A Different Life

On​ 29 January this year, a cello made in 1730 by Nicolò Gagliano, a member of the famous Neapolitan dynasty of luthiers, stood in front of the European Parliament to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It had belonged to Pál Hermann, a Jewish Hungarian composer and virtuoso cellist who had studied under Kodály and Bartók and gave concerts throughout Western and Central Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. He was murdered in 1944, aged 42, after being interned in the concentration camp at Drancy, near Paris. ‘His story,’ the parliament’s president, Roberta Metsola, said as she gestured towards the instrument, ‘is carried by this beautiful cello.’ Kate Kennedy was in the audience. The cello, lost for more than eighty years in the black hole of the Holocaust, was there because of her book.

When she was fifteen, Kennedy won a cello scholarship to Wells Cathedral School and began to practise with the intensity and single-mindedness of an elite athlete preparing for competition. But a year later she suffered an injury; the shooting pain from tendonitis in her left arm meant she was unable to play. She tried to manage the loss of her life’s dream by sitting in her practice room working on the Bach Suites in her head. But playing a cello in your mind isn’t the same as playing one in your arms: she became depressed, anorexic and was finally admitted to hospital. There she decided to live, even if it meant giving up playing. The vulnerability of musicians to the physical demands of their instruments is one of the recurring themes in Cello.

Kennedy recovered enough to perform professionally. She is still a cellist but now also director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. Her book is an exploration of what the cello has meant to other cellists, in an attempt to understand her own connection to it. It is largely an account of her journeys, cello on her back, to recover four stories of loss ‘woven together by absences and silence, but also by resilience, survival and sound’. Two of the stories fall under the sign of world-historical loss: one is Hermann’s; the other concerns Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who survived Auschwitz as the only cellist in the camp’s women’s orchestra. The other two are on a different scale. One is about Lise Cristiani, born around 1824, who was among the first professional women cellists. Mendelssohn was so taken with her playing that he composed for her what is now a standard of the Romantic cello repertoire, one of his Songs without Words. She died of cholera while still in her mid-twenties, after undertaking a madcap tour of Siberia when her career in the West began to fade. Her body is thought to be buried in Novocherkassk. The 1701 Stradivarius cello, kept in a lead-lined case, which accompanied her across snow, ice and flooded rivers, somehow made its way back to Paris, then was taken to Berlin, where it belonged to the cellist and teacher Hugo Becker, with whom Hermann took lessons. It was transported to London and finally to the Museo del Violino in Cremona, where it had been made three centuries earlier.

The protagonists of the final – comic – story are the ‘world’s most famous shipwrecked cello’, the ‘Mara’ Stradivarius, and its succession of owners dating back to the late 18th century. It became famous in cello circles because its first known owner was the wife-abusing second-rate German cellist Johann Baptist Mara, who was married to Gertrude Elisabeth Schmeling, the pioneering opera diva. He spilled enough alcohol on it that the damage is still visible. When Schmeling finally left him in 1799 after years of abuse, he lost his source of income and was forced to sell his Strad, whose genealogy, like that of any true Italian aristocrat, is complete to the present. Amedeo Baldovino, the ill-tempered but very good cellist of the Trieste Piano Trio, bought it in 1954.

In 1963 the trio was stranded on a concert tour in Uruguay. Unable to fly from Montevideo to Buenos Aires for their next engagement because of bad weather, they foolishly decided to take a boat down the fog-enshrouded River Plate, a distance of 150 miles. The boat hit a submerged wreck, burst into flames and sank, leaving Baldovino to spend the night clinging to a life raft. ‘I don’t know exactly when I abandoned the “Mara”,’ he later said. ‘My instinct for survival took over.’ Miraculously it was recovered; even more remarkable, seven hundred hours of work by luthiers at London’s W.E. Hill and Sons, founded in 1762, restored it to supposedly better shape than before.

The recovery​ of Hermann’s cello is Kennedy’s sleuthing triumph. He had been given the Gagliano in 1928 by Louise Bachiene and Jaap de Graaff, wealthy Dutch admirers of his in London. Soon afterwards, he toured the Netherlands, where he met and married their niece Ada Weevers, with whom he moved to Berlin in 1931. He taught and gave concerts until Hitler came to power, when the couple moved back to Holland with their daughter, Corrie. That year, Ada nearly drowned while swimming in the sea and died three months later, leaving Hermann bereft and unable to support himself. He sent Corrie to live with his wife’s relatives and moved to cheap quarters in Brussels, where he managed to earn a scant living. Four years later he went to Paris in the hope of continuing his career and, as both a composer and performer, met with some success. His works were played by new music societies; he performed Darius Milhaud’s First Cello Concerto at the Salle Cortot in February 1940, his last public concert.

Milhaud was on a wanted list of prominent Jewish artists but escaped to the US, where he would teach on and off for the next thirty years. Hermann was not so fortunate. He fled to the Weevers family’s country house at Monguilhem in the South of France, but, bored with rural life, moved to Toulouse, where he managed to eke out a living teaching and perhaps playing a little: he was hiding from the Gestapo in plain sight. In April 1944 he was caught in a round-up on the streets of Toulouse and taken to Drancy, the collection point for Jews awaiting murder. He managed to write a note to his brother-in-law, Jan Weevers, and threw it out of the window of the train that was taking him to the camp. A stranger found it and put it in the post. The note explained what had happened and asked for his cello to be secured. His room had been boarded up by the Gestapo to await plunder but somehow Jan and his friends managed to break in and leave a cheap student cello in place of the Gagliano. Jan cycled a hundred miles west to the family home with the cello on his back.

Kennedy finds Hermann’s entry card at Drancy, which identifies him as a Hungarian national, a cellist and a ‘V.i.E’ (‘veuf. 1. enfant’ – ‘widower, one child’). He is classified ‘B’, meaning ‘no reason not to murder immediately’. Two weeks later, on 15 May 1944, he was one of 878 able-bodied men on Convoy 73, the only one of 79 convoys with no women or children, and the only one not headed for Auschwitz. It went to Kaunas in Lithuania. It is thought that the men were assigned to dig up and burn the bodies of murdered Jews. Nothing is known of the time or place of Hermann’s murder.

Kennedy evokes his presence as she follows his path. She plays parts of the Milhaud Cello Concerto at the Salle Cortot to hear as best she can the quality of sound he would have heard. She visits Drancy, where an old man asks her to play her cello; she responds with a few bars of a reconstructed version of a concerto Hermann wrote in 1925. (His music was almost entirely forgotten until 2016; its resurrection was the work of his family and the Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices, which promotes composers whose music was silenced by the Nazis.) Kennedy discovers that his cello surfaced briefly in 1952, when Jan Weevers sold it to finance Corrie’s medical studies. But it disappeared again in a murky market flooded by stolen instruments. After the war, they were even harder to trace than stolen art.

Eventually Kennedy learns that a Gagliano sold by W.E. Hill and Sons to the Parisian dealer Ernest Maucotel in 1925 could be the one she is looking for: it seems likely to have been Maucotel who sold it to de Graaff, and to Maucotel that Weevers sold it back. But Maucotel’s premises are now a burger shop, and the archives of the other, always secretive, luthiers she visits don’t yield answers either. She solicits the help of Carla Shapreau, probably the world’s leading expert on Nazi stolen instruments, to no avail. Then she notices that Weevers had mentioned in a letter the name of an Amsterdam dealer called Max Möller, whose shop still exists. Kennedy talks to Möller’s daughter-in-law, who later suggests in an email that Kennedy has the wrong Möller; the cello had probably been sold by Gebrüder Müller. That seems to be the end of the line.

Some hours later, however, Kennedy notices that attached to the email is a photograph of a certificate of authentication to a 1730 Gagliano that met the description of Hermann’s. It is unclear why Möller’s daughter hadn’t mentioned it before, or why she had attached it. It had been issued in 1953 to its purchaser, Kurt Herzbruch, a cellist who lived in Cologne. Kennedy tracks down his widow, who tells her that he had sold it after a year; she doesn’t know to whom. The certificate, however, mentions that carved on the frame of the cello were the words ‘Ego sum Anima Musicae’ (‘I am the soul of music’). Hermann’s name is not on the certificate; the cello is identified only as having belonged to an anonymous artist. Kennedy ends her story with this clue but no resolution.

But after Cello’s publication in August last year, one of its readers, the Chinese cellist Jian Wang, remembered that he had heard a young Australian called Sam Lucas play an instrument that met Kennedy’s description of Hermann’s at the 2022 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. (It was on loan to Lucas from the Robert Schumann Hochschule, a conservatory in Düsseldorf. How it got there is unknown.) Wang contacted the British cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, who in turn contacted Kennedy. On 29 September 2024 the cello, lost for eighty years, made its first proper public appearance. Lucas played the Allegro Cantabile from Hermann’s Cello Concerto at Kennedy’s book launch in Wigmore Hall, where Hermann himself had played almost a century before. Corrie, who was at the event, said: ‘The cello being played [here] now makes the circle round.’ Five months later she told her father’s story at the European Parliament, where again Lucas played the recovered music on the recovered cello.

Artworks​ stolen by the Nazis are relatively easy to identify and often turn up in public arenas – museums and auctions – where dodgy provenance can be challenged. In contrast, string instruments can often be identified only by experts looking for subtle clues, and the trade in them is opaque. But tens of thousands were stolen and they are still being recovered. Willem de Vries, a Dutch historian and musician, documented the scale of the pillage in his 1996 book Sonderstab Musik (‘Music Taskforce’), which took its title from the special section of the Nazi looting infrastructure, under the direction of the well-established musicologist and longtime party member Herbert Gerigk. It managed theft in occupied Western Europe. Gerigk was also one of the authors of Lexicon of Jews in Music (1940), a list that aimed to prevent any Jewish musician who might otherwise have escaped notice from performing, and to stop the performance of music by Jewish composers, whether old or new. His henchman and co-author Wolfgang Boetticher, liaison for music policy and member of the Waffen SS, deployed his considerable expertise in arranging the theft of instruments and music manuscripts. Boetticher enjoyed a successful university career after the war as an expert on Schumann.

The Nazis were of course not the first to steal the treasures of their enemies, but the scale of German theft was unprecedented: nearly seventy thousand Jewish households were seized and emptied in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, the contents almost all carefully inventoried to the last pfennig and sent to Germany in 26,984 freight cars – more than a million square metres of cargo space. The homes of famous musicians were among those to be raided first. Wanda Landowska’s collection of historical instruments, which included a spinet, a tafelklavier, several harpsichords and a viola da gamba, filled 54 crates. And 23 crates were taken from the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, including his Stradivarius, in the keeping of his mother-in-law, the Baroness Rothschild, in Paris. Like Hermann’s cello it was lost for a time until a man showed up at the Aachen shop of the master luthier Mathias Niessen in the early 1950s and offered to sell it to him; Niessen recognised it and refused the offer. Some time later a different man appeared with a bill of sale that seemed genuine. This time Niessen bought the cello for $200 and returned it to Piatigorsky for what he had paid for it and the cost of a few repairs.

Larceny went on at all levels: ‘7 October 1941 – three valuable cellos – owner unknown, taken to lager Bassano’; ‘one violoncello and two violins to rue Bassano’ (one of the Sonderstab’s warehouses). The looting of cultural property began earlier in the greater Reich with Austria as the model. Soon after the Anschluss in March 1938, Jewish musicians were expelled from the Vienna Philharmonic and other orchestras; Jews, who comprised almost half the membership of the Association of Authors, Composers and Musicians, were purged and silenced. Large-scale theft began almost immediately when the Gestapo seized nearly eighty instruments from Alphonse Rothschild, including a 1710 Stradivarius cello. The law passed on 26 April 1938 that required Jews to register property or assets valued at more than five thousand Reichsmarks helped to yield more. Five musicians from the Vienna Philharmonic are thought to have taken their instruments to the camps or ghettos, where they played music before they were liquidated. Then there was silence.

The scale of loss of music, musicians and instruments is staggering. By 1944, Shapreau estimates, more than twenty thousand instruments had been confiscated from Jewish deportees in Prague alone, whether left with someone for safekeeping when their owners were arrested and then looted, like Lasker-Wallfisch’s Ventapane cello in Breslau, or confiscated from them directly. Only in a very few cases has the journey back to sound that Kennedy writes about in relation to Hermann’s cello been possible. Most of these stories end in silence and rupture. Lev Aronson, who, having survived four years of concentration camps, eventually became principal cellist of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and a renowned teacher, never retrieved his beloved cello, possibly a very rare Amati. He was forced to hand it over to a colleague by Latvian collaborators in Riga.

In an unpublished memoir (now in the Leo Baeck Institute in London), my father’s cousin Hans Cramer writes that he began taking clandestine violin lessons while he was in hiding in Amsterdam. His teacher was an old, poor and ‘already a bit queer’ woman called Betty Francken-Schwabe, who had been a pupil of Joseph Joachim, for whom Brahms wrote his Violin Concerto in D major. Her serious career came to an end when Hitler’s purges of Jewish musicians forced her into exile. Cramer writes of his gratitude for ‘all the beauty which, under her guidance, I learned to admire’; in her poverty ‘she forgot everything around her if she could play.’ Francken-Schwabe worried whether she would be allowed to take her violin – by some reports a del Gesù – with her if she were deported to Poland. The last time Cramer saw her was in Westerbork, the Dutch transit camp. She had her violin. He was told that on the night before her deportation she played it in the barrack she shared with four hundred other internees. In the morning, she was pushed into the cattle car that would take her to Sobibor, where she was murdered on 16 July 1943. Her name is on a Stolperstein in front of her last German home, Isestrasse 37, Hamburg. Her violin is lost.

There is no special cello in Lasker-Wallfisch’s story. (Born Lasker, she married the pianist Peter Wallfisch after she emigrated to Britain; they helped found the English Chamber Orchestra.) Kennedy offered to try to track down the one she lost in the Holocaust, but she wasn’t interested: ‘It was a different life.’ (That cello was a not-so-distant cousin of Hermann’s; its maker, Lorenzo Ventapane, was an apprentice in the Gagliano family shop and his instruments are in its style.) In this instance, Kennedy is also not recovering a forgotten life as she is with Hermann: Lasker-Wallfisch has been interviewed many times and is the author of a memoir, Inherit the Truth (1996). In 2018 she told her story in beautiful prewar German to the Bundestag for Holocaust Remembrance Day. She received Kennedy graciously but there wasn’t much new to tell.

Lasker-Wallfisch features in this book because her recovery from loss and her sustained passion for playing aligns with Kennedy’s quest. Her father was a distinguished lawyer in Breslau, now Wrocław, and a decorated veteran of the First World War; her mother was an accomplished violinist, and both her sisters played. On Sundays, much to her annoyance, her family spoke only French; on Saturday afternoons they discussed the classics of German literature; her father told them about his experiences in the war; they played chess. When she was twelve, in 1937, her cello lessons in Breslau came to an end because there were no Jewish teachers left. Since it was too dangerous for an ‘Aryan’ to teach a Jew, her parents sent her to Berlin, where they found her a teacher. After Kristallnacht those lessons ended too. So did ordinary school. But music did not, nor did her commitment to her parents’ cultural ideal. Back in Breslau, in a makeshift school organised by the Jewish community in 1941, she played concerts that prompted calls for encores; she listened to and critiqued recordings. She was top of her class in Latin. All this she reported to her sister in London, Marianne, with the naivety that perhaps only a gifted teenager could muster.

Her parents were deported on 9 April 1942 to the Polish transit ghetto at Izbica, where, as Lasker-Wallfisch learned after the war, they were made to dig their own graves before they were shot. Their apartment was boarded up. The 16-year-old Anita and her younger sister, Renate, weren’t deported as they had been sent to a Jewish orphanage and put to work in a paper factory alongside Polish and French forced labourers and prisoners of war. At the factory, they began to help prisoners forge false papers. They were caught, tried, convicted and sent to jail in June 1943 – not as Jews but, to their ultimate good fortune, as ordinary criminals. This was the first of the absurd contingencies that accounted for their survival.

After a year in prison, Lasker-Wallfisch ‘voluntarily’ signed papers to be sent to Auschwitz, where she avoided the life-or-death selection process because she was classified as a Karteihäftling, a prisoner with a file, and not as a Jew. She was stripped, shorn and tattooed with her new identity: no. 6938. Someone came up to her as she was standing there naked and started a conversation: what had she done in her previous life? She had been a cellist. ‘Then you will be saved.’ The cellist in the women’s orchestra had just died and the conductor – the formidable Alma Rosé, niece of Gustav Mahler and daughter of Arnold Rosé, concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic until the Anschluss – needed someone to play the cello bass line. All stories of Holocaust survival are in their way absurd: a Jew who is a duly convicted prisoner doesn’t count as a Jew for purposes of murder; Primo Levi survived Auschwitz because someone needed a chemist, and Lasker-Wallfisch because Rosé needed a cellist.

Rosé asked her to ‘audition’. Lasker-Wallfisch, who hadn’t touched a cello for two years, asked for a little time to practise then played the slow movement of a Boccherini concerto; she was accepted. The women’s orchestra was housed in a special barracks in the shadow of the crematoria and its members got better food than ordinary inmates. It was assigned to play marches as inmates went to and from the factories at Birkenau, to give ‘concerts’ of light German music for camp guards on Sundays and to perform one-off as commanded – for example, when Josef Mengele stopped by and demanded that Lasker-Wallfisch play Schumann’s Träumerei. Kennedy asks her what it felt like. She played it as fast as she could and that was that.

Some commentators say that Lasker-Wallfisch and her colleagues played to save their lives. Not so, she insists, though it was of course their special status that saved them. They played to meet the standards set by Rosé, who was determined to forge the ragtag musicians into an ensemble her father could listen to. She drilled them note by note. At some point, Lasker-Wallfisch writes in her memoir, she got typhus; as she lay semi-conscious in the sick bay, unable to stand, the SS men making their selection for the gas chamber passed by. ‘This is the cellist,’ she heard one say. When she returned to the barracks, she wasn’t playing well. Rosé punished her by making her scrub the floors. She hated her for it but came to admire the iron discipline with which ‘she managed to focus our attention’ away from ‘the smoking chimneys and the profound misery of the camp, to an F which should have been an F#’.

When Rosé died the orchestra fell apart, but before the consequences were felt the Russians advanced on Auschwitz and the sisters were sent west to Bergen-Belsen, where tens of thousands died not from gas or bullets but from disease and starvation. The British troops who liberated the camp on 15 April 1945 found piles of unburied dead – ten or even thirteen thousand bodies – and more than fifty thousand skeletal survivors. A typhus epidemic raged; ten thousand more died after the camp’s liberation. The sisters survived and were sent to a displaced persons camp. Pestilential Bergen-Belsen was burned to the ground. On 4 June, Anita wrote to Marianne in great excitement that she might, in the ‘not too distant future become the owner of a C-E-L-L-O’. Four days later she told her that her most urgent need – except for having a cello – was for sheet music; she sent a list. On 17 June, a cello came. ‘I am half crazy.’ The strings were worn but she thought it sounded good.

Lasker-Wallfisch tells Kennedy that in the DP camp she met a bedraggled Italian POW called Giuseppe Selmi, who before the war had been the principal cellist of the Rome Radio Orchestra. He too had got hold of a cello, though it came with only three strings. He was a fantastic player; they played duets; he gave her lessons. She was still only nineteen. In early July she wrote to Marianne that soon there would never again be a 1 in front of her age unless she lived to be 100. (Which she has done – she turned 100 in July.) Playing Träumerei for Mengele in the shadow of the crematoria didn’t destroy its beauty for her: ‘Violoncello – Schumann – Träumerei – Anita Lasker’ reads the first line of the programme of a concert given at the Bergen-Belsen DP camp three months after liberation.

Lasker-Wallfisch won’t engage with Kennedy’s questions about what her various cellos mean to her as material objects. She refuses to talk about whether her cello is a partner, friend or child and isn’t interested in whether cellos remember anything (Julian Lloyd Webber thinks his cello remembers the Delius Cello Concerto it premiered). She thinks playing on bad cellos has made her a more self-sufficient musician. As Kennedy says, and as every player knows, the relation of every cello to its player is reciprocal. When I play my teacher’s high-school cello it sounds like a trombone in a shower; I am convinced that his subtle and sophisticated bow arm is in part the result of taming this beast. Lasker-Wallfisch is not on the side of enchantment. Kennedy is more equivocal.

Woven​ into Kennedy’s stories of survival are her encounters – avowedly subjective – with individual cellos that she believes are bearers of memory and history. In a sense she is right. All musicians carry within them the genealogy of their teachers and their discipline. Kennedy pauses on her travels to play études by Hugo Becker, Hermann’s teacher in Berlin – pieces that she used to play before her injury. Cellists and violinists in particular are haunted by the musicians who played their instruments before them and those who had taught these ancestors. Even new instruments bear the marks not only of their maker but of the history of the wood of which they are made. Dendrology plays its part in Kennedy’s story. But there is a tension in the way we understand and hear – or don’t hear – these histories.

Before she sets off on her journeys, Kennedy visits Oxford Violins with the luthier Bruno Guastalla. They conduct a listening test to establish whether they can distinguish on which instrument the cellist Nick Roberts is playing the opening of the Elgar Cello Concerto: on his own Giovanni Grancino, made in 17th-century Naples by a contemporary of Stradivari, or on a ‘brash’ new cello made by Guastalla, the varnish on which is scarcely dry. It ought to be easy, but Kennedy gets it wrong; she mistakes ‘a stallion for a newborn foal’. Guastalla does too. Perhaps it’s because even Guastalla’s new, unplayed cellos sound good. Or maybe Roberts worked harder on the instrument unfamiliar to him. Kennedy’s mistake is anyway commonplace. The cellist Maria Kliegel told Kennedy about all the reviews of her concerts on a world tour that noted the golden tone of her famous Stradivarius cello – the 1693 Gendron-Speyer – when in fact she was playing a modern copy.

Why did critics think that the modern cello without the ‘advantage of hundreds of years of having every resonance, every harmonic coaxed and polished from it by the world’s best players’ sounded like its venerable double? In fact, for centuries, the Gendron-Speyer wasn’t played by the world’s best players. Before one of the great cellists of the 20th century, Maurice Gendron, acquired it in 1958 it had been left unplayed in the collection of the financier Edgar Speyer, and before that we don’t know who played it. But seventy years of being played by great players should have fixed that. Maybe Kliegel made herself play better on a less distinguished instrument. The real reason, as Kennedy writes, is that the cello was ‘not the star of the show. It was there to serve her.’

It is the musician who makes music. A woman came up to Jascha Heifetz, the most celebrated violinist of the 20th century, after a concert and gushed that his violin sounded so good that evening. He picked it up, put it to his ear and said ‘funny, I don’t hear anything.’ (After seventy years of sitting in a vault somewhere his 1731 ‘Piel’ Stradivarius is now up for sale. One can be pretty sure that it remembers little or nothing of his concerts or recordings.)

Kennedy reports a celebrated repeat in Paris in 2012 of an experiment held two years earlier in Indianapolis in which new violins were compared to old ones. The retest was rigorous enough to pass peer review in three papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Ten professional violinists described as ‘first-rate soloists’ were given six old instruments including five by Stradivari and six high-class modern ones to play: in their lists of favourites, new beat old by three to two. By far the most popular was Number Five, a new one. In the Indianapolis test two Stradivariuses and a del Gesù went up against three modern instruments. One Stradivarius was the least favoured by the players; 13 of 21 players preferred one of the new instruments. Tests like these, more or less controlled, go back to the 19th century. There have been fewer tests of cellos, but a match-up at the Fourth American Cello Congress in 1990 came up with the same results as the ‘Judgment of Paris’ for violins. In front of an audience of 140 musicians a blindfolded colleague behind a linen screen played six new and six old cellos by the likes of Montagnana, the Venetian luthier Matteo Goffriller, who was especially noted for his cellos, and Stradivari. The top cello was an old one; the second, third, fourth and fifth places went to new instruments.

Among the explanations as to why new instruments so consistently score highly is that old instruments are harder to play; competitions that ask musicians to perform on short notice aren’t probative. I asked the violinist Anthony Marwood for his explanation. He suggested that even assuming the ‘chemistry’ is good between a player and an old instrument, ‘it takes patience to know what questions to ask it from a playing point of view – the response can vary tremendously.’ There are probably as many ‘how they chose their cello’ stories as there are cellists. David Finckel heard a violin in the shop of the Brooklyn luthier Sam Zygmuntowicz that sounded like a Stradivarius but was in fact Sam’s. (A sign in the shop reads ‘Stradivariuses were once new.’) He immediately ordered one of his cellos, a copy of the 1711 Duport named after the cellist Jean-Louis Duport; the original still bears the scars of Napoleon’s rough handling when Duport let him try it. It has been his main instrument since the 1980s; his colleagues in the Emerson Quartet were already playing Zygmuntowicz instruments and so his fitted in well. It has no history; Finckel is the only person who has played it.

There are wonderful modern instruments and wonderful old ones; players prefer one or the other for all sorts of reasons. Why not let it go? Violins and cellos are the only instruments subjected to these comparisons. (I have found none made between old and new violas; I think this is because they have varied so much in size over time.) Professional wind players trade in their instruments regularly because they wear out; no one plays a 19th-century bassoon or clarinet or oboe. Pianos from the 18th and early 19th centuries are incommensurable with modern ones; anyone can hear the difference. By the late 19th century the modern era of iron-frame pianos had begun, and the sounds are more comparable. Musicians might prefer the qualities of one or another of a dozen makers, the result of mechanical differences, but there are no comparison tests. After the Second World War piano ecology shrank, not quite to monoculture but to the dominance of Steinways in the concert halls and conservatories of the world, all tuned and voiced by Steinway technicians to sound the same.

Sports fans​ like to argue about whether a great player from the past could beat a modern star, and cellos and violins seem to offer the chance of putting such fantasy comparisons to the test. But it isn’t so straightforward. The basic cello design was established in the late 16th century by Andrea Amati, who founded the workshop in which Stradivari was an apprentice. In the 18th century, cellos became smaller, and the finger boards shortened as the so-called ‘basses’ became solo instruments. In the 19th century, new sound posts wedged between the top and bottom plates and new bass bars enabled the instrument’s sound to project in the large new halls. But all modern cellos and violins are copies of two 17th-century models – the relatively slender ones of Stradivarius patterns and the more voluptuous ones of the Venetian luthier Domenico Montagnana. Comparison tests are between rehabilitated (modernised) old instruments and their new avatars.

Even in the late 18th century experts were passing judgment on the previous century’s instruments. ‘The violins of Cremona,’ the historian of music John Hawkins wrote in 1776, ‘are exceeded only by those of Stainer, a German, whose instruments are remarkable for a full and piercing tone.’ A French encyclopedia entry on the making of stringed instruments similarly argued that the violins of Jacob Stainer were of ‘the greatest importance’. Mozart played one. But the modern history of comparison begins in the early 19th century when Stradivari rose to superstardom, his aura spread to his Italian colleagues and the modern copy came to stand in relation to an ‘original’. This was largely due to the work of a French luthier, Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, who bought from a collector a trove of Stradivarius instruments as well as parts and forms that had been left in his workshop. Vuillaume created the modern Stradivarius standard models. (Almost no old cellos have all their original parts: necks, scrolls, fingerboards, even bellies and backs are often modernised, except those that are restored to their 18th-century set-ups for early music players.) Vuillaume was also a dealer who knew how to hype his products: he bought a violin from the famous collector Luigi Tarisio in 1854 that came to be known as the ‘Messiah’, because like the ‘Messiah of the Jews’, the violinist Jean-Delphin Alard joked, ‘one always expects him but he never appears.’ Neither man ever let anyone play the instrument; it now hangs in a glass case in the Ashmolean with a label saying that it has probably never been played. Vuillaume also employed the craftsmen who invented the modern bow, playing with which transformed the sound of his instruments.

Violins and cellos that have survived for three centuries and been heard and touched by so many musicians are like contact relics: in some way sacred. No other instruments so often bear the names of those who played them centuries before; players succeed one another like an apostolic succession, with a laying on of hands. Baldovino agonised over who should get ‘the world’s most famous shipwrecked cello’, his ‘Mara’, when he retired. His candidates were Yo-Yo Ma and Heinrich Schiff. Ma already had Jacqueline du Pré’s ‘Davidoff’ Stradivarius; Schiff desperately wanted the ‘Mara’ but couldn’t afford it. As is so often the case today with expensive instruments, a foundation bought it and loaned it to him. In time, he passed it on to one of his students, Christian Poltéra, who has played it since 2012.

Kennedy ends her narrative about Lise Cristiani at the shrine of her cello in the Cremona museum. She approaches it as a relic in a glass pyx, an apparition of great beauty. (The English cello pedagogue Arthur Broadley was once asked to name the finest violoncello in the country. ‘I give up,’ he said, but ‘one of the most handsome, if not the handsomest of the Stradivarius basses, [is] that glorious instrument known as “the Cristiani”.’) Playing it on an earlier visit, Kennedy felt it was like a bird released from its cage. ‘The whole cello shuddered with vibrations of pleasure, almost wriggling in its wooden skin … all the most exquisite sounds distilled into one note.’ She played Mendelssohn’s Song without Words, ‘the closest she would get to hearing Lise’s own voice’. Kennedy is speaking with the dead, all those who have played or heard the instrument.

But while Kennedy and many others believe that old instruments sound different from modern ones because they seem to be ‘the loci around which ghosts converge’, they are also drawn to the secrets hidden in their material bodies, the wood and varnish. On the second of Kennedy’s visits she is not permitted to touch the Cristiani because another cellist is spending six weeks recording every possible sound ‘the greatest cello in the world’ can make in order to make a digital record of the cello’s ‘soul’. She concedes that this is strange. Stranger still is that in 2016 Harry Mairson, a professor of computer science at Brandeis, who had already made an algorithmic model of an Amati violin, was not only allowed to touch the Cristiani but to take it in a taxi, chaperoned by the conservatore of the Museo del Violino, for an hour-long drive to Modena, where the cello had a CT scan to somehow diagnose its greatness. Looking for something that accounts for a cello’s particular quality, Kennedy considers exotic varnish, tight-grained spruce for the belly, and the precise measurements of this or that part. No explanation pans out. Stradivari, like other great craftsmen, did not repeat himself; some of his instruments aren’t great; little distinguishes the material of his cellos from other great cellos old and new.

The great modern cellos, like the old, are that way because they are made by luthiers with deep knowledge of their craft; they have a gift as ineffable as the musicality of their players. And every player will over time discover what her cello offers. Midway through her book Kennedy accepts the realisation that it is the player who makes an instrument speak – ‘an often frustrating negotiation going on between player and instrument’. In the end she finds what she was looking for: an understanding of her own cello as ‘a completely new object’, and a way to hold ‘silence and sound in measured harmony’.