Ari Goldman - The Late Starters Orchestra

Soon afterward, cello in hand, he boarded an ocean liner bound for Guatemala. He had no money and knew he would have to earn a living upon his arrival, so he spent the better part of the two weeks at sea learning Spanish. He was a quick study. By the time he reached Puerto Barrios, the main Guatemalan seaport on the Caribbean, he had serviceable Spanish.

Mr. J secured a job at the music conservatory in Guatemala City where he taught cello and music theory. He eventually became the head of the conservatory and made a name for himself as a chamber musician and orchestra soloist. In Guatemala, he ran into another German refugee, Ilonka Breitenbach, a singer five years his senior, whom he knew from the musical evenings in his home in Berlin. They married in Guatemala and had two children, Andrew and Dorothea.

Once again, however, Mr. J became the victim of a government decree. His job at the conservatory was a government post and, after World War II, Guatemala decided to purge foreigners from all government positions. He was without a job, and, by this time, his marriage was deteriorating. He divorced Ilonka and left her and the children behind in Guatemala to move to New York in search of work.

Before long, he set himself up in New York as a chamber musician and found a position as the principal cellist of the New York City Symphony Orchestra, which played at City Center under the leadership of a young conductor named Leonard Bernstein. The orchestra, which had been founded by Leopold Stokowski, was aimed at a younger classical music audience, offering more modern music and cheaper tickets than the New York Philharmonic. When the orchestra folded in 1948, Bernstein wrote Mr. J a letter of recommendation that said: “His tone is most pleasing, his musicianship sincere and sensitive, and his devotion to music unswerving.”

Around the same time, Mr. J met a graceful young pianist named Renata Garve, like him a German refugee. They married and set up a house in Westchester County, just north of New York City. Mr. J and his new wife went to Guatemala to pick up Andrew, who was then eight years old. Ilonka and Dorothea moved to Germany to set up a new life there.

Mr. J and Renata had a son, Bruno, born in 1951 and named for the great German-born conductor Bruno Walter. A year later, the couple made their New York debut as a piano-cello duo at Town Hall. The review in the Times was a rave. “Mr. Joachim’s cello sang with a warm, strong voice, tinted with the dark and rosy luster of the instrument itself,” wrote the Times reviewer Carter Hermon. “The tone had body, but it was smooth and clear even in the lowest register and it was capable of light stage-whispers of attractive feathery quality.”

At the time, Mr. J was a member of the cello section of the Philharmonic, where he stayed for nine years — under Stokowski, Dimitri Mitropoulos, and finally Bernstein — before leaving to become the principal cellist at the Baltimore Symphony under Peter Herman Adler in 1959. With his family rooted in New York’s Westchester County, Mr. J commuted to Baltimore for concerts. But things were not good at home. To hear Andrew tell it, Renata was not kind to her stepson.

“Stepmonster,” he told me years later. He recalled being excluded from “family vacations” that involved Renata and Bruno but not him. They went off to Maine as a family while he was sent to summer camp. They went to Europe while he stayed with Renata’s parents, where he remembers being barely tolerated if not ignored.

When he was ready for high school, Andrew boarded with a family in New York City and used their address to gain admission. He remembers never having enough money for food. His father lived by certain German aphorisms about money like Sparsamkeit erhalt das haus (Frugality keeps the house). There was actually virtue in hunger, his father would say, quoting another German proverb, Hunger ist der beste koch (Hunger is the best cook).

In 1962, tragedy struck. Renata was diagnosed with cancer and did not respond to treatment. She was forty-two when she died.

Mr. J, devastated by Renata’s death, quit the Baltimore Symphony because he was needed at home to take care of Bruno, who was twelve. Andrew was already on his own, although he told me he was on his own emotionally years earlier.

Mr. J stopped concertizing and found work as a “section player” in various local orchestras and teaching music at the Manhattan School of Music and other conservatories. By the time I met him in 1976, he had married and divorced again (his third wife, Ursula Hirsch, was a former student of his) and was the father of a ten-year-old daughter, his fourth child, Angie.

“My father was a wonderful human being,” Andrew said. “He was very sensitive, altruistic, and insightful. However, he was a terrible father, and had very few social skills, owing to his having devoted himself so exclusively to the cello at such a young age.”

Andrew told me several cringe-worthy stories about his father. Unlike other fathers who wore fedoras in the 1960s, Mr. J wore a beret. Though he didn’t like neckties, he wore them because it was the convention of the day, but they inevitably clashed with the colorful sport shirts he wore. His children hated to go shopping with him. “He would go into a discount store and inquire if the merchandise he was buying was of top quality,” Andrew recalled. Then he would ask if he could get a further discount because he was a musician. When he would finally make a purchase, he complained about the plastic bag the merchandise was put in. “He would request a more colorful bag because, he said, it looked more ‘gay,’ ” meaning festive. On top of it all, he spoke with a heavy German accent.

“To say the least, we were extremely embarrassed and annoyed,” Andrew told me. “Heinrich was a uniquely strange man. Yes, he was a terrible father, but so out of touch that one could hardly hold that against him.”

A TERRIBLE FATHER, PERHAPS; but a superb teacher. He made the cello come alive for me. More than anyone I’ve met, Mr. J saw the cello in human terms.

He’d take the cello and slowly run his hands down it from top to bottom. Here, at the top, is the head. It even has ears, these pegs that you tweak when it sings out of tune. The head is connected to the long slender neck, which ends in the sloping shoulders. It has a back and, when I turn it over, a belly, both of them slightly arched. Overall, it has the feel of a rather womanly body, with a slim waist in between the curves. And, finally, it stands on a single leg, which we call the end pin.

Sometimes when I arrived at his studio for a lesson, he’d be playing his viola da gamba and he’d say sheepishly, The cello is my wife, but the gamba is my mistress!

When I first took hold of the cello, he told me not simply to hold it but to fully embrace it like you would hug a beautiful woman . I put my arms around the neck and my legs around the body of the instrument. Now play, he said, instructing me to run the bow over the strings. Don’t just listen to the sound. Feel the sound. Feel the vibrations, not only in your hands but up your thighs and on your chest. Feel the sound.

The cello is something of an enigma, he taught me. It has the body of a woman, with an ample curved bottom, a narrow waist, and a full curved top. And the cello has what musicians call f-holes — orifices shaped like two bold italic f s — which some musicians liken to the mouth, ears, and eyes of a woman. And, yet, for all these feminine attributes, the cello has a man’s voice. Its tonal range most approximates that of a man, sounding at times like the bass singer in a barbershop quartet and at other times like the quartet’s male alto.