The Late Starters Orchestra

by Ari L. Goldman

  “Tea or coffee?” he said when I came for my first lesson. And that became our routine. We would talk at that table over hot drinks for a few minutes and only then would we play cello. Mr. J wanted to know about my life and my ambitions before we even touched the instrument. I told him about those special Saturday morning walks with my dad on the way to synagogue, about how I lost my voice and how, in writing, I found another personal expression. “I don’t even give music much thought anymore,” I told him. “But when you opened your door and I saw you and I saw the cello, I thought this might be a way back for me.”

  Mr. J was warm and reassuring. “The cello,” he said, “will give you back your voice.”

  When I told him about my concern about my age—I was twenty-six at the time—he laughed gently and told me not to worry. “There is something inside you we will have to bring out. But it will take work. Many years of work. I promise you, it will be worth it.”

  Mr. J was a great listener. It was harder for me to get him to open up about his life. He told me only bits and pieces. But over the years, and with the help of his children, I was able to assemble a realistic portrait of the man and his music.

  HEINRICH JOACHIM WAS BORN in Berlin in 1910, the son of a Jewish doctor named Georg and a Catholic seamstress named Bertha. Heinrich was the third of seven children, all of whom played instruments from a very young age. Georg himself played the violin and organized musical evenings at home for his children and friends. Heinrich, who began piano at five, took up cello a year later. According to family lore, one day when he was eleven, Heinrich, dressed in a suit and tie with his hair slicked back with pomade, announced to the family that he was giving all his playthings to his younger brother Gerhard. “From now on I am going to devote myself to the cello,” he said in utmost seriousness. “For me, there is nothing else.” A few years later, his parents sent him off to study with Adolf Steiner, one of the leading cellists of the day, and by the time Heinrich was nineteen, he became the principal cellist of a small chamber orchestra in Berlin that was an arm of the German Ministry of Culture. The year was 1929 and Hitler’s rise to power had begun. By 1933, with Hitler firmly in control as chancellor, all members of the orchestra had to sign a loyalty oath to Hitler and the Nazi Party. Mr. J refused and lost his post.

  Soon afterward, cello in hand, he boarded an ocean liner bound for Guatemala. He had no money and knew he would have to earn a living upon his arrival, so he spent the better part of the two weeks at sea learning Spanish. He was a quick study. By the time he reached Puerto Barrios, the main Guatemalan seaport on the Caribbean, he had serviceable Spanish.

  Mr. J secured a job at the music conservatory in Guatemala City where he taught cello and music theory. He eventually became the head of the conservatory and made a name for himself as a chamber musician and orchestra soloist. In Guatemala, he ran into another German refugee, Ilonka Breitenbach, a singer five years his senior, whom he knew from the musical evenings in his home in Berlin. They married in Guatemala and had two children, Andrew and Dorothea.

  Once again, however, Mr. J became the victim of a government decree. His job at the conservatory was a government post and, after World War II, Guatemala decided to purge foreigners from all government positions. He was without a job, and, by this time, his marriage was deteriorating. He divorced Ilonka and left her and the children behind in Guatemala to move to New York in search of work.

  Before long, he set himself up in New York as a chamber musician and found a position as the principal cellist of the New York City Symphony Orchestra, which played at City Center under the leadership of a young conductor named Leonard Bernstein. The orchestra, which had been founded by Leopold Stokowski, was aimed at a younger classical music audience, offering more modern music and cheaper tickets than the New York Philharmonic. When the orchestra folded in 1948, Bernstein wrote Mr. J a letter of recommendation that said: “His tone is most pleasing, his musicianship sincere and sensitive, and his devotion to music unswerving.”

  Around the same time, Mr. J met a graceful young pianist named Renata Garve, like him a German refugee. They married and set up a house in Westchester County, just north of New York City. Mr. J and his new wife went to Guatemala to pick up Andrew, who was then eight years old. Ilonka and Dorothea moved to Germany to set up a new life there.

  Mr. J and Renata had a son, Bruno, born in 1951 and named for the great German-born conductor Bruno Walter. A year later, the couple made their New York debut as a piano-cello duo at Town Hall. The review in the Times was a rave. “Mr. Joachim’s cello sang with a warm, strong voice, tinted with the dark and rosy luster of the instrument itself,” wrote the Times reviewer Carter Hermon. “The tone had body, but it was smooth and clear even in the lowest register and it was capable of light stage-whispers of attractive feathery quality.”

  At the time, Mr. J was a member of the cello section of the Philharmonic, where he stayed for nine years—under Stokowski, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and finally Bernstein—before leaving to become the principal cellist at the Baltimore Symphony under Peter Herman Adler in 1959. With his family rooted in New York’s Westchester County, Mr. J commuted to Baltimore for concerts. But things were not good at home. To hear Andrew tell it, Renata was not kind to her stepson.

  “Stepmonster,” he told me years later. He recalled being excluded from “family vacations” that involved Renata and Bruno but not him. They went off to Maine as a family while he was sent to summer camp. They went to Europe while he stayed with Renata’s parents, where he remembers being barely tolerated if not ignored.

  When he was ready for high school, Andrew boarded with a family in New York City and used their address to gain admission. He remembers never having enough money for food. His father lived by certain German aphorisms about money like Sparsamkeit erhalt das haus (Frugality keeps the house). There was actually virtue in hunger, his father would say, quoting another German proverb, Hunger ist der beste koch (Hunger is the best cook).

  In 1962, tragedy struck. Renata was diagnosed with cancer and did not respond to treatment. She was forty-two when she died.

  Mr. J, devastated by Renata’s death, quit the Baltimore Symphony because he was needed at home to take care of Bruno, who was twelve. Andrew was already on his own, although he told me he was on his own emotionally years earlier.

  Mr. J stopped concertizing and found work as a “section player” in various local orchestras and teaching music at the Manhattan School of Music and other conservatories. By the time I met him in 1976, he had married and divorced again (his third wife, Ursula Hirsch, was a former student of his) and was the father of a ten-year-old daughter, his fourth child, Angie.

  “My father was a wonderful human being,” Andrew said. “He was very sensitive, altruistic, and insightful. However, he was a terrible father, and had very few social skills, owing to his having devoted himself so exclusively to the cello at such a young age.”

  Andrew told me several cringe-worthy stories about his father. Unlike other fathers who wore fedoras in the 1960s, Mr. J wore a beret. Though he didn’t like neckties, he wore them because it was the convention of the day, but they inevitably clashed with the colorful sport shirts he wore. His children hated to go shopping with him. “He would go into a discount store and inquire if the merchandise he was buying was of top quality,” Andrew recalled. Then he would ask if he could get a further discount because he was a musician. When he would finally make a purchase, he complained about the plastic bag the merchandise was put in. “He would request a more colorful bag because, he said, it looked more ‘gay,’ ” meaning festive. On top of it all, he spoke with a heavy German accent.

  “To say the least, we were extremely embarrassed and annoyed,” Andrew told me. “Heinrich was a uniquely strange man. Yes, he was a terrible father, but so out of touch that one could hardly hold that against him.”

  A TERRIBLE FATHER, PERHAPS; but a superb teacher. He made the cello come alive for me. More than anyone I’ve met, Mr. J
saw the cello in human terms.

  He’d take the cello and slowly run his hands down it from top to bottom. Here, at the top, is the head. It even has ears, these pegs that you tweak when it sings out of tune. The head is connected to the long slender neck, which ends in the sloping shoulders. It has a back and, when I turn it over, a belly, both of them slightly arched. Overall, it has the feel of a rather womanly body, with a slim waist in between the curves. And, finally, it stands on a single leg, which we call the end pin.

  Sometimes when I arrived at his studio for a lesson, he’d be playing his viola da gamba and he’d say sheepishly, The cello is my wife, but the gamba is my mistress!

  When I first took hold of the cello, he told me not simply to hold it but to fully embrace it like you would hug a beautiful woman. I put my arms around the neck and my legs around the body of the instrument. Now play, he said, instructing me to run the bow over the strings. Don’t just listen to the sound. Feel the sound. Feel the vibrations, not only in your hands but up your thighs and on your chest. Feel the sound.

  The cello is something of an enigma, he taught me. It has the body of a woman, with an ample curved bottom, a narrow waist, and a full curved top. And the cello has what musicians call f-holes —orifices shaped like two bold italic fs—which some musicians liken to the mouth, ears, and eyes of a woman. And, yet, for all these feminine attributes, the cello has a man’s voice. Its tonal range most approximates that of a man, sounding at times like the bass singer in a barbershop quartet and at other times like the quartet’s male alto.

  But then it has something that is both male and female. It has a soul.

  For Mr. J, the soul of the cello was the sound post, that small dowel of wood that sits inside the cello and transfers the sound from the top panel of the instrument to the back panel and beyond. You can’t see it, but believe me, it is there, inside, set right under the bridge of the cello. If the sound post falls, your cello sounds weak, hollow, and thin, but with the sound post in place, it has not just sound but soul.

  Mr. J’s anthropomorphic notions had a great impact on me. Playing the cello was not simply a mechanical act but an engagement with another body and another soul. It meant commitment, respect, loyalty, devotion, even love.

  The first order of business was to buy an instrument of my own. Adult full-sized cellos are expensive, with a starting price of a thousand dollars for anything decent. From there the sky’s the limit, and some Stradivaris and Guarneris are worth millions of dollars. Adults who take up the cello are advised to rent first. All too often, adults fall out of love with the instrument or simply feel it is too hard to master. (The parents of children are also advised to rent, not only because the child might stop playing, but because youth cellos come in different sizes and as soon as you buy a quarter- or half-size cello for your child, he or she may outgrow it.)

  But I didn’t want to rent. After meeting Mr. J, I knew that I was in this for life. “I’m ready to buy,” I told Mr. J after our first lesson. He offered to go shopping with me but stopped and then thought a moment and added: “I might just have something at home that will work for you. It doesn’t look like much but it has a sweet sound.”

  When I returned the next week, Mr. J took out a cello that was dark red in color. “This is ‘Bill,’ named for my friend Bill Robson, who gave it to me as a gift. Don’t be alarmed by all the nicks and cracks—or by the bullet hole in the front. I’m not sure how that got there, but it was nicely mended.”

  I wondered who was shooting at Bill. The bullet hole, patched with a peg of wood, was right over where Bill’s heart might have been. “Bill” was a student cello, one built in the 1920s in France. Mr. J said he would sell it to me for five hundred dollars.

  I was about to agree, but then he stopped me and said, “You must hear it first.” Of course, I thought. I was like the first-time car buyer who was ready to buy the car on the lot and without a test-drive, always a big mistake. Mr. J tuned the instrument and played each of the strings with the bow, the series simply called open strings. “A, D, G, C,” the notes rang out. In his hands, this student cello had a warm and generous sound. When I took it in my hands, it didn’t sound nearly as good. It sounded scratchy and uneven.

  You need a ninety-degree angle. That’s ninety degrees where the bow meets the string and you must maintain it as you move the bow down and as you move the bow up. I wasn’t getting it and Mr. J, ever patient, corrected me again and again and again. He finally had me stand up and move my chair in front of the full-length mirror he kept in his studio. Now watch your bow. Watch your bow. Keep watching it until the ninety-degree angle becomes second nature. Little did I know that this would take years and years of practice. It would be years, in fact, before I could even approximate the sound Mr. J got out of that cello, even on open strings. In making music, the cello counts, Mr. J explained, but the cellist counts even more.

  Mr. J and I discussed sound quality, what musicians call timbre. The particular sound of a particular instrument is its timbre, also known as tone color. It is what makes one musical sound different from another even when they have the same pitch and volume. For example, an A played on a cello will sound different from an A played on a gamba and an A played on a piano.

  Mr. J demonstrated by playing all three A’s on the instruments that surrounded him in his studio. The piano A, the cello A, the gamba A, they are all the same note but they have a different timbre. And even an A on your cello sounds different than an A on mine. Again, he paused and demonstrated.

  It’s like men and women talking. You can tell which is the man and which is the woman. That is because of timbre. But more than that. Just like you can tell one man from another and one woman from another, you can tell one cello from another and one cellist from another. Timbre makes the difference.

  LOVE AND MARRIAGE

  I took weekly lessons with Mr. J for seven years, and with each lesson I found more of my rhythm, melody, harmony, and timbre.

  At the same time, I was advancing in my reporting career, moving from a suburban reporter to a city reporter specializing in education, politics, transportation, and eventually religion. I would often have to cancel lessons because of deadlines and travel, but Mr. J was understanding. He knew my job came first. If anything, I was the one who felt bereft when I didn’t have a lesson. I needed some harmony in my life.

  In those special moments before each formal lesson began, I told Mr. J about my new beats and my growing body of articles. He wasn’t a regular Times reader and he asked me to bring my articles to our lessons so he could see what I was up to. I would clip them out and show them off like so many baby pictures. I took pride in my work but I wanted more. I was quickly moving through my early thirties and I wanted my own family—with real baby pictures.

  One week I told Mr. J that I was dating a girl and thinking of marriage. “I must meet her,” he said. Shira had not yet met my father, although I had introduced her to my mother. I wasn’t keeping Shira from my dad; it was just that he never asked. Mr. J asked. I brought Shira to the next lesson and he, like me, was smitten. Shira, eleven years my junior, is gorgeous with an equally high-wattage personality. Was then; is now. But what captivated me most, from the start, was her voice.

  I am a sucker for a beautiful voice. My mother, Judith, couldn’t sing but, oh, could she talk. There was energy, melody, rhythm, harmony, grace, and a range of expression—from surprise to joy to concern to sadness—that no instrument could duplicate. My mother, born in Brooklyn, was the eldest of four girls in her family. She had an older brother, but no one held a candle to her oratorical abilities. She was articulate and commanding. She trained to be a teacher at Brooklyn College and then got an advanced degree in library science from Columbia. She devoured books like a hungry man devours food. She read everything and seemed to remember everything, not just the stories, but the words and expressions used to tell the stories. And she made these words and stories her own. Her voice was the sound track of my childho
od.

  I first heard Shira’s voice on the phone. She, a rabbi’s daughter, was just out of college and was calling, on the recommendation of a “mutual friend,” with questions about a career in journalism. In observant Jewish circles, I was the go-to person to talk about journalism. But I barely listened to Shira’s questions. I was taken by the voice. With some callers, a few minutes on the phone would suffice, but Shira left me hankering for more. I always suspected that our “mutual friend” knew I would fall in love. Shira and I met a short while later for breakfast and, within a few months, we were engaged.

  “Beautiful voice,” Mr. J said approvingly.

  Shira and I married in 1983, in the backyard of the Westport, Connecticut, home that my mother shared with her second husband. Mr. J came and brought along his cello. As Shira and I stood under the marital canopy, he played “Air on the G String” by Bach and “The Swan” by Saint-Saëns.

  Our first child, Adam, came within our first year of marriage. To honor Mr. J, we gave Adam the middle name of Joachim. I felt closer than ever to Mr. J and even kept up sessions with him until Adam was about a year old, but I soon found that the demands of job and family were overwhelming; I simply had no time for music lessons, let alone practicing. It was a wrenching decision, but I stopped my regular lessons and put the cello away. I was thirty-five years old and the time had come to concentrate on other things. But I stayed in touch with Mr. J—after all, he had become something of a father to me—and I always knew I would return to music one day. My cello was in a closet but it was not forgotten, just waiting for the right moment.

  Four years later Shira and I had a daughter and named her Emma. We had no relative or music teacher named Emma, but I always had wanted to be related to the great anarchist-feminist Emma Goldman and, now, finally, I was. When Emma was turning five years old, I gave up my reporting job at the New York Times and took a faculty position at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. And then, fresh in my new life as a professor, we had a third child, Judah, named for my mother, who had died just a few weeks before his birth.