Most students will know of the studies and exercises by Louis Feuillard, the teacher of Paul Tortelier.īooks of various levels of difficulty which cover cello technique will initially be given to the student by their teacher. This process continued throughout the twentieth century. A corpus of etudes also emerged at this time which presented huge challenges to existing cello technique. With the benefit of early recordings, we can listen to artists such as Casals, Feuermann, and Piatigorsky who were products of different cello schools, and were clearly virtuosos of the highest quality.įrom the mid nineteenth century, teachers composed ‘technical concertos’ to prepare the cello technique of their students for the larger challenges ahead. In fact, driven by great teacher performers such as Klengel, Popper, Sebastian Lee, and Goltermann to name but four, the foundations for a further development of cello technique had been laid, and there was to be a great flowering of wonderful soloists at the beginning of the twentieth century. In old age, after hearing a performance of the Dvorak cello concerto, Brahms is said to have remarked that had he known a cello could be used in such a way, that he himself would have written a cello concerto. Whereas Paganini and Liszt revolutionized technique on the violin and the piano in the first half of the nineteenth century, the cello was still perceived as not being suitable for such treatment.
Haydn’s two cello concertos from the same period were inspired by and composed for particular performers in his orchestra. These players, most notably Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805), toured throughout Europe raising the profile of the cello and in the process inspired other cellists and composers to push at the boundaries of previously accepted cello techniques. For the first hundred years of its history, the cello was considered to be primarily an instrument which provided the bass line.Īs was often the case in musical history, the expansion of cello technique was driven principally by a succession of virtuoso cellists performing their own compositions. Historically, the expansion of ‘cello technique’ came later than on the violin.
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