Cello

'Strikingly original' The Times
'Absorbing' Wall Street Journal

‘Just as a cello’s voice is divided across four strings, each with its own colour and character, this is a journey in four parts, in search of four players and their instruments...’

In Cello, Kate Kennedy weaves together the lives of four remarkable cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury and misfortune. The Hungarian Jewish cellist and composer Pál Hermann managed to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo for much of the Second World War but was eventually captured and murdered. Lise Cristiani, the first female professional cello soloist, undertook an epic – and ultimately fatal – concert tour of Siberia in the 1850s, taking with her one of the world’s greatest Stradivari cellos. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch was incarcerated in both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps, only surviving because she was the cellist in the Auschwitz-Birkenau women’s orchestra. Amedeo Baldovino of the Trieste Piano Trio was forced to jump from a burning ship with his ‘Mara’ Stradivari, losing the cello, and nearly losing his own life when the boat was shipwrecked off Buenos Aires.

Counterpointing the themes raised by these extraordinary stories are a sequence of interludes that draw together the author’s reflections on the nature and history of the cello, and her many interviews and encounters with contemporary cellists. Kate Kennedy’s own relationship with the cello is a complicated one. As a teenager, she suffered an injury to her arm that imposed severe limitations on her career as a performer on the instrument that was her first love. She realised that, in order to understand what the cello meant to her, she needed to find out what the cello – and, crucially, the absence of the cello – had meant to some other cellists, past and present.

Kate Kennedy has written an eloquent and multi-textured homage to this warmest of stringed instruments – part quest narrative, part detective story, part philosophical meditation.

This wonderful book is a love-letter to cellos and cellists, a gripping quest across Europe for lost and sometimes miraculously re-found instruments, a startling plunge into the dark histories of our times, a meditation and improvisation on music and musicians, and a moving personal story of a cellist who has rediscovered her own gift for playing and with it the central meaning of her life. Hermione Lee
Kate Kennedy’s quest across seas and continents, following the lives of four great cellists, is a rare musical adventure. Brimming with life, comic, thoughtful, and at times heartbreaking, Cello explores the bond between players and their instruments and its enduring power. Jenny Uglow
Kate Kennedy has followed her cello heart, and it has led her on a fascinating and unusual path. An excellently researched, thoroughly absorbing account of a personal voyage of musical discovery. Steven Isserlis
This is a beautiful, richly fascinating book – a love song to the cello which, as if a character, lives within the lives of those musicians who play it. Stephen Hough
A wonderfully evocative journey of exploration and contemplation in the company of four remarkable cellists and their equally remarkable instruments. Robin Lustig
Fascinating -- Ivan Hewett The Telegraph
Strikingly original -- Kathryn Hughes The Times
Cello sings richly … The human leads are compelling and carefully drawn out by Kennedy's new research. But their instruments are almost more so ... fascinating -- Alexandra Coghlan The Spectator
Kate Kennedy’s fascinating and deeply moving book about the cello weaves a lifetime’s passion for the instrument as a performer with her skills as a historian. This absorbing exploration of remarkable instruments and their players through death camps, shipwrecks, and on into the cellos of the future is an embodiment of the deep companionship between musician and instrument. I was fascinated by insights which only a professional cellist could know and by entirely unexpected aspects of the instrument’s physicality. Above all, Kennedy’s book is a deeply humane tribute to the partnership between composer, musician and instrument, ‘the soul of music’ and is a huge achievement. Gwyneth Lewis
This lively, likable, and very sad book is structured as a series of movements and interludes ... Neither silence nor sound is absolute; the passage from one to the other is what matters. -- Norma Clarke The TLS
Rigorously sourced and meticulously researched ... 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. -- Richard Bratby Gramophone
Absorbing Wall Street Journal

KATE KENNEDY is one of the foremost critics of twentieth-century music of her generation. She has published widely, including The Silent Morning: Culture and the Armistice, 1918, Literary Britten, Lives of Houses and Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney (shortlisted by the Royal Philharmonic Society for their 2021 awards). She is a Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-writing, Director of the Centre for the Study of Women Composers, Director of the Museum of Music History, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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