Synopsis
The meteoric career of the Austrian cellist Emanuel Feuermann ended with his sudden and tragic death in 1942, aged only thirty-nine. A brilliant soloist and chamber performer, many expected him to inherit from Pablo Casals the reputation of the greatest cellist of all time. The trio he formed with Jascha Heifetz and Artur Rubinstein was considered the world's leading chamber ensemble. This new biography of Feuermann - a combination of documentary and oral history and narrative - discusses his life, work and legacy, and gives him the place in musical history that he was denied by his early death.
The New Yorker
Although Pablo Casals remains the popular ideal of a cellist, cellists themselves tend to prefer the more obscure Emanuel Feuermann, who was born a century ago, in Jewish Galicia, and died in 1942, at the age of thirty-nine. One of the greatest musical prodigies of the twentieth century -- he was made a conservatory professor at sixteen -- Feuermann had a flawless technique and all but created the modern cello sound. Morreau's exemplary biography reveals a personality in which artistry, careerism, and naïveté crowded out any glimmer of self-doubt. "Difficulties do not exist for Mr. Feuermann," a critic said of one performance, and these words apply equally well to the cellist's boundless energy and confidence. Having moved to America to escape the Nazis, Feuermann was on the verge of stardom when he died. Photographs here show him slouching against his Buick, advertising Chesterfields, and performing in front of the Stars and Stripes -- a tantalizing glimpse of the household name that might have been.