From the Alwinac: 1907-8: Alwin’s Gap Year, Part 1 Encore: The 1907 Farewell Playlist

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[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

In the leadup to his departure from the US, Alwin Schroeder’s 1907 farewell concerts started with a February 3 program at Boston’s Chickering Hall. Reviews of the Kniesel Quartet’s March and April 1907 concerts in New York, Boston, New Haven, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Louisville, St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and other cities all make special mention of Schroeder, noting his incomparable skill and status as a solo and ensemble cellist on the occasion of his final US appearances. In Baltimore he received a 10-minute ovation, Philadelphia admirers gave him an inscribed gold watch, and in New York a “superb silver punch bowl” was his parting gift, presented after a eulogizing speech by the music publisher Gustav Schirmer. (Ever dignified and self-effacing, Schroeder himself never addressed his audiences from the stage, even to offer a few parting words.) During this period there was much speculation about the future of the Kniesel Quartet without Schroeder, and Franz Kniesel himself seriously considered disbanding it until a group of New York patrons funded his search for a new cellist from Europe. Here's what he played on these concerts….
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Read on…on the Alwinac website itself…. (It includes a link to listen to the playlist.)

Copyright © 2023 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: 1907-8: Alwin’s Gap Year, Part 1

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“His technical command of his noble instrument is infallible, his tone full and pure and his style free and genial, like his personality. It is said that he has more friends than any other musicians that have lived in the United States for any length of time, and he is affectionately known across the breadth of this country as “Papa” Schroeder. His loss to the Kneisel Quartet will be irreparable, but he will return again and again to this country for concert tours.”
                                    Indianapolis News, April 6,1907, p. 9

Alwin Schroeder spent the 1907-8 season in Europe, then returned to the United States. This was not his original plan. What happened? Before getting to the reasons that he came back, I will explore the motivations for his decision to leave the US.
    First, some context. The preceding season (1906-7) was Alwin’s 16th year as the cellist of the Kniesel Quartet. This ensemble was then at the apex of its powers and popularity, and was hailed in many quarters as the best quartet in the world. Season after season, Schroeder had been heard regularly in solo performances on the quartet’s concert tours throughout the US. But for the four transplanted European musicians, there had always been a longing to return to the old world, to be remembered and recognized on their old stomping grounds before their powers waned. They said as much in 1903, when they resigned their principal positions in the Boston Symphony Orchestra to devote themselves to quartet and, in the case of Kniesel and Schroeder, solo playing. Four years later, the quartet’s many admirers were “astonished” to learn that Schroeder was leaving the quartet and the country to settle in Frankfurt, Germany. Why would he want—or feel he needed—to go?....
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Read on…on the Alwinac website itself…..

Copyright © 2023 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: A Composition Update and Remembrance of Dimiter Christoff

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It has been about a year since, on a fine spring day in 2022, after the last April snow “surprise” hereabouts, I started to compose. I had little prior evidence of my own abilities as a creator of music, unless you count a number of arrangements I have done of others’ music, and in some ways perhaps these do count, but the act of writing a new piece of music requires a level of inspiration and confidence that I wasn’t convinced I had. Aside from a modest store of musical knowledge and experience, what really did I have to go on?
    Twelve months and more than fifty brief pieces later, I can say that a small kernel of inspiration goes a long way. Most of the way in fact. It’s what Beethoven called the poetic idea, or what Bruce Adolphe in his wonderful new book on composing refers to as the vision stage of the creative process. It can be a mood, a rhythm, a melodic gesture, an intriguing quotation from literature, a photo or other image, a blade of grass, anything. Not necessarily anything grand or elaborate, or even all that specific. For many of the pieces I have composed (most for piano), my inspiration has come from students whose choices of musical parameters such as tempo, rhythmic motif, interval size and direction, and character have excluded other choices I might have made on my own and provided a more sharply defined and differentiated starting point for each student’s piece. As with any other type of inspiring kernel, these pre-determined aspects help guide and speed my journey down a creative path that is unique for each piece.

    I have long marveled at others’ ability to thrive under what might be considered self-imposed creative constraints. My father’s very successful forays into the sestina form in poetry, where a set of pre-determined words must end each line in a pre-determined order that shifts from stanza to stanza, come immediately to mind. So do the always arresting works of Bulgarian composer Dimiter Christoff, who rarely used an interval wider than a whole-step. I too have discovered the hidden delights of such constraints, and find myself eagerly seeking them. One of my more recent solo cello compositions uses just four notes (albeit over four octaves). Others tend toward direct repetition over motivic development or transformation. One recent composition for cello and piano is limited to textures reminiscent of Beethoven, while another evokes those of Chopin, and a third those of a pop ballade. Sometimes my initial plan plays out much as expected, but with many pieces it morphs into something else along the way. I enjoy stepping back and hearing what is taking/has taken shape and how it happened, and to wonder at the very existence of something that wasn’t there before....
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Read on…. [it gets better and better, says the editor]

Copyright © 2023 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Posthumous Dialogues: Roumen Balyozov, Bulgarian Cellist-Composer, and J. S. Bach

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Listen to Balyozov’s Baza i nadstroika (string duo version of Bach's first cello suite)

During the month of March my thoughts often turn to Bulgaria, not least because this is the month of the martenitsa, a kind of good luck bracelet that Bulgarians exchange on March 1 in anticipation of the coming spring. In the Bulgarian calendar, March is named for Baba Marta (Grandmother Marta), the feminine figure that deftly navigates the challenging transition from winter. Musically I try to spend extra time this month with the music of Bach, whose birthday is celebrated on the 21st. Recently I discovered this exquisite string duo arrangement of Bach’s first cello suite that deserves wider attention, and it got me thinking about the arranger, a Bulgarian musician with whom I collaborated on a number of projects over the years.
    Roumen Balyozov (1949-2019) was one of the most colorful personalities in the Bulgarian artistic community. An accomplished cellist, he was for many years a member of the Symphony Orchestra of the Bulgarian National Radio (BNR). He is best remembered as a composer, a kind of self-styled Bulgarian John Cage with an insatiable appetite for musical provocations. It was Rumen (Balyozkata), with his impossibly thick glasses, long unkempt hair curling out from a quasi-Amish black hat, and a toothy smile that made his eyes twinkle and his nose wrinkle, who knew more about the American avant-garde than I—resident American musician of Bulgaria—did….
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Read on…on the Alwinac website itself….

Copyright © 2023 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: From Ballenstedt to Berlin: Life of Alwin, Part 2

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Part 2 of my biographical sketch of Alwin Schroeder is titled “Ballenstedt and Berlin.” It deals mainly with the years 1868-1874, when the teenaged Alwin was playing viola with his older brothers in a professional string quartet, and is now live on the schroeder170.org website. Read Part 2 here, or start from Part 1, here.

Copyright © 2023 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: 19th Century Cellists in the US: George Knoop (1797-1849)

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“If you would hear the very soul tell all its deepest, most inner feeling,
if you would listen to language as from another world and from some matured spirit in a more exalted and perfect state than here below,
go to hear Knoop.
You will feel as if he were drawing out of you your very soul.”

C. P. Cranch to Miss Julia Myers, April 11, 1842

in The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch

Johann Georg Knoop (sometimes spelled Knop, 1797-1849) was a celebrated German cellist who spent the last decade of his life as one of the most highly regarded instrumental performers in the United States. Because his name was commonly abbreviated as G. Knoop, he is often confused with his younger brother Gustav Knoop (1805-?), also a cellist. Georg was born in Gottingen, may have studied with Romberg, and made his concert debut at the age of eight. in 1816 he succeeded Dotzauer’s teacher Johann Jakob Kriegk as first cellist in the Meiningen court orchestra. His first wife was Kriegk’s daughter Louise, and their cellist son Huldreich (1820-1898) played alongside Carl Ludwig Dotzauer in Spohr’s orchestra in Cassel. Georg and Gustav had six other siblings, including the Basel music publisher Ernest Knoop and Wilhelm Knoop, a violinist in the Meiningen orchestra. Their father Conrad Knoop was a Gottingen music dealer and teacher. (letter from Conrad Knop to Louis Spohr, March 28, 1822)
    In addition to his Meiningen duties, Georg Knoop toured as a soloist in Europe, performing to acclaim in Paris and London from 1833. He seems to have made regular appearances in England for several years, performing concertos at the Philharmonic concerts and earning the epithet “violoncellist to her Majesty.” (London Morning Post, July 14, 1835, p. 3) In the spring of 1835 Knoop was in direct competition with other leading cellists of the day, performing solos on the same concerts as A. F. Servais and Carl Schuberth. Of the Knoop/Schuberth play-off, the Morning Post wrote, “…both the violoncellists displayed great talent, particularly Mr. Knoop, in a Swiss divertimento, in which he introduced the harmonics with excellent effect.” (May 30, 1835, p. 3) Georg’s solos on another London concert were described as “both beautiful in style and extraordinary in execution.” Both Knoop and Servais were found “wanting that body of tone which no one except [London cellist Robert] Lindley has yet acquired, and which is necessary to fill a large space.” (Court Magazine and Belle Assemblee, October, 1835, p. 176) Knoop himself confided to Spohr that “My stay in London was not particularly pleasant, as the artists there placed many obstacles in my way….
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Copyright © 2023 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Wooden Angels: Silent Night for Cello Ensemble

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Looking up from the organ loft at St. Trinitatus church in the Thurginian town of Holzengel (“wooden angel”), home of Alwin Schroeder’s paternal forebears, a musical score comes into view. Foregrounded diagonally within a music-themed quadrant of the church's painted wooden ceiling, the meticulously reproduced sheet music is readily identifiable as the soprano and alto parts of Gruber’s Christmas carol “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.” With my warmest wishes for love- and music-filled holidays, I hope you will enjoy this cello ensemble version of Silent Night, performed by the cellists of the Philharmonia Orchestra.
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Read on the Alwinac website itself….

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Catching Up: My Most Recent Cello Performance Videos

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Earlier in the year I was able to record a handful of cello pieces to add to the collection on my YouTube channel, and today I actually added them to the collection! Of course there is a story behind each of these pieces, and I hope to get around to telling these stories in the near future. For now, here are the video links, with some suggestions for further reading and my wish for pleasant listening.
    F. Prume, Melancolie, Op. 1. Several European cellists, George Knoop and Theodore Ahrend among them, played versions of this once-popular violin piece after settling in the United States. Read my post about Ahrend here. The Knoop story is on the way.…    _______________
Read on….

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Boston Symphony First Cellists: New Random Facts

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During a recent visit to the Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives, I came across documentation of some interesting facts related to the orchestra’s principal cellists of yesteryear.

Carl Bayrhoffer, BSO first cellist for the latter part of the orchestra’s inaugural 1881-2 season, wrote to BSO founder Henry Lee Higginson in 1892, hoping to return to the BSO. At about the same time, a Mr. Underwood in Glasgow was asking Higginson about the workings of BSO as Underwood helped start the permanent Glasgow orchestra. Higginson may have suggested that Bayrhoffer contact founding BSO conductor George Henschel, because the following season Bayrhoffer joined the new Glasgow organization under Henschel, renewing the working relationship started a decade earlier in Boston.

Wilhelm Mueller, Boston Symphony first cellist from 1882-1885, was breaching his BSO contract during his final BSO season by playing in New York orchestras. The programs of the New York Philharmonic from the 1884-5 season show Mueller sharing the third cello stand with Adolph Hartdegen. Knowing that Mueller had accepted outside work prohibited by his current BSO contract, BSO manager Charles Ellis sought New York legal help, hoping to make an example of Mueller, because at the time several other BSO players were also in breach of contract. The result seems to have been that Fritz Giese was called in to serve in Mueller’s place that season, even as Mueller’s contract was still in force.

Fritz Giese cabled Higginson in May 1887 that he was delayed in Grand Rapids, MI, due to an unsettled case, the nature of which was not discussed. Then in Dec. 1888 Giese cabled Higginson from Philadelphia, asking to be excused from two rehearsals and saying that conductor Gericke had already agreed. Later in his last BSO season, Giese was out for several concerts due to injuries sustained when he fell out of a carriage in New York. At least as concerning at the time was the damage to his Stradivarius cello, for Giese had fallen on top of it....
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Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Introducing my new online Alwin Schroeder biography

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I recently uploaded the first installment of my expanded Alwin Schroeder biography. This first part covers Alwin’s ancestry and early childhood (1855-1868), with details on the musical activities of his father and older brothers in Alwin’s native Neuhaldensleben. Read it here.

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Schroeder Student Spotlight: Ernest Lachmund (1865-1954)

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Among the Oscar Cobb opera houses highlighted in my previous post was one that existed briefly in Duluth, Minnesota. In a surprise Schroeder connection, one of the musicians who made his studio in the Temple Opera Building before it succumbed to fire in 1895 was Ernest Lachmund, a cellist, pianist, and composer who counted Alwin Schroeder among his teachers. I recently had the pleasure of collaborating with the Duluth concert organization Matinee Musicale (founded in 1900) in unearthing a cello piece by Lachmund that hadn’t been heard in a hundred years. Cellist Ifetayo Ali-Landing’s subsequent performance of Lachmund’s rediscovered Waltz-Serenade for Matinee Musicale can be heard here.
    Ernest Lachmund’s father Gustav Otto Lachmund had fled Germany following the failed 1848 revolution, going first to Missouri, where Ernest’s older brother Carl was born in 1853, then to Clinton, Iowa, where Ernest was born in 1865. Carl and Ernest both studied music in Germany. Carl attended the Cologne conservatory as a piano and violin student from 1867 to 1871, and Ernest followed in his footsteps, arriving in Cologne as a 13-year-old in 1878. Two years later Ernest was at the Royal Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin, studying chamber music with Joachim Quartet members Joseph Joachim, Emanuel Wirth, and Robert Hausmann, and cello with Anton Hekking. In Berlin Ernest attended the first local performance of Wagner’s complete Ring cycle and heard Brahms as a pianist. Meanwhile Carl had become an ardent follower and piano student of Franz Liszt in Weimar, and Ernest himself observed Liszt’s classes during the summer of 1884....
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Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Oscar’s Opera Houses: A Virtual Tour

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[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

As a follow-up to my Ashland Grand Opera House post, here are the briefest of sketches on some of the late 19th-century opera houses built to designs by Chicago theatrical architect Oscar Cobb (1842-1908). These 24 buildings represent about 12% of the 200 or more theatres Cobb designed. I have arranged them by state, with asterisks denoting the five that are still standing today. The other 19 were lost to fire or demolished; the year of destruction is given next to the year of construction. Images are always below the entry they illustrate.

ALABAMA
Selma Opera House, Selma, AL (1880s-1972). 1000 seats. Appears to be synonymous with the hall of the Selma Academy of Music and the Edwards Opera House, both of which were managed by Louis Gerstman until 1896. A period postcard depicts the exterior (see photo below). A movie theatre by 1914, it was known from 1938 as the Wilby Theatre. Lost to fire in 1972.

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Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Lazar Nikolov: Bulgarian Composer Centennial (1922-2022)

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Read my earlier Lazar Nikolov post here.
Listen to Nikolov’s second cello sonata:


Yesterday [August 26], on the occasion of Lazar Nikolov’s 100th birthday [1922], his long-time musical associate Dragomir Yossifov observed that Nikolov’s music continues to receive polished performances by leading Bulgarian musicians of the younger generation. This is a happy state of affairs. It is not by any means a “given” that any composer’s music will outlive the composer. I suspect that Lazar himself, who had been accustomed to the near-impossibility of getting an unbiased hearing of his own compositions, would enjoy the irony that now, almost two decades after his death [in 2005], young performers are voluntarily seeking his music out to perform.
    I was once one of those young performers. In September 1991, then a new arrival in Bulgaria, I wanted to meet the most celebrated living Bulgarian composer. The next thing I knew I was drinking tea across the table from Lazar Nikolov and his wife Hanna at their Sofia apartment. I remember the excitement I felt as he played recordings of his music, laid out the scores of several of his cello works, and invited me to play them. I remember that same kind of excitement, a sense of profound momentousness and child-like giddiness all wrapped up in one, every time I performed or recorded one of his works. Its echo comes back to me now as I write this....
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Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Summer Song: The Ashland (Wisconsin) Grand Opera House

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I discovered the Ashland Grand Opera House on a recent trip to the Chequamegon Bay area on the southern shores of Lake Superior. A city of about 8,000 inhabitants, Ashland, Wisconsin, was founded in 1854. For a time it was the third busiest Great Lakes port, behind Chicago and Buffalo, with ships loaded with northern Wisconsin pine, brownstone, and iron ore departing from Ashland to supply the rest of the Midwest and points beyond. The central ore dock was, at the time of its completion in 1925, the largest concrete structure of its kind in the world….
    We first learned of the ore dock on a tour through the streets of downtown Ashland, where more than twenty expansive murals adorn as many facades, each visualizing a chapter in the story of Ashland and its citizens….
    One of the murals is a tribute to local railroad workers and located near the former train depot, an impressive brownstone structure two blocks south of Main on 3^rd Ave. W. As we walked along 3^rd Ave., a smaller building on the east side of the street caught my attention. A painted, poster-like sign identified it as the Ashland Grand Opera House. An attempt had been made to visualize a fanciful operatic scene through mural art on a more miniature scale. The familiar likeness of famed operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti in full voice covers an upper window, while a Wagnerian soprano holds forth from another. The boarded-up doors, no doubt leading to the second-story performance space, and twin abandoned store-fronts on the ground level make the prolonged disuse of the building painfully apparent. But the signage seems an encouraging indication that the opera house is still a source of local pride in Ashland….
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Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Carl Schroeder’s Sondershausen: Schroeder Travel Log, Part 3

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Exactly three years ago [August 10], as Petros and I circled the central streets of Sondershausen in search of a free parking spot, we noticed the banners with the cello-friendly logo and the slogan, “Muzik im herz” (Music at Heart). Sondershausen’s claim to being a “music city” (Musikstadt) is more than a ploy to increase tourism in this picturesque Thuringian city of (currently) about 21,000 inhabitants. While targeted efforts have been made over the last 20-odd years to strengthen the presence of music in Sondershausen’s public spaces, the city’s musical traditions run much longer and deeper, with local institutions such as the Loh Orchestra and the Carl Schroeder Conservatory standing out as traditional sources of civic pride. Alwin Schroeder's older brother Carl was himself decisively connected to both the orchestra and the music school, and is celebrated in Sondershausen as a local musical hero.
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Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Signature Suites: My Latest Creative Obsession

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To those of you who know me as a sometime arranger of cello music, usually from original Bulgarian works for other instruments or orchestra, it may come as a surprise that over the last couple of months I have become slightly obsessed with composing … for piano. I have never considered myself a composer, nor am I a performing pianist, so this current creative wave of mine has come up unexpectedly. But as long as I’m on it, I plan to ride it out!
    There is a bit of a backstory here. When I returned permanently to the US after a quarter-century (OK, I rounded up from 23 years) of musical adventures in Bulgaria, I had the opportunity to work with some wonderful young people on projects geared to making musical creativity more immediately accessible to students with a very limited musical knowledge base. One of the tools we developed to facilitate this creativity was a musical notation cipher, where each letter of the alphabet is linked to a music note letter. The original idea for this type of code, arrived at quite spontaneously as I remember, came from two very dear students, cellist Tressa Hunt and violinist Ellen Hayashi. Based on a substitution principle, the code unlocks possibilities for creating a melody—a cipher in sound—from any series of words.
    For centuries, classical composers have been using similar techniques to fashion musical cryptograms. Personal mottos have formed the basis of such works as the F A E Sonata, a collaborative effort of Schumann, Brahms, and Dietrich, who took violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim’s Frei aber einsam (“free but lonely”) motto as their theme as a birthday surprise for Joachim in 1852. (Brahms’ Scherzo movement for this sonata is often played as a stand-alone piece: ) 

Over a century earlier, Johann Sebastian Bach had introduced his…
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Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: That Fellow with the Cello: Mello-Cello Strikes Again

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I’m starting out this post to the somewhat unlikely soundtrack of “Mello Cello,” a meditative instrumental piece by Steven Halpern and cellist David Darling:

I say unlikely because my own meditation today on cello mellowness is centered around the type of Tin Pan Alley song popular in vaudeville about a century ago—a slightly different style of music.
    The tradition of rhyming cello with mellow goes back a long way, at least as far back as the anonymous poem “To my violoncello,” published in a Southern paper in 1819 (“What joy to hear the notes so mellow/Of thee, my aged Violoncello!”). The phrase “mello cello,” with this spelling and often hyphenated as if to reinforce its onomonopiac implications, seems to have really caught hold in American popular culture in the 1910s. The songs I’ve discussed in previous mello cello posts—Charlie Chaplin’s “Oh! That Cello” of 1916 and the Neil Moret/Harry Williams song “Mello Cello”  of 1921—were in fact later arrivals on the mello cello scene.
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Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Happy 167th Birthday, Alwin!

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In honor of Alwin Schroeder’s 167th birthday, here are the Sarabande and Gigue from the Suite in E minor by Julius Klengel, his Leipzig cello colleague. This was Klengel’s very first opus (at least that has an opus number and was later published), written around 1874-5, when Schroeder was just starting his self-study of the cello.

    My Schroeder/Klengel post details their years together as the two leading cellists of Leipzig, 1880-1891.
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Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Tale of Two Cellists: Alwin Schroeder and Julius Klengel

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Klengel dedicated his Op. 2 cello pieces to Schroeder. Listen to the opening, Berceuse:



During the 1880s, two outstanding cellists represented Leipzig on the European music scene: Leipzig native Julius Klengel and his Gewandhaus Orchestra and Leipzig Conservatory colleague, Alwin Schroeder. As this timeline shows, their early careers developed along similar, sometimes intertwining lines.

1855
On June 15 Alwin Schroeder is born in Neuhaldensleben. His father is a local music director, and his three older brothers, younger sister, and younger brother all pursue music professionally.

1859
On Sept. 24 Julius Klengel, the son of an amateur musician, is born in Leipzig. Julius’s grandfather Moritz Klengel had been Gewandhaus Orchestra concertmaster, and his aunt married a later Gewandhaus concertmaster, Engelbert Rontgen. Julius’s older brother Paul, also a musician, is five years older (born in 1854).

1862
Alwin, age 7, begins violin and piano studies in Neuhaldensleben with his father and eldest brother Hermann.

1869
Julius, age 10, begins studies with ….
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Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean

From the Alwinac: Violoncello Without a Master: Alwin the Auto-Didact

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[The Alwinac blog is part of the schroeder170 project, honoring the life and musical career of cellist Alwin Schroeder (1855-1928) and exploring the history of cello playing in the US.]

Alwin Schroeder’s status as a self-taught cellist gained widespread notoriety from at least as early as 1885. That year the Leipzig Musicalisches Wochenblatt (LMW) published a biographical sketch of the then 30-year-old Gewandhaus solo cellist emphasizing the unusual nature of Schroeder’s cellistic beginnings:

Those who hear Alwin Schröder play without knowing about his studies will assume that he has been playing his instrument since early childhood. … And yet that is not the case: Alwin Schröder did not discover his love for what is now his main instrument until very late in life, and the level he has reached at present is clear evidence of his great talent, since as a cellist he is completely self-taught, i.e., had no teacher.

    With certain variations and embellishments, the 1885 account of Alwin’s switch to cello would be repeated throughout Schroeder’s career, in sources including the Riemann and Baker biographical dictionaries of musicians and the Wasielewski and Van der Straeten histories of the violoncello and its players. The LMW profile tells it like this:

During this period, as chance would have it, he found a cello left behind by his brother Carl at their parents’ house and felt the urge to learn the familiar solo from Rossini’s William Tell Overture. As a joke, the next time his brother Carl visited their parents, he played it for him, but Carl took the successful attempt very seriously, and told Alwin to continue his studies of the cello in earnest. Alwin took his brother’s advice and used the free time he had – he had meanwhile taken a post with the Fliege Orchestra as a violinist, which took him to St. Pe tersburg – to continue studying the cello. He worked so hard that only a few months later he was able to exchange the violin for a cello. In autumn 1875 he became the first cellist in the Liebig Concert Orchestra…

    This narrative raises a number of questions that I will now explore.... 

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Read on….

Copyright © 2022 by Geoffrey Dean