From Italy to New York, Spain to Carlow - the biography of the Piatti cello made by Stradivari is a lively tale unearthed by its present owner, Mexican cellist Carlos Prieto, writes Arminta Wallace
Some stories you couldn't make up. If, for example, you were going to concoct the history of an eminent and hugely valuable Stradivarius, you probably wouldn't mix in a 19th-century Irish sherry merchant by the name of Don Alonso Dowell, an opera company in 18th-century Spain, a Carlow clergyman and an alcoholic New York socialite who was a relative of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. These, however, are just a few incidents from the real-life story of the 288-year-old instrument known as the Piatti cello - as related by its owner, the celebrated Mexican cellist Carlos Prieto, in his book The Adventures of a Cello.
Prieto will talk about the book - and his reasons for writing it - at the John Field Room in the National Concert Hall next Monday at 8pm. He will also give a solo recital of music connected with his instrument. "When this cello came into my hands in 1979," he says on the phone from his home in Mexico City, "I thought I would like to find out something about its history. Then, I can say, it turned into some kind of obsession. I became a detective investigating the life of a cello."
It wasn't an easy task; musical instruments often leave no trace in history. "It has taken me 10 years, and visits to countless museums, cathedrals, and places where the cello has been," Prieto says.
Known as the "red cello" because of its warmly glowing varnish, the Piatti cello was made in 1720 - around the time when Bach was writing his six extraordinary suites for unaccompanied cello. Besides the Piatti, the 76-year-old master luthier from Cremona, Antonio Stradivari, produced 14 violins that year. It took him just over a month to make the cello from Balkan maple and Italian pine.
"Once finished," writes Prieto, "it was hung in front of a large window in his workshop so that the sun would dry the marvellous varnish." Prieto envisages his cello's biography as a series of journeys. It stayed at Stradivari's house until after the instrument-maker's death, when a cellist named Carlo Moro bought it from one of the Stradivari sons.
In 1762 Moro and some other musicians from Cremona were offered jobs with an opera orchestra in southern Spain. They crammed into a coach, with the cello in a wooden box on the top rack along with the rest of the baggage, and set off. Moro and his cello worked at the opera house in Cadiz until 1773, when the opera company packed up, leaving Moro without a source of income.
He was, however, fortunate in his friends. One of them was Father Jose Saenz de Santa Maria, a fiercely determined priest who not only got Moro a job with the cathedral orchestra but also, in 1786, managed to commission the most famous composer in Europe at the time, Franz Josef Haydn, to write a liturgical piece for a regular passiontide rite in a local cave. And so it was that the first documented concert by the Piatti was on Good Friday 1787 in the Santa Cueva de Cadiz, at the premiere of Haydn's The Seven Last Words of our Saviour on the Cross.
By 1818 the cello had come into the hands of Allen Dowell, an Irish wine merchant and violinist based in Cadiz. Known as "Don Alonso Dowell", he seems to have been something of a Del Boy - a contractor for the British army, he also enjoyed trading in top-notch musical instruments, which he bought for a song in Spain, then sold in England for a tasty profit.
In 1818 he returned to Ireland, bringing the Piatti cello with him. After his death it was bought by a clergyman and amateur cellist from Carlow, the Reverend Booth, and in 1867 it became the property of the man whose name it now bears, the Italian cellist Alfredo Piatti.
HAPPY EVER AFTER? Not quite. In another picaresque twist the cello ended up in Nazi Germany in the hands of Francesco Mendelssohn, whose father was a nephew of composer Felix Mendelssohn. He managed to smuggle it across the border into Switzerland - on his bicycle - and thence to New York. Sadly, once there he went into a downward spiral of alcoholism; with some hair-raising results for the Piatti, which was often left behind bars by way of settling the tab.
One night after a concert, Mendelssohn had a few scoops too many and, on getting out of a taxi on East 62nd Street, was unable to open his own front door. Gradually it dawned on him that he was at the wrong house. Leaving the cello case on the footpath, he staggered off in search of the right one. Next morning he woke to hear his housekeeper declaring, "Isn't this your cello? I found it lying in the street just as the garbage truck was about to pick it up. . ."
Francesco Mendelssohn died in 1971, leaving the cello to the Marlboro Foundation which, in 1978, decided to sell it. It was bought at last by one Carlos Prieto. Not to be outdone by his illustrious predecessors, the cello's 20th-century owner adds a clutch of entertaining anecdotes of his own, including tales from his trips to China, India and Russia - a flight to Tbilisi, in Georgia, is described in spine-tingling detail - and, for good measure, adds a section on the history of instrument-making plus another on cello music from 1700 to the present day.
It's the latter that - apart from his cello - interests the 71-year-old Prieto more than anything else. He has made it his business to promote the work of contemporary Latin American composers, and is a tireless commissioner of new music, including a cello concerto by John Kinsella.
"I am sometimes accused of adopting a quixotic attitude, of fighting a losing battle," he writes in his book. "However, I am inspired by the relentless quest for the masterpieces of the future. If even a small fraction of these works manages to survive, I will be extremely satisfied."
The CD that accompanies the book is a showcase for this aspect of his musical life. On it, Prieto performs a selection of strikingly varied pieces for solo cello, two cellos, cello and piano and cello and chamber orchestra.
These range from works by Astor Piazzolla and Manuel de Falla to music by Mexican composers in the shape of Mario Lavista's Three Secular Dances, a delicate evocation of the courtship rituals of imaginary birds, and Samuel Zyman's melodic Suite for Two Cellos, commissioned jointly by Prieto and Yo-Yo Ma.
His solo recital in Dublin will feature three movements from Zyman's Suite for Cello Solo, four movements from Bach's Suite in C Major, and the world premiere of a new short piece, Una Giga Para Carlos (A Jig For Carlos), by John Kinsella. And it will bring the Piatti back, once again, to where it lived for more than 30 years. Does it enjoy its visits here? "I'm sure the cello loves coming back to Ireland," Prieto says. "I certainly do."
Carlos Prieto will play at the John Field Room of the NCH on Feb 4 at 8pm. Adventures of a Cello is published by University of Texas Press, $24.95
