(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DANIEL ESTRIN, HOST:
(Reading) What better instrument than a cello - half thunder, half prayer - to listen to the world. But what if that instrument falls silent?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ESTRIN: That is from the opening line of "Cello," a new book from writer, BBC broadcaster and cellist Kate Kennedy. She crisscrossed Europe with her cello on a mission to tell the remarkable stories of four celists and some lost instruments. "Cello" is part detective story, part memoir and really resonates with me because I also play the cello. Kate Kennedy, thanks so much for being here.
KATE KENNEDY: Thank you for having me. It's a great pleasure to be here.
ESTRIN: How do you tie the four cellists together in your book? What ties them together?
KENNEDY: Well, I didn't really know what would tie them together until I got to the end of the book. It was a genuine detective story for me. But I found increasingly that it was things like absence and resilience and silence. All of them adored their instrument in the way that I do, so that probably was the common denominator.
ESTRIN: I mean, that is a deep bond that I know very well. I think if my apartment were on fire and I had to save one thing, it would be my cello. I think about that a lot. How do you think about the relationship between a musician and her cello?
KENNEDY: Well, that was what I wanted to know because I was a very, very serious cellist, very young. When I was about 17 or 18, something happened to my arm, and it was permanently injured from overpractice. And so my relationship to my cello is hugely intense, hugely complicated, and it's one that I've never really fully understood. So I thought, as a biographer, I'm going to put my biographer's hat on my cello identity if that's even an image. And see if I could actually puzzle out what this relationship is by looking at other people's relationships and talking to so many other cellists about what does this instrument mean to us that's like our own body, you know? It's the size of a human torso. It's the thing that we are closest to for most of our lives.
ESTRIN: One of the cellists you write about is a woman who was the first female professional cello soloist. Tell us about her.
KENNEDY: Sure. She was called Lise Cristiani, and she was pretty extraordinary. She was from Paris in about the 1840s. And it's a huge gender issue. You read through all the reviews, and all the male reviewers from right across Europe are obsessing about whether this is a grotesque spectacle or something very beautiful. Is she St. Cecilia, or is she kind of more of a prostitute with this cello between her legs? You know, it's this scandalous stuff. But she was a sensation. And she conquered Europe very quickly and then went to Russia and did this extraordinary kind of exploration of Russia with this Stradivari from St. Petersburg, right across Siberia, right to the very furthest edges where Russia meets China. She had a cello wrapped in wolf fur on a sled. She dropped it into bogs. She was - zoomed along with Cossacks on horseback through incredibly difficult circumstances.
ESTRIN: And there are no recordings of her playing. But there is something that lasts till today, right?
KENNEDY: Yeah. One of her concerts, I think in Leipzig, Felix Mendelssohn came to and heard her play and, I think, kind of fell in love with the sound of her cello. I don't know whether he fell in love with her, but certainly, something about the way she played really took his fancy. And he wrote a very beautiful, very famous song without words for her specifically.
(SOUNDBITE OF YO-YO MA PERFORMANCE OF MENDELSSOHN'S "SONGS WITHOUT WORDS")
KENNEDY: When she had to, I think, quite consciously decide what a woman cellist sounded like - which was to play quite high, nothing too ferocious, nothing too gutsy, lots of harmonics, lots of lovely, wafty, lyrical, song-like sounds - that's what Mendelssohn writes for her. So it is like a little time capsule.
(SOUNDBITE OF YO-YO MA PERFORMANCE OF MENDELSSOHN'S "SONGS WITHOUT WORDS")
ESTRIN: You write also about another cellist, Pal Hermann.
KENNEDY: Yeah.
ESTRIN: A remarkable story - he was a Hungarian cellist. Tell us a little bit about him.
KENNEDY: So he was an astonishingly brilliant player, fantastic technique. He was also a great composer. He was making a huge name for himself in Europe. He lived in Berlin, but he was Jewish, and obviously, 1930's Berlin is not the place to be if you're a Jewish musician. So he was hounded out of Berlin, went into hiding and then was caught in Toulouse, rounded up by the Gestapo, managed to get a little note out of the train window as he was taken off to a concentration camp to get to relatives to tell them that his cello had been left behind in a sealed flat with a Nazi guard. And that's the last we ever hear of poor Pal Hermann.
ESTRIN: And you are crisscrossing Europe with your own cello on the hunt, following this breadcrumb trail of clues that he left behind, trying to solve the mystery about his fate. You ended up in Lithuania in what was likely his prison cell before he was killed.
KENNEDY: Yeah. Pal was taken to a camp on the edge of Paris and then on probably to Lithuania, to a dreadful place called the Fort of Death.
ESTRIN: You brought your cello into that prison cell.
KENNEDY: Yeah.
ESTRIN: What did you play?
(SOUNDBITE OF KATE KENNEDY PERFORMANCE OF BACH'S "CELLO SUITE NO. 2")
KENNEDY: I played Bach. I played the second suite, which is so mournful and so lonely and so beautiful.
(SOUNDBITE OF KATE KENNEDY PERFORMANCE OF BACH'S "CELLO SUITE NO. 2")
KENNEDY: It was the most extraordinarily powerful experience. I've never heard a cello sound so mournful. These walls are about, you know, a meter and a half thick. It's a proper fortress, as well as the fact that all around me was the graffiti of the 800 Frenchmen who'd been held there.
(SOUNDBITE OF KATE KENNEDY PERFORMANCE OF BACH'S "CELLO SUITE NO. 2")
ESTRIN: As you said, he wrote a lot. He wrote a lot of musical compositions. Much of what Pal Hermann wrote was lost during the war, throughout the ages. But some has survived, including his cello concerto, which was only recently discovered.
KENNEDY: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It was in his daughter Corrie's house, just in a bundle of papers in a drawer somewhere. Yeah, she doesn't play the cello. There was no interest in his music because he's - he was forgotten. His story was forgotten. But she found this manuscript, and her son, who's a great advocate for his grandfather, managed to get it sort published and get it available on the Internet.
ESTRIN: You sent me the notes of that opening cello concerto.
KENNEDY: Yeah.
ESTRIN: I even sent it to my cello teacher back in college, and he had never heard of it. But he...
KENNEDY: No. No one has. No.
ESTRIN: ...Very, kindly sent me some bowings and advice on how to play it. And I have my cello out here.
KENNEDY: Yay. Fantastic. You're going to give it a go? It's not easy. I'll give you that disclaimer.
ESTRIN: I know. I've been practicing it feverishly, but here goes nothing.
(Playing cello).
KENNEDY: Well done.
ESTRIN: Thank you. Thank you.
KENNEDY: It's hard to play. He was a fiendish technician, so all his cello repertoire is pretty hairy but very rewarding.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLIVE GREENSMITH AND LVIV INTERATIONAL ORCHESTRA PERFORMANCE OF HERMANN'S "CELLO CONCERTO: 1. ALLEGRO CANTABILE")
ESTRIN: I love how it's optimistic. It feels forward-looking, uplifting. It feels modern.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLIVE GREENSMITH AND LVIV INTERATIONAL ORCHESTRA PERFORMANCE OF HERMANN'S "CELLO CONCERTO: 1. ALLEGRO CANTABILE")
KENNEDY: Yeah, he was in his 20s when he wrote this. He was basically a student. And it's full of optimism. It's full of life because so was he. He was huge fun. This amazing violinist he used to play with called Zoltan Szekely, who was hugely famous through the 20th century, described him as vlot (ph). And I spent ages trying to interpret what vlot means. It's a Hungarian word, I think, for kind of light and easy and fun and chilled out. But he was up for a party. He was that kind of a guy. He was great.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARKO KOMONKO AND DENYS LYTVYNENKO PERFORMANCE OF HERMANN'S "DUO NO. 2 FOR VIOLIN AND CELLO: III. ALLEGRO GIOCOSO")
KENNEDY: I want to remember him with that vlot, that energy, that lightness, because that was who he was.
ESTRIN: Kate Kennedy, author of "Cello: A Journey Through Silence To Sound." Thank you so much. This has been so fun.
KENNEDY: Thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF MARKO KOMONKO AND DENYS LYTVYNENKO PERFORMANCE OF HERMANN'S "DUO NO. 2 FOR VIOLIN AND CELLO: III. ALLEGRO GIOCOSO") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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