Cellists and their stories

A few years ago, Robert DeMaine, the principal cellist of the LA Philharmonic, posted a topic on the now defunct Internet Cello Society webpage asking people to reflect on people who were important in their lives. This was my reply:

This is going to be a long one, but I think most of us have long stories to tell of what took us on our journeys. As I have been struggling with some major health issues the last few months, the opportunity that Robert presented with this topic gave me the chance to breathe and reflect on my path.

My family had settled in Ft. Worth, Texas in the fall of 1962. The next fall, Kennedy was assassinated. Shock, grief everywhere. Then came the Beatles. Joy and excitement in something new and thrilling. I started guitar lessons with an itinerant guitar player who came to the house. Then a quartet played in our school encouraging 3rd graders to sign up for violin. I did. The fall of 1965, we rented a violin and and I started in Mrs Virginia Hansen’s class once a week, using the Samuel Applebaum (the Guarneri Quartet’s violist, Michael Tree’s father) books. I went through the 3 books she used for 4th, 5th, and 6th grades in 2 months on my own, then had to have my tonsils out. When I came back, she asked me if I would like to learn the cello, as her cello player was going to graduate. She said she could get me a cello and the books, but that she couldn’t teach me to play it. I said that was fine, because I’d “already finished the violin.” (!!!) That summer, I took a week long group class with Professor Harriet Woldt (TCU/ principal of FW Symphony) with a bunch of other new cellists. In the fall, I began lessons with her most advanced student, Ms Linda Ferguson. Progress was fairly rapid, as I took to it quite naturally, and she was a good and charming teacher with a rye sense of humor. Lessons were often in a room where the ancient instruments were kept, and she invited me to play them after we finished our hour. Krumhorns, Gambas, viols of other sizes, she showed me what the notations meant and where the notes were, and we would plow through music. I was too young and naive to understand that I should not be able to do it… Linda went on to graduate school in Michigan but fell on ice, injuring her back, and had to give up the cello. She became a musicologist and I heard that she ended up teaching at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

At one point, she started me on the D minor Klengel Konzertstucke. I really liked it. The opportunity came up to audition for a Christmas break string program at Baylor, and I went. There, I was waiting in a hallway to play for the cellist on the faculty, Lev Aronson. I heard some guy screaming, “Beethoven was not some guy from Waxahachie!!!” I thought, hmmm. Then the kid before me came out a bit later in tears. Hmmm, again. I went in, and Aronson introduced himself (very elegantly attired, and with his complicated European manner), and asked what I would be playing. I told him the Klengel and he let out a little grunt and gestured to a chair. As I started to play, he began to weep, copiously. When I finished the exposition, I stopped, and he told me a story about when he went to audition for Klengel, with this piece. Later that afternoon, all of the cello students gathered in a larger room, and Lev entered with his Gofriller and viciously ripped into 4 octave scales with a massive sound. I was stunned and intrigued by this madman. He got me a scholarship for a summer program they had, and there I had more exposure to him and to other faculty. First time I played in a real orchestra (Beethoven!), and chamber music (piano trios, in what would set a precedent for my future career). Because of family issues, it was not possible for me to continue to work with Aronson (I had a brother with schizophrenia and mild retardation, as they described it at the time), so I continued to work with Ms Woldt.

Ms Woldt also taught theory, and was both very funny (a serious punster) and a very serious musician. Her husband had been a composition student of Hindemith’s at Yale, and later studied in Vienna, where he played French horn with the State Opera. I worked with both of them in my musical studies. They were a very unusual couple for that era, they adopted 4 kids that no one wanted, kids with problems. They were big supporters of liberal causes, American Civil Liberties, etc. They put their hearts where their beliefs were, no empty talk, action.

My sisters and my best friend at the time studied with the FW Symphony Concertmaster, Kenneth Schanewerk. Kenneth had studied with the founder of the FT Worth Symphony, Brooks Morris, and later with Roman Totenberg, and he became a very important mentor. He invited me to join the University Chamber Orchestra, though I was but 13 (and playing the cello for 2 years!). We played a lot of challenging repertoire, Stravinsky, etc. and I loved it. I joined the FW Youth Orchestra later that year, where the conductor was a brilliant young classical sax player named John Giordano. In 1969, the FWYO went on a 6 week tour of Europe. The culmination of that was a festival in St. Moritz, with an international orchestra composed of members of the various participating orchestras conducted by Stokowski. Our orchestra played a program of contemporary works by local composers, including a massive aleatoric work featuring electronic music from the synthesizer studio at what is now UTNT. It was a big hit. All this while my friends back in Texas were going to the rock festivals of that Woodstock Summer and doing Acid…

Many of my friends were starting bands in those days, and I would get together with them and listen to all kinds of music, jazz, blues, English prog, Hendrix; I brought Stockhausen, Berg, Stravinsky, Debussy… Then we started to jam. We formed a band that became well known in area bars as “Master Cylinder.” Most of the guys were older and in the jazz program and electronic music program at UTNT. Started playing in bars at 15. Met lots of girls, older girls with their own apartments. At TCU, there was a very active piano department where Lili Kraus was encamped with a group of marvelous young faculty around her. As the string department was not large, I got to coach chamber music with her several times. A true force of nature, passionate and heedless of convention. That summer, I went with my best friend to Taos, where Schanewerk had founded the Taos School of Chamber Music years before with Chilton Anderson (an amateur cellist, rancher, and heir to the Eastman Kodak fortune). Kenneth had a wonderful house there on the rim of a canyon that he had built himself. Not the canyon, the house. We went up to work on people’s houses, fixing cracks in the adobe that formed over the winter, and spreading fresh tar on the roofs. We stayed with Kenneth part of the time and camped out part of the time. Lots of chamber music, lots of adventures. I played for Robert Marsh, who was on the faculty at the Taos School at the time and got a scholarship for the following summer there. Went to a party at Georgia O’Keefe’s. This was the summer when all of the folks who burned out in Haight-Asbury formed a commune outside of Taos. It was a different world than we inhabit these days.

Back at Ft. Worth, I came to the attention of one of the new piano faculty at TCU, Luiz Carlos de Moura-Castro, who I had met at Kenneth’s in Taos. I began playing sonatas with several of his students and coaching with him. He invited me to his home, where he had an active salon of visiting artists, local playwrights, authors, painters, and musicians. There I met some amazing people, including Radu Lupu and his wife of that time (her father had been the British Ambassador to the Soviet Union), who had studied in Moscow with Rostropovich and was in his class with DuPre. Luiz and his wife had studied at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, in addition to their native countries of Brazil and England, respectively, and had a wide circle of friends.

I also had a chance to coach chamber music with Ft. Worth and TCU’s reining Diva of the piano world (which is saying something, as it is the home of both the Van Cliburn Competition and Van Cliburn). She was a true force of Nature

Lili Kraus