The 19th-century’s cello archetype: Stradivari’s ‘Duport’ cello (1711) as illustrated in the Hill brothers’ book (1901)
It’s not uncommon for musicians to speak of ‘loving’ their instruments. Not just tools is my ‘umbrella’ for a series of interlinked projects that explore what happens when we take the idea of loving the instrument at face value. (Nathan Milstein, for example, speaks of loving the violin ‘more than music’!) The philosopher Philip Alperson has claimed that it is ‘hard to overestimate the importance of the idea of the musical instrument in our appreciation of music and our understanding of musical practice’ but it also seems surprisingly easy – perhaps especially for musicians – not really to ‘see’ the instrument and to think of it in day-to-day work as a kind of tool.
There’s wonderful anecdotal material from all sorts of musicians about their relationships with instruments. If you have something you would like to share please contact me. (I think these anecdotes are important!) However, what I’m really interested in doing is following through the different kinds of world views that musicians have ‘through their instruments’ and attempting to articulate this more precisely and fully than normally happens in interviews. When Pablo Casals spoke near the end of his life of his cello as a companion, a friend (‘I love him, and he loves me’) he stopped to confirm that he really intended what he had said. But what could that mean?
Stradivari’s ‘Duport’ cello, left, is a ghost in the room for cellists today. It was considered the greatest of all cellos by the most important French makers of the 19th century, and in England by the Hill brothers, who had an enormous influence on both players and makers. It has been owned and played by some of the world’s greatest cellists who have also left indelible stamps on the identity of what we understand as ‘the cello’: Jean-Louis Duport (1749-1819), Auguste Franchomme (1808-1884), and more recently Mstislav Rostropovich, who played it from 1974 until his death in 2007. It appears not to have been heard in public since Rostropovich died…
In any case, it makes sense to me to think of this instrument as something with a powerful identity and presence of its own. It also happens to be the model for the instrument I play (by Jean-Baptiste Vuillame, c. 1840) so every day I am in a physical relationship with it.
(Photograph of my hand on the index page by Marius Skaerved.)