Cellos are different (I don’t say odd). And cellists are different (again, I don’t say odd), too. The cello’s size and shape – so awkward on public transport, so responsive in the performer’s full-body embrace – seems to have a disinhibiting effect on its players: enabling at one extreme the courage and charisma of du Pré or Casals, at the other a sort of instrument-fetishism (an obsession with chairs and Popper études) that can verge on the irrational. Years ago in Oxford I convinced myself that it was sensible to ride a bicycle with my cello case dangling from the handlebars. A collision with a car put paid to that; but while the driver rushed to my aid, my first thought, lying on the tarmac, was for the cello.

Worse things happen to cellos in Kate Kennedy’s new book: far worse things. They’re smashed to pieces and lost at sea, gouged by Napoleon’s spurs and hauled across Siberia in caskets of lead and wolf fur. One is converted into a beehive. These instruments have personalities, possibly even souls. The aristocrats of the cello world – the Stradivaris and Gaglianos – have names and pedigrees. Mere ‘mongrels’ and student instruments are disdained or discarded. But they all have a story to tell, intimately linked to the humans through whose lives they’ve passed, and Kennedy suggests more than once that cellos absorb the personalities of their players. They soak up sweat, blood and spilled wine, and their wood attunes itself to a particular set of vibrations.

Cello is an unusual thing: a book on a musical subject that has no great interest in music for its own sake. Don’t expect many insights into the cello repertoire or its interpretation. Cello is about the nature and personality of an instrument, its lore, and above all, the player’s relationship to the object that many come to regard as an extension of their own being. Kennedy is herself a cellist, deprived by tendinitis of a career and (as she’d hoped) a lifelong relationship with her beloved cello. ‘What was I if I wasn’t a cellist?’ she asked herself. ‘Just looking at the music for the Elgar made me want to cry.’

Cello is partly a reckoning with the cello’s role in Kennedy’s own life, but it’s also a biography of four players and their instruments. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is probably the best known, and you might wonder what more can be said after her own memoir, Inherit the Truth. But Kennedy prods her, tactfully, before concluding that any attempt to trace her instrument (a Ventapane, stolen by the Nazis who sent her to Auschwitz) would be worse than futile. ‘Her cello belonged to a life that had ended: brutally and with finality. My desire to round off her story with a manufactured happy ending held no appeal for her.’

If you’ve read the news, however, you’ll know that Kennedy’s mission to rediscover the Gagliano that belonged to the Hungarian cellist (and composer – an appendix contains useful listening suggestions) Pál Hermann has been successful. More, indeed, is known about the history of the instrument than about Hermann’s own fate, though in some of the book’s most powerful pages Kennedy follows him as far as she can: an encounter with absolute evil in a Lithuanian death camp.

Kennedy can’t visit the grave (if it even exists) of the 19th-century French cellist Lise Cristiani, who took her Strad on tour across the Russian Empire, and whose playing on board a ship in the Sea of Okhotsk summoned whales (in Cristiani’s opinion, the cetaceans were ‘top-notch dilettanti’). But she sees and hears the ‘Mara’ Stradivarius, which was reduced to matchwood after its player Amadeo Baldovino was shipwrecked in the River Plate. Painstakingly reconstructed, it’s played today by Christian Poltéra, for whom it has a ‘sound made of sunshine’, though Kennedy hedges around the question of whether an instrument that has suffered such damage can still possess its former personality.

Throughout, Kennedy’s explorations are rigorously sourced and meticulously researched. Group biographies and personal quest narratives are very fashionable at present, but juggling the subjective and the scholarly is a difficult feat to pull off. The travelogue sections will not be to all tastes; and an early side-swerve into gender theory, now more or less compulsory for professional academics (Kennedy is director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing), feels forced. Has any heterosexual male ever seen ‘sheer sex’ in Augustus John’s high-camp portrait of Guilhermina Suggia?

For the most part, though, Kennedy handles her interweaving strands with virtuoso flair, and the closing sections of the book (like the Dvořák Concerto, it has several endings) go straight to the heart. As with any good cello, the occasional wolf-note is a price well worth paying, and it’s hard to think of another book about a specific instrument that goes quite as deep as this – or, indeed, any other instrument that could have inspired one. For all the wonder, sorrow and wisdom in this volume, when it comes to the cello Kennedy is a romantic. Naturally: she’s a cellist. 

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Gramophone. Never miss an issue – subscribe today