The Well-Tempered Cello: Life with Bach's Cello Suites

The

Well-Tempered Cello

Life with Bach’s Cello Suites

Miranda Wilson

ISBN: 978-1-62992-047-4

Published by Fairhaven Press.

Copyright 2022 by Miranda Wilson.

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For Sean Butterfield

Acknowledgments

This book could not have been written without the help of people too numerous to mention individually. Top billing goes to the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences and the Office of Research and Economic Development at the University of Idaho, who jointly funded the purchase of my five-string cello. I am indebted to the University of Idaho administration for granting me a semester of sabbatical leave to research and write. The faculty and staff of the University of Idaho Library were endlessly patient with my constant requests for assistance, and managed – through what wizardry I can only imagine – to acquire all the materials I needed, even at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The faculty and students of the Lionel Hampton School of Music kept me inspired throughout this journey, especially Jason Johnston, Leonard Garrison, and my Idaho Bach Festival co-directors Christopher and Lynette Pfund.

Heartfelt thanks go to Mike Hollis of Fairhaven Press for believing in my work, and to Gillian Bibby, Brian Hodges, Michael Kyte, Gill Tennant, Lyn Warwick, and Roger Wilson for reading and commenting on drafts of the manuscript.

Lastly, I would like to thank Sean and Eliana for their love and encouragement. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Author Biography

Miranda Wilson is an internationally performing cellist and author. She is Professor of Cello at the University of Idaho and Co-Artistic Director of the Idaho Bach Festival.

Praeludium

Bach’s Cello Suites come into my life at the end of a storm. For the past week, a vicious southerly wind from Antarctica has swept up both islands, bending the pohutukawa trees into cringing submission, ripping sheets of corrugated iron from the roofs, and howling through the narrow alleys between buildings. Tourists naïve enough to imagine they can use umbrellas here lose them immediately as the wind flips them inside out, then yanks them away altogether. Salt spray from the sea blasts the parked cars around the waterfront. Then this morning, as suddenly as it came, the southerly is gone. The harbor is opaque.

It’s one of those Wellington days after a storm where mist rises to the tops of the forests on the hills, where the smell of damp earth and damp ferns makes you feel alert with possibility. My mother and I are in the car, teetering up my cello teacher’s narrow, moss-covered driveway on our way to my weekly lesson. The cello lies diagonally across the backseat in its canvas bag, my music satchel stuffed between it and the door to hold it steady up hills and around corners.

My teacher, Judy Hyatt, is a cellist in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, and she lives in a great ghostly Victorian house in the oldest part of Khandallah. There are fourteen-foot corniced ceilings and dark book-lined corridors carpeted with Persian rugs. The brass handles on the heavy carved doors seem slightly too low. Behind a door in the hallway, a circular staircase leads up to a turret in the roof. How I long to live in a house with a turret! If I had a turret, I would sit there all day in a long green gown like a princess, writing poems and eating strawberries. This is the kind of house where any of the wardrobes might transport you to Narnia. A house where New Zealand’s greatest writer, Katherine Mansfield, might appear in the drawing-room in a white lace dress, light an illicit cigarette, and utter something brilliant and scathing about colonial hypocrisy.

I am a skinny nine-year-old, all eyes and elbows and teeth. I have grown out of my bright blue corduroy pinafore, which hangs too-short over white tights and white sneakers fastened with pink velcro straps. Adults keep telling me that I’m going through a phase, using the kind of voice that implies they hope I’ll soon grow out of it. Judy never talks to me that way. Dear, kind Judy, twinkling and jovial as Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, treats me as though I’m much older than nine. She asks me questions and takes my opinions seriously.

I twist the old-style doorbell, and Judy is there in a trice to usher my mother and me into her music studio. The room is full of antique furniture, because Judy loves old things, and because I love her, so do I. A hundred-year-old upright piano lives against the far wall, gilt candle-holders on either side of its music-rack. We sit to play our cellos on heavy round-backed mahogany dining chairs. There’s a carved wooden cabinet where Judy and her cellist husband John keep their scores, and a writing-desk with a lid you can flip up to reveal compartments for fountain-pens and blotters. Three or four cellos stand up in their cases like mummies in sarcophaguses. A slightly spotted mirror leans against the wall so you can check your posture and your bow-hold, but Judy has angled it so you can’t see your head. She explained to me once that she always gets a shock when she looks in the mirror and sees a gray-haired woman instead of the seventeen-year-old she feels like inside. Though she is only in her late fifties at this time, to me she is ancient. I want to be exactly like her when I’m old.

Today, Judy says in a reverential tone, I think we might be ready to start on some Bach.

I already know who Bach is, because my mother is a pianist and my father an opera singer, and we have compact discs of Bach’s music all over the living room. Unlike our neighbors, we own neither a video cassette recorder, nor a computer, nor a microwave oven, but we do have a compact disc player, and we’re the first people in our street to have bought one. My parents’ friends come to the house and gaze with awe and respect as we carefully place the shiny silver discs in the tray and push the open-close button. When the music starts, we watch their faces, enjoying the expressions of wonder when the music starts. "Oh! The sound!"

So far, my cello lessons have included scales, arpeggios, and technical etudes by Justus Johann Friedrich Dotzauer, Alfredo Piatti, and Friedrich Grützmacher, since Judy is conscientious about fundamentals. For repertoire, we’ve worked on Romantic salon pieces like the Tarantella by William Henry Squire, the study concertos of Georg Goltermann, and La Cinquantaine by Gabriel Marie. Judy tells me that Katherine Mansfield herself might have played these classics of the literature back when she was little bookish Kass Beauchamp. She was as obsessed with the cello as she was with writing stories, says Judy. Long ago in some long-forgotten biopic, Judy was Katherine Mansfield’s cello-playing body double.

We haven’t yet done anything by the great composers, but I know that great composers exist because my parents take me to concerts and operas. I can already tell the difference between Mozart and Haydn, and what I think of as the Shoe composers, Shoe-mann and Shoe-bert. My dad sings in Bach oratorios several times a year, and my mum plays Bach’s Partita in B-flat over and over on her piano. Sometimes they do recitals together, mostly of songs in German by one of the Shoes.

We’ll start with Bach’s First Cello Suite, the one in G major, says Judy, but let’s not start at the very beginning with the Prelude, because it’s a bit hard, dear. We’ll start in the middle with the two Menuets, and after that the Gigue. And when you’ve got those under your fingers, we’ll have a go at the Courante. The Prelude, Allemande, and Sarabande are a bit harder, but we’ll get to them eventually. Her eighteenth-century Italian cello – a cello as old as Bach! – is already out of its case, and she plucks the strings to check their tuning as I go through the familiar rituals of taking out my bow, applying rosin, and finally lifting the canvas bag from my own half-size cello. Sitting by the piano, mother busies herself with a lined school notebook, writing down everything Judy says.

I’m not yet very adept at sight-reading, so Judy demonstrates a few bars of Menuet I on her own cello. Suddenly I understand that this is no pedagogical work, no pretty salon piece for dutiful children. The opening arpeggio sings and dances out of Judy’s cello, and something awakens in my nine-year-old mind that changes music for me forever.

My squeaky little cello is no match for Judy’s glorious tone, but over the course of the hour I manage to stumble through the Menuets, stopping many times to write fingerings and bowings in the score. Judy explains that the Menuets are to be played da capo, that once you’ve played them both you have to repeat Menuet I. There’s a happy one and a sad one, she tells me. The first one’s in G major, and the second in G minor. See how the melodic line goes up at the beginning of Menuet I and down at the beginning of Menuet II? There’s a composer who likes to make contrasts! It’s as if Menuet II is a thundercloud, and the return of Menuet I is like the sun coming out. Do you see?

Yes, I see. And I want to know everything I can find out about this Bach, a composer who could have dreamed up such a piece for the cello alone, with no need for cute titles or plinking piano chords. A composer who wrote music for grown-ups.

Outside, the sun hasn’t yet come out, but looks as if it might be thinking about it. As my mother steers the car down the steep slopes and sharp corners of the Ngaio Gorge Road, I say Mummy?

Yes, darling?

I think my three favorite things in the world might be eating, sleeping, and playing the cello.

My mother looks very, very pleased.

*

Twenty-one years later, I’m sitting stunned on the dingy tiled floor of my office at the University of Idaho, music scores all around me, my right hand clapped to my temple. I’m actually seeing stars, like in the cartoons. Outside my window, the leafy neo-Gothic campus is abuzz with the chatter of students moving into dormitories, signing up for clubs, and planning parties. Just a few feet from them, I’m crouched in tears after a hardback volume of Beethoven’s complete string quartets has toppled from the highest level of my bookshelf, hitting me on the head and causing me to fall over. I know I should have borrowed a stepladder from the custodian before starting to unpack my scores and books, but because I’m tall it never occurs to me that I might need help reaching high shelves.

No one outside the window has seen the accident, but I’m not just crying because of the blows to my head and my pride. It’s because I think I might be beginning, albeit a little on the early side, some kind of midlife crisis. In hitting my head, the Beethoven score has also hit my mind with an inescapable thought that I might go to my grave without playing everything within its covers.

Dante Alighieri was only in his forties when he wrote In the middle of life’s journey, I found myself again in a dark wood, because the straightforward pathway was lost. He knew, having lived half of his biblically allotted three score years and ten, that he might have seen more yesterdays than tomorrows. It seems absurd to think your time’s running out when you’re only thirty, but isn’t everyone’s? I suddenly realize that because of spending the first half of my twenties in the single-minded pursuit of advanced degrees and the second half being in a string quartet, I’ve been locked in a practice room for the entire decade that people usually spend finding themselves. I have experienced none of the rites of passage that people tolerate in twentysomethings, but frown upon in those old enough to know better: I have never hitchhiked around Europe, worked on an organic farm, sung karaoke, lived in a commune, backpacked in Thailand, dyed my hair an eccentric color, or chained myself to a tree in the name of environmental activism. Thanks to the life-eating profession of classical music, it’s now too late to try on the lives of the people I might have become and didn’t. It’s time to face up to the life I have now as a cello-playing adult.

Except for the problem that I haven’t even done cello properly, because I haven’t played all the Beethoven quartets and now I probably never will.

Several other volumes besides the Beethoven quartets have fallen too, including the orchestral scores of the cello concertos by Dvořák, Schumann, and Shostakovich. Despite years of practicing these pieces, I’ve never performed them with a major symphony, or any symphony at all, and now I’m never likely to. Wait, hadn’t I thought I would grow up to be the next Jacqueline du Pré? When I was a cello-mad teenager, I assumed my hours of practice would automatically confer greatness and fame upon me. I thought that some mysterious magnetic process would attract agents, managers, conductors, and recording contracts with very little extra effort from me, since talent ought to be enough, oughtn’t it?

Now I’m furious. Not one of my teachers ever disabused me of these absurd imaginary notions. Why did they encourage me, egg me on, tell me to aim high and dream big and go for it? Why did no one tell me how idiotically, delusionally wrong I was? Why didn’t anyone say Look, this profession is ridiculous and almost no one succeeds in it. Don’t imagine you’re going to be Yo Yo Ma. Even Yo Yo Ma doesn’t get to be Yo Yo Ma. If you persist in this, you will work yourself half to death, you’ll never make much money, you won’t get to choose where you live, and most of the time you won’t even get to choose the music you play. Why not qualify as something sensible like a doctor or lawyer so that you can have a good income, live where you want, and buy lots of lovely things? Whether I’d have listened is anyone’s guess, but it would have been nice if someone had so much as mentioned some of the realities of life as a classical musician.

For a while, it felt as if the string quartet was succeeding. We had concerts, tours, outreach, and a respectable number of competition prizes. We had a lot of financial support from the New Zealand government, and huge professional boosts from our mentors in the United States. We put in what felt like superhuman effort, rehearsing ten hours a day seven days a week, with no days off. We performed all over the world, competed in contests, taught masterclasses, recorded discs, cold-called potential sponsors, wrote press releases, applied for grants. For several years, I was proud to devote my life to performing in a medium that seemed to bring out the best in composers. We worked our way through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Bartók, and Shostakovich, and I loved it all, especially Beethoven. I had the career I had always dreamed of.

What had made it so impossible to continue down this path? Mostly, the realization that I could not be in a quartet and simultaneously have a happy life. For years I had made sacrifice after sacrifice and pretended not to have any normal human needs, but once I started to think about having a happy life, I couldn’t stop. I longed to have a baby, and a specialist had told me that I would have trouble both getting and staying pregnant. How could I manage a high-risk pregnancy when I spent seven months of the year in planes and hotel rooms in countries where I had no health insurance, knew no doctors, and often didn’t speak the language? Even if such an ordeal were manageable, who would look after the baby once it was born? It clearly couldn’t be me, since the quartet rehearsed ten hours a day, seven days a week. Would my fiancé, Sean, give up his career to be a stay-at-home dad? Was it fair to ask him to do this when I would never in a million years consider giving up my own career? Most of all, who would pay for a husband and baby when I barely made enough money to cover my own living expenses?

It took me three months to find the words to tell the quartet I was leaving. I had no teaching job to go to, but I planned to apply for anything and everything. Most universities had hiring freezes at that point in the Great Recession, so when I got into the finals for two cello professorships it seemed like a sign. With love, and not without pain, I finally told my colleagues I was finished. A week later, they decided they would not continue without me.

String quartet players often compare the group dynamic to a marriage with none of the advantages and all of the disadvantages. In the weeks and months after disbanding, I mourned the quartet more than I’d ever mourned a failed romance. I’m still mourning it now, sitting on this dusty floor at my new university in northern Idaho, where I’ve come in pursuit of a happy life.

So when am I going to start being happy? I’ve worked hard to get my job, but I know part of it is pure luck. I’ve heard a report from a former classmate in London that our old professor has been using my example as a stick to beat his students. Mirandochka has made it, he tells them in his thick Russian accent. "What are you doing to build your career?" He never tells me directly that he thinks I’ve made it, but knowing he’s said it warms my heart a little.

I’m lucky in other ways, too. I’m in love and newly married, and this very morning Sean and I signed mortgage documents on a little cottage set picturesquely among pine trees. We’ve adopted a dog. There’s a stack of books about getting pregnant on our kitchen table. Compared with so many of my friends who have doctorates and no jobs, I’ve hit the jackpot. I should be floating in bliss, and yet here I am, weeping over a book full of unplayed notes.

Weeping because gradually, subtly, one by one, doors have started to close on me.

On the eve of my thirtieth birthday, I performed in the final of an international chamber music competition. It was good timing, because had it been scheduled one day later I’d have been too old to compete. There are a few competitions open to older applicants, but not many.

Then there’s the cello problem. When we still had the quartet, a generous patron loaned me an instrument whose golden tone and quick response made playing it a heavenly experience. Its value was in the region of six figures. The patron took it back after the quartet disbanded, because he wanted to loan his instruments to young quartet players and I no longer qualify as either. The only cello I actually own is a student instrument that can’t handle the level of sound I want to pull out of it. Just when I’ve gotten used to reveling in what a great cello can do, I now have to plan my playing around what this old clunker can’t. If I forget that I can’t bow the strings too heavily, they reward me with ugly, scratching noises.

When I call instrument banks and sponsors to ask about borrowing a cello, they demur. My instrument collection is for young up-and-comers, one explains. You have a job now. It’s not worth protesting that journalists had described our quartet as young up-and-comers mere months ago. The message is clear: I am too old and too employed for any benefactor to want to buy me a cello. No one seems to care that my professorial salary, even though it’s more money than I’ve ever dreamed of making, won’t stretch to a good cello. Between us, Sean and I have thousands of dollars of credit card debt, and even if we didn’t, a bank manager would be a fool to loan me the kind of money I’d need.

I sniff and wipe my face disgustingly on the sleeve of my t-shirt. That’s when I notice the last of the fallen scores. It’s the book of facsimiles of the four eighteenth-century manuscript copies of Bach’s Six Cello Suites.

A voice in my head, my own voice, says You’ve still got Bach.

It’s been years since I played Bach’s Cello Suites. I learned the first two in childhood and adolescence, the Third and Fourth as an undergraduate, and the Fifth for a competition. Aside from some practice-room noodling, I’ve never played the Sixth. Actually, it’s been years since I played anything at all by Bach, because for a long time I only had time for the string quartet repertoire and Bach’s lifetime predates the genre.

Bach’s lifetime. It’s funny, I think to myself, the way I’ve always pictured Bach as a satisfied old man in the wig with the lace ruff and shiny buttons. The famous oil painting by Elias Gottlob Haussmann dates from 1746, near the end of Bach’s life. By that time he was an establishment figure as the learned Cantor of Leipzig. It occurs to me now that half a lifetime had passed between 1720, the probable year he composed the Cello Suites, and the year he sat for his portrait. Cello-Bach, the younger, thinner, pre-wig version, was in the middle of his own life’s journey when he wrote the Suites in the tiny hamlet of Cöthen in eastern Germany. Cow-Cöthen, they called it. While his job as court Capellmeister was pleasant, it compelled him to live in the middle of nowhere. And there was no use there for two of his most luminous gifts, playing the organ and composing Lutheran sacred music. The Cöthen court didn’t need Bach’s elaborate, near-operatic church cantatas for their Calvinist services, so his job was to provide secular entertainment. This wasn’t necessarily bad, because the thing about Bach was that he was a great virtuoso at more or less everything. While he was there, he composed not just the Cello Suites, but many other top instrumental works. Cow-Cöthen wasn’t perfect, but it was still a pretty good gig.

Bach lived in Cow-Cöthen, and I live in Mos-Cow, Idaho. I’ve already noticed that when the wind is blowing from the west, I can both hear and smell the cows in the Agriculture Department on the other side of campus. No cows in Moscow! the locals gleefully correct visitors who don’t know that it’s pronounced Moss-Co. And yet, alongside the lentils and soybeans that grow on the strange undulating hills of the Palouse, there are lots and lots of cows. This is the first place I’ve lived that wasn’t a city.

For the first time in my life, I start feeling a kinship with Cello-Bach. We’re of a similar age, both living in isolated small towns because of our profession. Neither of us is getting to do the things we’re best at. I’m even conceited enough to imagine that if we lived in the same time and place, we would be friends. We would have coffee. I love coffee, and Bach must have too, since he once wrote an entire cantata about it.

The voice in my head is gathering speed. You could do a Bach project. You could do a marathon concert of Bach’s Six Cello Suites and have it live-streamed on the internet.

No, I can’t do this. The Sixth Cello Suite is a real monster, practically impossible unless you have a five-string cello, and I barely have a regular four-string one. I’d make a fool of myself trying.

No, you wouldn’t, the voice persists. You could make a CD too. You need a big creative goal for your thirties. The thirties are supposed to be about creativity, you know.

Nonsense, I tell the voice, I’m not going to make a CD. Who wants yet another recording of one of the best-known pieces, most-recorded pieces in the repertoire? Who cares about anything I might do alone, away from the quartet?

The voice acts as if it hasn’t heard this. Let’s set a time limit, it says. You have to do it by the time you’re thirty-five.

No, that’s ridiculous. Thirty-five will be the year I’m up for tenure, and by then I need to have published a book and loads of articles. Plus, I want to have a baby, and I have no idea how much work I’ll be able to