The Late Starters Orchestra

by Ari L. Goldman

There was much to do and so much to say, both in my private life and in my professional life. There were classes to teach, parties and dinners to attend, books to read, movies and museum exhibitions to see, and a rich religious life to explore.

  But all I wanted to do was play the cello, formally called the violoncello, an instrument that was beginning to take its modern shape in Gutenberg’s time.

  THE CELLO

  The music that Tevye heard—or thought he heard—came from a fiddle, which is pretty much just another name for the violin. What’s the difference between a violin and a fiddle? One Irish folk musician I know put it this way: “A fiddle is a violin with an attitude.” Fiddling refers more to the style of music than the instrument itself. It is used for jigs and reels, while the violin is used for symphonies, concertos, and sonatas. People sit when they listen to a violin; they dance when they hear a fiddle. And just as you can fiddle on a violin, you can fiddle on a cello. Yo-Yo Ma, probably the most famous classical cellist of our time and known for his mastery of the classical music repertoire, has gone the fiddling route more than a few times to record with folk, jazz, and Celtic musicians.

  What’s the difference between a violin and a cello? Here, it’s more than simply attitude. The cello is easily three times the size of the violin. Given its bigger body and thicker strings, the cello produces a much lower sound. It is held vertically, between the legs, rather than horizontally under the chin like a violin.

  In musical history, the violin came first. It dates back to the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and its sound reflects the fashion of the day. Ideal sound of the early middle ages was high-pitched, whiny, and nasal, not unlike traditional Asian and Indian music. The violin was designed with the female musical voice in mind.

  But around 1450, composers sought a lower range, not so much to be played by a solo instrument, but as a lower-register—or bass—accompaniment to the high-pitched voice and violin. Bass parts began to appear with some regularity in musical notation. The cello as we know it—bigger, fuller, more robust in sound than the violin—began to take shape. The viola da braccio, as a smaller and earlier version of the cello was called, was cradled under the chin, but it was soon moved down to the ground and held between the legs. These early cellos rested on the ground when played, or they were clasped between the player’s calves or were supported by a string roped around the player’s neck. It was much later, in the eighteen hundreds, when a peg or “end pin” was added to lift the instrument a foot or so off the floor.

  The first known cello maker was Andrea Amati (1520–1578) of Cremona, Italy, a luthier who made elaborately decorated cellos for the court of the French king, Charles IX. Amati’s was a family business and he passed his skills on to his sons, Antonio and Girolamo. The greatest of the Amatis was Andrea’s grandson, Nicolò, who practiced and taught the luthier art to many, including Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737) and Andrea Guarneri (1626–1698).

  Both Stradivari and Guarneri went on to found their own workshops in Italy, where, working with their children and other trained craftsmen, they continued to perfect the art of violin and cello making. If some of the most famous violins that survive today bear the name Stradivarius, some of the most renowned cellos are Guarneris. Mr. J bought his Guarneri, which was made in 1669, for ten thousand dollars when he first came to New York from Guatemala in 1946. Pretty expensive back then, but nothing like it would cost later when the price of antique classical instruments skyrocketed. Smooth, satiny, and delicate in tone, Mr. J recalled, lovingly. But it proved to be more suited for chamber music than the concert stage. As Mr. J’s career advanced, and he was being invited to play with major orchestras, he needed a cello that was a stronger solo instrument. Around 1970, he sold the Guarneri to David Soyer, the founding cellist of the Guarneri String Quartet, for thirty thousand dollars. Mr. J bought a cello made by another luthier, Domenico Montagnana, who made cellos in Italy in the early seventeen hundreds. It was a mighty and robust instrument that had a big sound suited for the great concert halls. But it was not particularly suited for Mr. J. He came to regard it as too big. He eventually sold it and sought to buy back the Guareneri, but by then it was well out of his price range. Mr. J’s son Andrew told me that Soyer wanted three hundred thousand dollars for it just a few years later.

  According to Margaret Campbell’s sweeping history of the instrument, The Great Cellists, cellos reached a state of perfection during this Italian period. Owing to the choice of woods and the shape, master craftsmen like Stradivari and Guarneri created instruments that amplified the vibration of the strings without favoring some notes at the expense of others. Aside from the introduction of the end pin—added by a particularly corpulent cellist, Adrien François Servais of Belgium (1807–1866), who had trouble managing the instrument between his legs—little else about the cello has changed in the past two hundred years.

  For all its tonal and physical beauty, Campbell writes, the cello was for a very long time relegated to a sub­sidiary role in public performance. Cellists were invited into chapels and theaters to accompany singers; only occasionally were they invited to play short preludes or incidental music. According to one church instruction given them in the sixteen hundreds, they were to be “modest therein,” using ornamentation only “at the proper time and with taste.” Among the first to write music for cello was the Italian Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi of Venice (1678–1741), who is probably most famous for his work The Four Seasons, still a concert staple of the string orchestra. While he composed hundreds of works for the violin, he also wrote twenty-seven pieces that highlighted the beauty of the cello. He wrote these in particular for the young ladies of the Ospedale della Pietà, the convent, orphanage, and music school where Vivaldi, a Catholic priest, taught. The Pietà would periodically opens its doors for public concerts throughout the seventeenth century. The young women would sing Vivaldi’s music and some would play cello and other instruments.

  The first cello celebrity was a contemporary of Vivaldi, Francesco Alborea of Naples (1691–1739), the Yo-Yo Ma of his day. He was so closely associated with the instrument that he became known throughout Europe as “Franciscello.” He toured Europe, drawing audiences never before imagined for an instrument that had so long been relegated to secondary, “accompaniment” status.

  The person who combined both the virtuosity of Franciscello and the great composing gifts of Vivaldi was Luigi Boccherini (1743–1805). Born in Lucca, Italy, Boccherini picked up where they left off. Boccherini started playing cello at five and made his first concert appearance at thirteen. At seventeen, he completed a set of six trios for two violins and cello that became his opus 1, the first of hundreds. His most enduring work in the modern repertoire is his Cello Concerto no. 9.

  Boccherini quite literally pushed the cello to new musical heights, Mr. J told me. He demonstrated by showing me “thumb position” on his cello. He shifted his left hand from behind the neck of the cello to higher registers of the fingerboard, pressed down firmly on the strings, and then proceeded to explore the full soprano range of the cello that Boccherini opened up. I’m playing the cello, Mr. J said, but you are hearing the violin.

  Although Boccherini produced some of the most gorgeous music for the cello, he remains one of the instrument’s tragic figures. He was recognized as a prodigy and was celebrated in the courts of Europe, picking up patrons and commissions as he went. In 1771, at the age of twenty-eight, he married Clementina Pelicho, who bore him five children but who died of a stroke a few years later. Then his patron, Infante Don Luis, died. But his troubles weren’t over. Next, his publisher, in whom he had entrusted all his compositions, stole all his royalties and commissions. When Boccherini’s two daughters died within a few days of each other from an epidemic in 1802, his biographer said that he seemed to lose all will to live. He died despondent and impoverished in 1805 at the age of sixty-two.

  The next great pivotal figure in the history of the cello, Pablo Casals (1876–1973),
lived a happier and much longer life. If Boccherini expanded the instrument’s possibilities with the orchestra, Casals elevated it as never before as a solo instrument.

  Casals was born in the Catalonia region of Spain, the son of the local church organist and his wife, a former music student of the organist who had emigrated from Puerto Rico. As a boy, Casals exhibited considerable musical talent—he sang in the church choir at five—but his father, Carlos, feared that Pablo would never make a living as a musician. He made plans to apprentice him to a carpenter. However, the boy’s mother, Pilar, insisted that he study music. “She was convinced that I had a special gift and that everything should be done to nourish it,” Casals wrote in his autobiography Joys and Sorrows. Although he played piano, flute, and violin at a very early age, he never even saw a cello until a group of traveling musicians came to his village. One of them played the cello. In his book, Casals recalls rushing home and breathlessly telling his father about the strange instrument. His father made him a cello out of a hollowed-out gourd strung with a single string. “On that homemade contrivance I learned to play many of the songs my father wrote, as well as popular melodies that reached our village from the outer world,” Casals wrote.

  When he was eleven, his mother took him by train to Barcelona to enroll him in the municipal music school. His parents visited him regularly and one memorable time, when Pablo was thirteen, they stopped at an old music shop near the harbor and browsed through the sheet music. “Suddenly,” Casals wrote, “I came upon a sheaf of pages, crumbled and discolored with age. They were the unaccompanied suites by Johann Sebastian Bach—for cello only!”

  The Bach suites were a little-known collection considered to be musical exercises for students and seen as unfit to play in public. But not for Casals. For the rest of his life, Casals devoted himself to these Bach suites and, through his public performances and recordings, eventually assured them the same stature as Bach’s famous work for piano, The Well-Tempered Clavier. In 1904, Casals was invited to play for President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, and he was invited back in 1961 to play for President John F. Kennedy.

  Casals was known also as a conductor and as early as 1919, he organized an orchestra in Barcelona, but with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he left Spain. He was an ardent supporter of the Spanish Republican government, and, after its defeat by the forces loyal to Francisco Franco, Casals vowed not to return to Spain until democracy was restored. He lived out the rest of his life in exile, first in France and later in Puerto Rico, the birthplace of his mother. He died there in 1973 at the age of ninety-six. Several years later, after the end of the Franco regime, Casals was honored by the Spanish government under King Juan Carlos. His remains were reinterred in his native Catalonia.

  I was inspired by stories of the great cellists of the past and I began to consume their biographies and listen to their music. Vivaldi, Franciscello, Boccherini, and Casals were only the beginning. I explored the lives of Jacqueline du Pré, the gifted cellist struck down at the height of her career by multiple sclerosis; the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, whose Soviet citizenship was revoked in the 1970s because of his campaign for human rights; and Vedran Smailovic, who became known as “the cellist of Sarajevo” for playing his cello in the center of the city as the Bosnian War raged around him. And there was no escaping the music and life story of the versatile Yo-Yo Ma.

  Study the greats and you can become great, Mr. J said.

  But the more I followed his advice and explored these great cellists, the more I was curious about Mr. J himself. As I approached sixty, I believed he still had many lessons to teach me. And, judging by how often I heard his voice, so did he.

  THE CELLO, WHICH GREW in status and thrived as an instrument in the twentieth century, seemed to be in danger of losing its resonance in the twenty-first. Or so I feared. In an era in which computers, laptops, and smartphones rule, an instrument like the cello is the ultimate throwback. It has no wires and it has no memory. It is just a lot of wood and four strings made of metal and catgut and a bow made of wood and horsehair. In the right hands, though, it has a rich, sad, and soulful sound like nothing else in God’s creation. In his book Cello Story, the cellist Dimitry Markevitch writes that the cello “allow[s] one to express the most profound feelings, to convey emotions that stir the soul, and yet to give a sensation of total peace.”

  I wanted to play like that.

  And to do so I had to come up with a strategy. This wasn’t going to happen without a lifestyle change. After I joined LSO, I resolved to spend all my free time practicing. That meant ignoring my neighbor András. It also meant no more going to the gym or walking in the park. “I don’t care if I get fat,” I told myself, “I must learn how to play.” People tell me that I give a slim appearance—when I have my clothes on. But when I am home alone and stepping out of the shower, I can see the effects of the years of sitting at a typewriter and then a computer keyboard. I have little muscle tone on my upper body and my center of gravity has shifted to my stomach.

  But I had to rethink my priorities. At this stage in my life, I realized that building my musical brain was more important than building my pecs or flattening my abs. The time I would spend at the gym, I decided, I would spend instead with the cello.

  The second step was even more radical. I have eclectic tastes in music and have a collection on my iPod that ranges from folk to rock to jazz to classical to what has become known as “world music.” The sounds include Latin, African, Caribbean, Egyptian, French, Israeli, and Hasidic music. Sometimes I just put my iPod on shuffle and am surprised by what comes up: Dylan, Edith Piaf, 10,000 Maniacs, Yo-Yo Ma, Joan Baez, Shlomo Carlebach, Dave Brubeck, Vivaldi, Alison Krauss, even an aria from Mozart’s Don Giovanni or Puccini’s Tosca. But if I wanted to be a cellist, I reasoned, I had to focus on cello music. I went out and bought all the Casals, Rostropovich, du Pré, and Ma I could find. Then I erased everything else. I highlighted so much of my beloved music and pressed “delete,” “delete,” “delete” again and again. It was downright painful. But I had a purpose. I dedicated myself to listening to the great cellists in a new way, trying to understand what it was about their playing that set them apart and made them great. I wanted to train my ear to know greatness. I wanted to absorb whatever lessons they had to offer.

  My third step was to devote my Sunday afternoons to LSO. There is only so much time you can spend in your teacher’s music studio or in your living room practicing scales. Even Mr. J, who upheld the discipline of regular practice as the highest value, knew it had its limitations. Music is not a solitary pursuit. You need melody—and you need harmony. And, ultimately, you need an audience.

  Finding LSO had been a stroke of good luck. New York is not the kind of town that has too many orchestras for a perpetual novice. It is a city of perfectionists, at least when it comes to music. New York is where the greats come to play—the most accomplished orchestras, the most talented soloists play here—and, if they rate, the press heralds their “New York debut.” It is not a place for mediocrity. To be sure, there are a few community orchestras, but they tend to be for the elite amateurs who may have dropped out of conservatory to go to medical school or work on Wall Street. Such places would have no interest in the likes of me.

  But LSO did. The Late Starters Orchestra is a spinoff of a movement that started in Europe in the 1980s with the East London Late Starters and continued with the movement’s bastard child, the Really Terrible Orchestra of Edinburgh, two organizations committed to the notion that everyone should have a place to make music.

  Listening to cello music, playing with LSO once a week, studying with Noah, and rehearsing by myself each night was a good start, but it still did not suffice. As my birthday approached, I decided to spend one week at an adult music camp in Maine, near the Canadian border, and another week at a summer music retreat in the north of England run by our sister orchestra, the East London Late Starters.

  I did not c
hange overnight, of course. I learned that there are no overnight sensations, especially when you are my age. But I noticed one important thing as my birthday approached: I was getting better, not by leaps and bounds, but by small, almost imperceptible steps. No one else noticed, it seemed; not my wife, not my older children, not András, but I could see the difference. I had greater command of the bow, I was hitting the right notes on the fingerboard, my timing improved, my vibrato resonated. I was now something more than just musical. I was becoming a musician.

  PART TWO

  Overtures

  There are two things that don’t have to mean anything; one is music, the other is laughter.

  —IMMANUEL KANT

  If the people in my immediate circle were skeptical, I found encouragement from the words and examples of other late starters. Eve, with whom I sat that first day in the Late Starters Orchestra, stood five feet, one inch tall and wore her hair in a pageboy cut that shook and flopped around like a white mop when she played. Cello was not her first instrument; in fact she did not pick it up until she was in her late sixties.

  Eve grew up in Philadelphia. There was a piano in the house, but that was the instrument of her older brother, so, wanting to be different, she took up the flute and played through high school and college. She also sang in choruses and spent two summers of her youth singing at the summer music festival in Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

  Eve didn’t marry until she was thirty (she was a “late starter” to marriage, too, she joked, especially back in the 1960s). In fact, she and her husband met in an amateur orchestra. She played flute, he the trombone. But music took a backseat in her life as she raised three children and worked as a proofreader and secretary for organizations that she believed in, like the ACLU. Later, she worked in her husband’s photo print shop.