Paul Tortelier

Paul Tortelier pursued the cello as a means of infusing music with genuine vitality, thereby gaining the esteem and warmth of innumerable fellow musicians. His close and lasting connection with Pablo Casals led a French critic to describe him as Apollo to Casals' Jupiter. In the same spirit as Casals, Tortelier insisted on using only one finger at a time against the string so that vibrations could resonate freely. Imaginative invention and emotional spontaneity defined his interpretations and drew many younger players to his example.

His mother gave him a cello at the age of six, steering him toward a professional path from the earliest years. Beatrice Bluhm, his first teacher, acquainted the boy with the supple wrist and unrestricted right-arm motion prized by the Franco-Belgian School. At ten he enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire, where Gérard Hekking cultivated both rhythmic flexibility and a lifelong devotion to Bach. While still a student he played in Parisian cafés and cinemas, and at sixteen he left the Conservatoire with a first prize.

Following his appointment as assistant principal cellist of the Paris Radio Orchestra, Tortelier made his debut with the Lamoureux Concert Association and simultaneously pursued harmony studies with Jean Gallon at the Conservatoire. Upon finishing those classes he received another first prize, this time in composition. As a member of the Monte Carlo Symphony Orchestra he performed under Arturo Toscanini and Bruno Walter, and he appeared as soloist in Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote with the composer conducting.

Although his engagements expanded in the late 1930s to include tours across Asia, Africa, and both North and South America, the Second World War interrupted his momentum. After the war he resumed concert activity. Moved by the founding of the Israeli state, the Catholic cellist relocated his family to Mabaroth, a kibbutz situated only a few hundred yards from the border with hostile territory. At the inaugural Prades Festival, marking the two-hundredth anniversary of Bach’s death in 1950, Casals invited him to serve as principal cellist. From 1956 to 1969 Tortelier held a professorship at the Paris Conservatoire; from 1969 to 1975 he taught at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, Germany. In his later decades conducting claimed a larger share of his schedule, as did composition, which yielded two concertos. His treatise How I Play, How I Teach remains a standard reference for contemporary cello technique.