The endpin may have been an influence on the adoption of steel strings. I have always found it cumbersome to play on steel in the position without endpin: it doesn’t give me the force I need that a higher placed cello does. However, the greatest factor that enabled the change to steel I believe is vibrato, so the history of the strings is inseparable from the history of vibrato (while in reverse, steel strings have further influenced the use of vibrato).

So let’s explore their history. Let’s embark on this journey back in time together. Let’s step inside the Duchiffre time machine and follow the traces of both. I have to fill up space to get around Wilhelmina’s picture, so let met tell you about the violist who in a music theory test (what does a violist get on his SAT test? Drool) was asked for the dominant of G major, to which he gave the unmatched gem of an answer: “but G major is already the dominant!” Some musical expertise is required to get the humor. I can explain, you should find me in the late afternoon in the forest trail of South Franklin Circle, Chagrin Falls. In camouflage.

Metal strings and vibrato.

Metal strings, I hear, is a relatively recent phenomenon. I agree. The Neanderthals did not have them. Also, the archers from the Azilean, 12,000 years ago, wouldn’t have strung their bows with metal. On the other hand, hammered dulcimers have metal strings: they have been around for at least 3000 years; I wonder when metal strings were introduced to it. Psalteriums (psalteriA!) ditto. And we know that harpsichords have had them for at least 500 years. They were around. They were just not deemed fit for bowed string instruments. Musicians have experimented with them in every century. One such experiment is the viola d’amore of the 18th century, which had metal strings under the fingerboard and bridge (and therefore a gazillion of pegs) that rang sympathetically when a related note note was played on the upper strings*. Some builders began to make the upper strings out of metal too, a short lived experiment.

Arrowheads

from the Azilean, Switzerland, 12,000 BC

In the Baroque era, at least in what I call the Baroque era (I find Monteverdi so clearly reflecting another style that I do not want to call it by the same name, even though, yes, I know, there is the sudden stress on emotion and the continuous bass line - let’s call it Caravaggionism), we see a generous use of vibrato. Geminiani (London, 1751), in a relatively long passage dedicated to it, writes that it can express majesty and dignity, or affliction and fear, dependent on how what sort and combined with what note shape and dynamic; “and when it is made on short notes, it only contributes to make their sound more agreeable and for this reason it should be made use of as often as possible.”** We see it in Marais’s gamba works. Marais (1656-1728), who wrote down everything he did - had he farted during a perforce he would have written an “e” for explofion inteftinale … but wait! he did write “e” all over the place! - shows us where vibrato was used, and we are talking a pretty wide vibrato over the fret. Today’s interpretation of the evidence is that - perhaps, but not likely, with the exception of Geminiani and his minions - the default note was played non-vibrato, like we sometimes play scales. Vibrato was an ornament, not a part of the sound. Ornaments in the lush, lascivious Baroque era, must have been generous, expressive, eloquent, suggestive, poignant, passionate, moving, evocative, powerful, emotionally charged, plentiful, copious, ample. profuse, rich, lavish, abounding, you get the idea. In contrast to this generous use, the 19th century methods all (that is all who discuss vibrato) strongly advise to use it sparingly, and most advocate only a narrow, modest shake. Romberg writes that “in former times, no one could keep a tone of even the slightest duration without insistently shaking the finger, the result was a true (cacophony of) howling and bowling”. Spohr, who treats the subject extensively, giving four kinds of vibrato, is nevertheless less than luxurious in its use when annotating a concert by Rode: out of 44 notes that could and would today be vibrated, he chooses 6 … There were probably some that vibrated more than others; we have already seen that Popper, though two generations later, seems to have vibrated more than for instance Joachim - others were known used vibrato quite sparingly (Piatti), while Bernhard Molique (1802-69, according to Joachim) and Camillo Sivori (1817-94, according to Hugo Becker) allegedly didn’t vibrate at all. Those examples were from later times, my impression is, keeping mind that method books reflect the music one one generation earlier and that when they are written, the style was already changing, that in Beethoven’s time the use of vibrato was used most sparingly. Or should have, given Beethoven’s style. It is of course possible that many players played Beethoven with more, and Schumann with less vibrato “than they should”.

All those that urge a thrifty use (niggardly I say here in outspoken solidarity with the man who got fired from his job for using this word of Scandinavian origin) of vibrato, speak about the purity of the sound that it allegedly jeopardized. Here is what I believe happened. In the Baroque, music was played in a rhetorical, speech oriented style. Music was an imitation of speech, notes were syllables, accentuated or un-accentuated. The musician played the orator, and the dynamics were mainly limited to bringing out certain notes and glossing over others, just like jazz players do now (this is why so often there is no dynamic at the beginning of a piece, as that forms the beginning of an orator’s speech: graph the affect of the piece, how one would start a speech in that affect, and that’s your dynamic). In Beethoven’s time, however, music had become melodic, phrase-oriented. Players like Shimani and Campagnoli begin to yell at us to play a tune on as few strings as possible, and to keep the same theme, when appearing in another key, in exactly the same shape as before, with the string crossings and position changes in exactly the same place. I feel a strong urge to have Beckmessers like that ring my doorbell and then dump a weekly load of my own Cleveland Brown on them from the second floor window,*** but it does show a new emphasis on melody and sound. Uniformity begins to reign, hence the stress on the purity of the sound. Even in recordings of violinists around 1900, vibrato is often fairy thin and narrow, modest sounding.

Metro gnome

Maelzer’s Metronome was patented in 1815, but through questionable proceedings. The real inventor seems to have been Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel in Amsterdam, in whose house Maelzel had seen a prototype, according to which principles he built his own and patented it. Even in the legal action that followed, Maelzel’s conduct seems to have been less than “delicate”. Article The Metronome in The Harmonicon, volume 8, 1830, readable on line via footnote 9 in Wikipedia “Metronome”. The picture shows that though I came up with the pun by myself, I didn’t coin the phrase.

This helps us understand many of the bowings in classical (J. L. David) and early Romantic music (Delacroix). I have often been told that Beethoven did not know the cello, his bowings were phrasings, cellists made their own. That last part is of course true, but we always do, no matter what you write. It is also true that Beethoven did not know… the late 20th century cello with endpin, steel strings, slow tempi and continuous vibrato! My friend Steuart Pincombe,**** who in the Czech Republic is called Ṧtrt, and without whose dearest wife Michelle you would not be reading this now, claims he can play the original bowings of all Beethoven’s cello sonatas, and I believe him, he is a fantastic cellist, though as a musician … well … let’s say … (just kidding, he is a great musician!). ***** He claims that the slurs are true bowings, not phrasings, like in the piano. I believe that’s true most of the time, things get a bit complicated in passages like the ending o op. 69 (mm. 211-19), but there a prescribed bowing might have obfuscated the overall intention of ending a happy day with nothing to add but peacefully falling asleep; besides, not all the “urtekste or “original” editions match. Barring possible differences in editions, I think I found a combined of six bowing in all the sonatas that make no sense, and one or two that are simply impossible for me. That is a suspiciously low percentage. Dozens of themes can be played with the prescribed bowings, and they get a completely different and more spellbinding quality when thus performed, given the sparing use of vibrato and taking into account that most of the tempi we now use are too slow. Just two name too, too name to, to name tous, I mean to name two out of many: measure 7/8 in the F major beginning mvnt. could really has the audience grasping for breath when the bow frees itself in m. 9 at the end of the phrase; same for the pedal tone of mm. 218-21: a really slow bow is especially enthralling on a drone. The beginning of op. 102/2, when played under one bow, shows the essence of the piece better than when you break the phrase. When played in the usual way with vibrato and multiple bowings, the individual note become more gorgeous, but the iconic simplicity and the almost religious tension is lost. Rembrandt can express the world, but never can he express what a good Russian icon can… Also keep in mind that a piano in Beethoven’s time, compared to the cello, especially in 1796 when the two early ones were written, loses much more volume than an cello of that time. The high notes of m. 21 of the G minor beginning, for instance, which today has no trouble getting across over the fortissimo cello grumble, must have really sounded like a man desperately grasping the bars of his jail, sorry, gaol. Finally, the great players of the time must have been trained in this concentrated of bow at the bridge the way I have trained my vibrato, which took years to acquire. This much is sure: repeated occurrences of themes in op. 69, played by the piano and the cello after each other in the exact same context, in which the cello part has twice as many slurs as the piano part, which does have phrasings, show that generally, the slurs are intended to be bowings. The fact that I can play about 99% of them is another argument. Real phrases have no relation to how many notes can be played in one bow or sung in one breath, so there should be many more impossible bowings.

Those six slurs that cannot possibly be played, which only occur in op 69 and the late sonatas, are possibly symbols in the style of like European traffic signs saying You figure it out, I don’t have time for this. (you can call those ‘phrasing styles’, or a passive aggressive advice to get a 3 ft. bow).

The same erroneous thinking I find throughout the 20th century century about Beethoven’s tempi, which allegedly were too fast. “A faulty device …”. - Yes, all composers just happened to have faulty tickers… “Early 19th century composers read the gnome at the wrong side of the bar.” - Sure, those geniuses, to which you can’t hold a candle, were all idiots… There was even a group of respected musicians in Holland who taught me (!!!) in conservatory (!!!) that a full beat was counted when the pendulum was back at its starting point, therefore two metro gnome beats should be counted as one real beat: “all classical music should be played half tempo” - substantiated by the excruciatingly lame bromide “people had time back then”. - How could people have time before the washing machine, the light bulb, the train, and gas stoves? WE have time on our hands! - Also, more importantly, though I don’t know how to stress this after having been yelling that hard, people, save a few Usain Bolts, still ran as fast, walked the same pace****** and threw as hard as we do, and that gets expressed into music, rather than the trekschuyt or a hurting butt skin from a carriage ride. All the time, the truth stared them in the face and they couldn’t see it: not the tempi, the bowings were wrong, but our way of playing had changed so much that the original instructions could not be matched any longer.

Gilbert Duprez (1806-96) was the first tenor who sang the high notes with his chest voice. Before him, tenors like Adolphe Nourrit would sing them falsetto.

I believe that Verdi made the same mistake with his criticism on Beethoven 9 for bad writing for voices (which I have from Wikipedia and haven’t had the time to corroborate). I know nothing about singing, but I have never yet spoken to a singer who could answer my questions about historical singing style to my satisfaction. Beethoven 9 is brilliant in all its facets. It is the greatest piece I have ever heard. I know some of you do not like the Ode to Joy, but I strongly believe that is because you are missing something. That’s not arrogance, it’s realistic: in my experience, those who do not like music that’s universally considered great - Bruckner 9, or Mozart, whom one musician once called ‘characteristic’ - really?!!! - and of whom a mathematician and good amateur pianist once said “I like some pieces” (…)******* - it’s their fault, not the piece’s. I don’t understand Stravinsky, that’s then my shortcoming. Again, wait for me in my trailer, I will tell you what’s so great about the Ode to Joy, and how you can look beyond the forms. Verdi himself praises the first movement as sublime. Would someone who even in a state of total deafness creates an orchestration that has never been surpassed in its magnificent, otherworldly mystery, would such a genius fail in the voices? Or would it not be much more likely that the singing style had changed drastically between 1800, when Beethoven was still hearing and able to form concepts about sounds, and 1878, when Verdi made that statement? The fact that we find proof that in string playing at least such a major change had taken place in exactly that time (below I will show that turning point in our cello repertoire) should be a major argument in favor of that idea. Verdi’s own music provides another - though, I hear, perfectly written for the opera voice - his style is heavier than the him preceding Bel Canto style of the guys with longer names ending on -i, and Mozart. When reading about Philippe Nourrit (1802-1839) I learned that this French tenor, with all others up till well into the 1830s, sang the high notes falsetto. That constitutes an entirely different musical style, similar to the late 18th century cello technique of moving to the thumb position and then playing over all strings once the hand had arrived there, creating a similar falsetto effect. In fact, one of the difficulties of Schumann’s cello concerto is that Schumann, who learned the cello as a child, still had this old falsetto-ish technique in mind, while the music needs the power of the A string, so we find ourselves making an arrangement, so to speak, for “falsetto-less cello”. With instrumental music having changed so much, we almost have to assume that singing must have also. If you want to hear how a lighter style of singing might have sounded, watch Linda Ronstadt singing Mabel in G & S’s Pirates of Penzance, the movie with Kevin Kline and Angela Lambsberry. Linda probably knew nothing about historical performance - though she knows everything about authenticity! - so any resemblance, if even possible, would be purely coincidental, but it is a lighter way of singing, it is charming, and the English, which in my most humble but adamant opinion always suffers from the Italianate opera singing style, sounds natural.

Linda ronstadt in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance (1982). Only upon watching this movie did I learn the difference between Gilbert & Sullivan, Rogers & Hammerstein and Elvis, DAM! I’m saying it wrong again, Abbott & Castello.

(DAM = an acronym for Mothers Against Dyslexia)

As hinted on before, the cello repertoire provides us with an intriguing example of when the change to the heavier performing style Verdi had gotten used to took place. In the Schumann cello concerto, seen below, though we have to talk our way around Linda a bit before we get there, the slur over the first two measures is pointless if not impossible to pull off with the tempo in which all cellists play the opening passage, which in one of my little surveys - sort of how archeologists have short-surveyed all of Israel and the Sinai desert in order to trace evidence for the Exodus (they found none) - was almost uniformly between 90 and 100, while Schumann in a letter asked for 144, another sign for faster tempi in the early 19th century. If played in or close to that tempo, the concerto takes on a completely different, sweeping, fleeting identity, rather than the more plaintive way it is performed today. Saint-Saëns however shows us an entirely different musical ideal. In his concerto, which begins with a loud interrupting cry, followed by a run, ending in a wail or a rhetorical thesis, the phrase is cut in two by a new bow in the middle of the run, demoting the phrase to a lesser place, and bringing out the brilliance of the individual notes. I am adamantly sure that Schumann or Beethoven would never have cut that bowing into two, giving the phrase priority over the sound. And there we have the flipping point toward what I call the Puccini singing style.********

In Pedigree II I (funny how this looks like Pedigree III with one I walking away!) already mentioned Joseph Joachim’s recordings on youtube. I (still me, not another Roman one coming) am reminded of another little study I performed, checking out 20 recordings of the first note of Beethoven’s cello sonata in g minor on youtube. They were all modern cellists. Every single one of them vibrated! To me, there is absolutely no reason to vibrate that note. It expresses doom, tragedy, which is always a situation you can do nothing about. Maybe I should write a blog about this distinction in classical music, between feelings expressed or rather something that is, exists, something we can do nothing about. My whole talk of Beethoven 9 is based on that distinction: the beginning passage of the first movement, which reappears on every strategical point of the movement (repeated in the beginning, at the development AND the recap - fortissimo - finally in the coda) has nothing emotional, it’s all showing things were there before we were born, eternal, fateful, yes, destiny, mortality, time-full, actually, living and dying in time, all phenomena we live under and like the viola solo: it’s coming and there is nothing you can do about it (the Ode theme, consisting almost entirely of “human” whole steps, is the opposite, reflecting the fullness of life in us). Vibrato shows emotion. There is no emotion in that note, just plain awareness of our fate. From a sound point of view, no vibrato makes the cellist part of the chord, for once, piano and cello can be almost indistinguishable! What a color!!!!! You even diminuendo together with the piano. The timelessness - or rather timefullness - is expressed, wie dort, auch hier, in the dotted rhythm of the theme following immediately, which rhythm also occurs in Chopin’s and Beethoven’s Funeral Marches, even in the slow part of the generic New Orleans jazz march. So even when the cello starts singing, this universal fate motive is still expressed. How much would one hesitatingly vibrated note in that tender, reminiscing beginning theme express! I’m deviating. Why vibrate??? - Yet, not a single player thought of this, not Yoyo, not Mischa, and I don’t remember who else was on the list, they all just bluntly vibrated, that’s what you are supposed to do, because they note takes longer than a 64th note (now I’m talking about Beethoven’s C major op. 102 no 1, where the 64th notes in the slow movement are generally played today as generic eight notes, what’s up with that?) …Not a single player!!!

Except … wow … that I didn’t expect … Rostropovich in a 1960s recording.

By 1930, as someone writes in Paul Seashore’s book The Vibrato (1932) (and he could do nothing to stop him or her), “the continuous vibrato had been generally accepted” or something to that extent. That itself is a testimony, as it can only be said by someone who still remembers a time that this was not so, that there were generally applauded players who did not vibrate much, and, as we have seen, even some who did not vibrate at all. I can’t for my life imagine that there must have been a time that there were no traffic lights in Cleveland Heights. Music had finally gotten to a level of sophistication that 1. everyone was taught to play the page, the whole page and nothing but the page; 2. cadenzas were practiced shut (in 1905, Szigeti (“SEE! Getty…”) reminisces about “past times of virtuosentum, when the celebrated soloist would still treat his spellbound audience to truly improvised cadenzas”). 3. Spiccato is generally used everywhere; 4. the continuous vibrato had been established. Soon 5. the portamentos would disappear. But little did they know, the music critics, the art pundits, in their new blazé suits with ties with exaggeratedly short haircuts in their shabby jackets, now, in these new times of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, that the groundwork had been laid for the steel strings to arrive. Due to the continuous vibrato, the next experiment with metal strings would be successful. And that experiment in a decade later in WW2, when gut got scarce again, and steel was tried - this time, with great success. After WW2, as my dad recently said, “we all changed to steel.” A new sound was born, that lush, opulent and powerful sound we now expect from a cello, even though some, like my teacher Anner, could never warm to them, saying that whenever he plays on a cello with such strings, he feels like a there is blue light around him. For me, the choice between the chestnut, gritty sound of gut and the wealthy, golden steel is entirely a matter of taste. We have to keep in mind, though, that in a big hall, the disadvantages of steel tend to disappear. The modern flute has been subjected the most of all instruments to the modern practice of volume enlargement, to the cost of quality. But that scrappy, metallic whizz I hate so much is entirely gone when I hear it play the gorgeous Brahms 4 flute solo in the orchestra. As long as we realize, as I may have said before, that every performance on steel of a work before 1945, let alone 1900, is an arrangement.

Portamento, and the general state of music today, marshaled with a major kernel of private opinions (and an awful title)

I’m not sure I should go too deeply into what portamento is, what kinds of portamento there were, that gets very technical, that’s for better informed professionals. My mom learned about the aanvangzs- and the eindportamento’s, the beginning and end portamentos. I asked her if she still had the notes I read when I did a project about cello teaching methods, as to which was which; one portamento begins gliding on the “old” finger and places the new finger without as an interruption when the hand has arrived in its new position, which produces a flip in the tone similar to the “crack” in the sound of a country singer. That’s the portamento I still hear in Oistrakh’s and Fournier’s recordings, for lack of better examples. The other one is beginning to slide with the new finger. Spohr claims that the first is the right one, the second, “which so many dumb people do”, or something to that extent (= it was done and he didn’t like it), “only leads to wailing misery”. What is interesting to me is that when my mom learned this in the 1950s, the whole art of portamento was already on its way out. Schools always teach the past.

The Apostles, by the Master of Constantinople, 14th century, Puskin Museum, Wrstjbrklzmrzlina. Incidentally, can you name all twelve apostles? Hint: Paul was not one of them. Neither were Mark and Luke…

Casals’s recording (on youtube - wow, these old dead people really like the internet!) of the Swan from 1915 shows 20 portamentos on a total amount of notes of around 116 or 117, I don’t remember. That’s one note out of six! And he was one of the ones who used it sparingly! American cellist Victor Sorlin who died too young (or not, dependent on how you like portamento, I guess), used it about every other note!

What I would like to discuss is why it got discontinued. And specifically, why it got outlawed. In one article about Starker, like every celebrity with brains so often misquoted in the press, he tells a student that “this slide downwards had been abandoned since the 19th century”. When I taught a hardworking student a beautiful upward slide on Dvořák’s Humoresque, a committee told him that such a thing was ‘not done’. In Dvořák time, every position change was a slide! Who are these people to tell us that portamento, in Dvořák, is “not done”? Are they better than Dvořák? Aside from the awful practice of people telling other people what they can’t do, musically, no portamento means one less color on your pallet. I believe classical music is working with quite a reduced color pallet nowadays, and that’s perhaps why … but about that in a moment. When I was a student in Amsterdam, one particular teacher was quoted saying that “a note without vibrato is a dead note”. We laughed at that sweeping generality. My dad, during a rehearsal of Schubert’s magnificent G major quartet, in the andante (Schubert, always walking, makes me think of the Christian 17-year old who asked his mom if he could have a car. Mom says “if you cut your hair, I’ll think about it.” - “The apostles … had long hair …” - “Yes, and everywhere they went, they walked”). In the andante, I said, before I got interrupted, the cello interrupts the rest of the players with part of the theme, in a sweeping crescendo to fortissimo (actually, the cello is together with the first violin, not in octaves, but playing the same dam note (we saw already that DAM is an acronym for Mothers Against Dyslexia)! Schubert and his haunting sounds! I’m reminded of the many times he orchestrates the oboe in unison with the clarinet. That practice, considered not done at the time, gives one of the most unbelievably heart-rending moments in the Unfinished). When the quartet stopped playing, my dad turned to me and said: “Here I need the power of the open A-string!” So much for the ‘dead note’ idea. But how many cellists would just dumbly play that note on the D string, “because out can, so it should be vibrated”? “Es ist bezahlt, es muß genossen werden!” One of three German phrase my Dutch grandmother taught me. Cleveland translation: “You paid for it, you shall see Browns lose again.”

Why was portamento discontinued? The government’s official statement is ‘because of its sentimentality’. The Turn of the Century was a time where the cultural atmosphere was dense like Venus, where Mahler expressed a human soul filled with neuroses, where Schoenberg with Transfigured Night (Verklärte Nacht in German, Verkrachte Nicht in Dutch*********) reaches the absolute limits of the culture’s outer space, where painting had already exploded into myriads of sub-styles like the Pre-Raphaelites, Orientalism, Realism, Impressionism, where the old trusted monarchies were creaking in their foundations: where sentimentality played a sure part in all this. It had to break - and did in WW1, after which we could not go back. Austria Hungary spit into 3, now 7 splinter states and half of its territory taken away, the old aristocracy annulled (one Austrian or German nobleman wrote in his identification papers - quoting from memory and translating: raised to peerage by Charlemagne, reduced to commonhood by Helmut Neustadt or however that particular bureaucrat’s name was). Fashion summarizes everything: from the dignity of 19th century’s frock coats and hope dresses to the triviality of the 20th modern suit as epitome, under which dictatorship we still cringe, and the flimsy female garments of the 1920s and 30s. Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings show that new mentality - riveting if not beautiful - reflected in art, in the form of the New Objectivity. There is no place for portamento in that style. It meant that sentimentality, with improvisation, plain simple tunes and simple dancing, escaped to the world of popular culture, where it happily resides in the deliciously predictable Hallmark movies, talking about cupcakes, traditional weddings and “the one”, with our “beloved” high culture left with fewer and fewer people who care. I’m being facetious (when am I not?): Pulp Fiction, which may well outshine and outlast everything our dear “high culture” achieves today, is also popular culture.

Set for Parsifal, 1882, by Max Brückner. I think Brückner, or Bruckner, indicates the profession of collecting tolls at a bridge.

But there may be another reason why portamento got outlawed. It is harder to hide a portamento just like it is harder to vibrate every note faster than a 64th. In art, there always has been a mentality of anything that you can do, I can do it better mentality. Louis Marchand is said to have left town at the crack of dawn after hearing Bach practice for their organ duel that was supposed to take place the next day in 1717. In that context, I remember walking along the Oberlin conservatory practice rooms when I was a gamba student there with Cathy Meints, qua teacher the best I ever had among a true crème de la crème faculty. Listening to all those young violinists practicing their concertos with their amazing sound, flawless execution, and power: it was hideous. I was shocked by the mere dichotomy between feeling and sound. It seemed there was nothing expressed except, perhaps, pride. I wondered how such a divorce between sound and meaning could exist on such a vast scale. I can only explain that by the notion that for Americans, classical music is a borrowed art. Somehow, Irish folk music made it across the pond, classical music didn’t. This is why I paused at the realization that for Friss, my dad, and to a major extent for me too, classical music is in our veins. I found the same natural relation when a certain American orchestra played a Big Band concert and the personal manager played the drums: it was three music. The same people who looked like they were office clerks when playing Beethoven 5, now were swinging along. I may exaggerate, but that was impression. I also find it in audiences: many people seem to display a formality in their attitude to classical music that I have seen in Europe, just less predominant. That doesn’t make me better than American players, or Europeans better listeners; but it does make a difference how I, and my dad, and Friss, and Schiffer and Popper, felt their music. I am even just at the fringe of all this: time has elapsed. When listening to Furtwängler’s Bruckner I get the overwhelming feeling that this conductor was still breathing the same air as the composer, he was one of the last Romantics (Furtwängler’s own compositions give a very good illustration of the so top-heavy culture around 1900). His sounds breathe a vitality that I miss in later recordings, that rather show music conceptualized from a distance. I repeat, this doesn’t mean that Americans are in- or less capable of finding soul in classical music, it just means there is one more hurdle in your way that, apparently, the majority of those young players were at least at that moment unable to overcome. While listening to those perfect, powerful but awful sounds, I thought back of that teacher in Amsterdam who was quoted saying that “a note without vibrato is a dead note”. It suddenly dawned on me, that out of 20 or 30 string teachers, this violinist was … the American teacher….

Falling Water, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, in Pennsylvania. Frank Lloyd Wright once had to testify in court. He was asked his name and profession. He answered: Frank Lloyd Wright, the best among the living architects. After the court session, his friends, in a state of shock, asked him how could you?!!! “I had to,” he said simply, “I was under oath.”

Finally, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Perfection was the thing to strive for, as long as it was not reached. Now, we are dangerously close to reaching it. When I hear recordings of Furtwängler, even Karajan, or Squire playing the unforgettable Brahms clarinet trio, or Maréchal the Debussy sonata, I hear “live” music. Casals’ languishing portamentos in the Swan, Joachim’s almost jazzy floating rhythm - Duke Ellington’s improvisations, the organized chaos of his arrangements, Miles Davis, I’m only scratching the surface of that world - show a spirit of life that cannot possibly be expressed when everything is perfectly together and in tune. In a perfect world, there is no place for portamentos and every note is vibrated. In a perfect world, however, there is not much going on. I am reminded of the priest telling his friend the rabbi about a dream he had of Jewish heaven. What a mess! People talking loudly, interrupting each other, eating from each other’s plates, playing games, praying in the corner of the room, I’m just filling in the details. Well … yeah. the next day, the rabbi told him about Catholic Heaven. A splendid city in a sunlit valley, blue waters, golden pavement and roofs, diamonds, marble buildings, aqueducts, bathing houses, gorgeous everything! - And the people? - people … people … no, I didn’t see any people there… ***********

This is why I am never pleased when I hear my performances praised as “flawless” (it is not true either: I am the least flawless player I know). I strive for riveting, not flawless (some can do both, I have to choose). A perfect world also has a sadly small musical pallet. I’m thinking of my good friend Simon Rattle, whom I have seen twice in my life (he doesn’t even know I exist ;-), and who on the later of both occasions spoke to the Oberlin Student Orchestra. He said, and I paraphrase: you guys are so fortunate for having the opportunity to do this. Play your heart out. At some point, we began to tell orchestra musicians that they should not show their emotions; and then we wondered why people didn’t come to our concerts any more.**********

Play a portamento here and there … Experiment with non-vibrato, even on steel - or, like in Schubert’s String Quintet, slow movement, middle voices, how small your vibrato can be for it to still be warm while not to be in the way of this gorgeous carpet that reaches you into the marrows of your bones. Find more of your soul in the greatest music that has probably ever been created …

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Footnotes

* I have always wondered at the point of using a viola d’amore in ensembles, as the other instruments would block out the sound of the sympathetic strings. Perhaps one of the reasons the instrument was not granted longevity: it really only makes sense, solo, and how much solo repertoire can you tolerate on a bowed string instrument?

** Geminiani continues: “Men of purblind Underftandings and half Ideas may perhaps afk, is it poffible to give Meaning and Expreffion to Wood and Wire; or to beftow upon them the Power of raifing and foothing the Paffions of rational beings? But whenever I hear fuch a Question put, whether for the Sake of Information, or to convey Ridicule, I fhall make no Difficulty to anfwer in the Affirmative, and without fearching over-deeply into the Caufe, fhall think if it fufficient to appeal to the Effect. Even in common Speech a difference of Tone gives the fame Word a different Meaning. And with Regard to mufical performances, Experience has fhown that by Help of Variations, Movements, Intervals and Modulation he may almoft ftamp what Impreffion on the Mind he pleases. Thefe extraordinary Emotions are indeed moft eafily excited when accompany’d with Words; and I would befides advife, as well the Compofer as the Performer, who is ambitious to infpire his Audience, to be firft infpired himfelf; which he cannot fail to be if he chufes a Work of Genius, if he makes himfelf thoroughly acquainted with all its Beauties; and if while his Imagination is warm he pours the fame exalted Spirit into his own Performance.” From this we can safely assume that Geminiani had a grammatically induced lisp, somewhat like the Spanish have, never occurring at the end of a word or at the beginning of a noun, which are, unlike the following word, capitalized. Afide from the lifp, note how many words are fpelled exactly the way do 270 years later. The syntax is cute, but by no means as cute as the 18th century Dutch tranflations I have of Quantz and Leopold Mozart. If you want to see those, my trailer is on the Wanted list in Geauga County. In the Bainbridge precinct, Dick can show you the forest, discretely. On a more serious note, the emotions described are typical for the Baroque style of performing, of which more below. And always, always the comparison with speech.

*** Rest assured, in my present home in south Franklin Ohio, we have no second floor window. By the way, Shimani I made up, some of you may get the pun.

**** Charles Wesley Steuart Pincombe, though I always forget in which order those names go. I am reminded of Paul Erdős, who once met another mathematician at a conference. He asked him where he was from. “I’m from Seattle.” - Oh, my friend Elliott Mendelssohn is from Seattle.” — to which the man replied: “I AM your friend Elliott Mandelssohn.”

***** When I mentioned that I’m just a poor musician, he said: “You’re not a poor musician, you are good musician.” I am also thinking of Wilhelm II, German Emperor, who is responsible for a major part of the millions of casualties and tragedies of WW1, but who, to put some balsam on the wounds he suffered now in hell, I use in my teaching. When he was ill, the doctor reassured him, Your Majesty, it’s just a little cold. - “A GREAT cold, doctor! Everything about me is GREAT.” I am urging most of my students to “be” Wilhelm, as most students use expression too frugally and hesitantly.

****** Only in Charley Chaplin’s time people seemed to do everything much faster, judging from film footage

******* Here I would like to quote Richard Strauss, who in his edition of Berlioz’ Orchestration Treatise mentioned a young composer who defended himself about his use of the tuba: “This rendered me speechless. The man was beyond help.”

******** I call it Puccini singing style because Linda Ronstadt talks about it in her autobiography Simple Dreams. She stresses how different Puccini is sung (by the vowels) compared to other music she was used to singing (which were more consonant-oriented). She helped me form or at least enrich my concepts of historical performance.

********* Dutch and German are two stems of the same language, but never tell that to a Dutchman of my generation. You can use a German word here and there in a conversation with a Nederlander, but just like vibrato in the early 19th century, use it sparingly … Schadenfreude, Ausdauer, Ausputzer … please, less is more!!!! Better if you say these words with an unusually deep and resounding voice, so it’s clear you’re imitating something. Eisenbahnknotenpunkthin-und-herschieber however you can use as often as you can. Reizender-preitzenderschallplattenkreiz!!!! with a high pitched voice, your slightly raised right arm stretched out and two left fingers under your nose is fine too, but make sure there are no Germans in your audience, they will sigh why it’s always that of their truly gorgeous, splendiferous culture and history that’s brought out...

********** On the same occasion he said (and that’s how you can see he’s British, not American): "What’s Australian foreplay? - “Are you awike yet?”

*********** I have trouble with the rule in the Catholic church that when a doctor has to choose between saving the live of the mother or the baby, he apparently has to save the baby; while a Jewish doctor seems to have to save the mom. In 2010, when a doctor in a Catholic hospital used abortion to save the life of the mom, and the hospital supported his decision, the Catholic diocese withdrew its support. Punishing a doctor for saving a life is of the same evil, legalist pharisaic mentality that Jesus so vocally condemned. The Jews have the opposite idea. In a family of mom, dad and 6 kids, the Catholic Church would leave six kids and the husband bereaved, the synagogue would just have the minor tragedy of a still born baby. Anyone like to react?

(the other reasons are that the Roman Catholic Church believes that only through itself can one find full salvation; and the third reason I don’t remember)

P.S. the apostles were Peter and Andrew, John and James, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew, then James the Lesser, Judas (Thaddeus), Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot. After Judas’ suicide, he was reelected by Matthias, or Mátyás in Hungarian, which I can’t write in English phonetics.

P.P.S. “Verkrachte Nicht” is not the Dutch translation of Verklärte Nacht. We have no translation of it. We simply say it in German.

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Below, clockwise, which is not the way you skate a 1500 m., 1. Hugo Becker in his renewed edition of Sebastian Lee’s cello method, clearly showing that Becker had three arms, like an incarnation of Krishna - 2. Aram Khatscheturian, as a cellist perhaps a paraprosdokian - 3. Alexandr Verzhbilovitch and Jozef Hollman, Polish/Russian and Dutch/French cellists of the late 19th century - 4. Guilhermina Suggia’s opulent portrait - by Augustus Edwin John 1920-3 - 5. Simon Rattle, (remember, its clockwise!) - 6. Basque Klika Band. this had some relevance to the article in the early stages, but now serves as pure decoration - they are however my colors - 7. Hans Holbein’s foreshadowing portrait of Steuart Pincombe from the early 16th century, examining: 8. Louis Spohr’s treatment of a concerto by Rode, with the vibrato signs encircled …