Hearing a Deeper Melody

The ship that the cellist was on had caught fire between Uruguay and Argentina, causing him and the other two members of the Trieste Piano Trio to jump into the waters of the River Plate. As disaster unfolded around them, however, Baldovino and the trio's violinist, Renato Zanettovich, talked about the details of their next concert, even considered the various fingerings they could use during the performance. "Musicians, with a capital M," Zanettovich's son Marco later observed, "do not live in the same world as everyone else." Living in a world of sound and sensibility, Baldovino was able to remain calm as he awaited rescue.

Baldovino's story from July of 1963-and that of his instrument-are among the subjects of Kate Kennedy's absorbing book, "Cello." Ms. Kennedy, the co-director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, grew up mad for music. As a young cellist, she practiced endlessly, entered competitions and won a scholarship to a prestigious music school. Then an unexpected arm injury shifted her energies to writing about music. Now in her late 40s, she hopes to understand her "complicated" relationship with the instrument in which she invested so much of herself. "I needed to find out," she writes, "what the cello, and its absence, had meant to other cellists, in order to start to understand what it meant to me." Ms. Kennedy focuses her book on four cellists, including Baldovino (1916-1998). Pál Hermann (1902-1944) was a performer, teacher and composer. Praised in his youth as the "Hungarian Casals"-in reference to the revered Pablo Casals-he earned the notice of Arnold Schoenberg. Hermann was Jewish and died in the Holocaust, though exactly where and when remain unknown. Lise Cristiani (1827-1853) was one of the first female cello soloists. An adventuress who thrilled to new experiences, she spent years performing in far-off places. She died in Siberia at age 25.

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch (b. 1925) is 99 years old and a founding member of the English Chamber Orchestra. As a young girl, trying to flee her hometown of what was then Breslau, Germany, she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz. As an identifying number was being tattooed on her arm-69388-she mentioned that she played the cello. This saved her, for the camp had an all-female orchestra that needed a cellist.

In researching these musicians, Ms. Kennedy makes pilgrimages, cello usually in tow, to the places where they lived, played and died. She talks with people who knew them and examines what records-official documents, personal letters, newspaper stories-she can find. Sometimes, in a concert hall where they performed, or near the spot where one used to be, she takes out her instrument and plays a musical homage.

Through Ms. Kennedy's book, one learns that many players see their instruments as extensions of themselves. The author tells how her own teacher, pregnant at the time, rushed into a burning house to rescue her cello. Steven Isserlis, the British virtuoso, calls his cello his "alter ego." One also learns how delicate these instruments can be. Gregor Piatigorsky, the Russian-American cellist and pedagogue, recalling the precarious means by which he conveyed his cello from place to place, nevertheless maintained that "by far the most nerveracking experience of all is when, in full dress, I must transport the cello in my own hands across the stage each time I have to play." Attesting to the truth of Piatigorsky's remark is Raphael Wallfisch, the son of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and himself a renowned soloist. Once, when Mr.

Wallfisch was taking the stage with his teacher's Stradivari, he tripped, the cello flying from his grasp and landing with a sickening crunch on its bridge. Luckily, it was reparable, but he was happy to hand the instrument back: "A Stradivari is too much of a liability." Ms. Kennedy breaks up the stories of her four cellists in an episodic way that staves off boredom. She moves her narrative briskly along, perhaps no more so than in her account of the shipwreck that befell Baldovino. Eight well-placed "interludes," ranging from eight to 12 pages and dealing with cello construction and acoustics, serve as intermissions that allow readers to mentally stretch their legs and move about.

It must be said, though, that Ms. Kennedy's disposition tends to a certain darkness. There is the doleful refrain throughout the book of "absence" and "silence" and "erasure." Visiting a museum where musical instruments are displayed, she looks at them as either housed in a "glass prison" or "hanging as if in formaldehyde." Elsewhere, a certain cello about to be sold stands in the corner of a room, "lined up, waiting stoically for its execution." This darkness isn't the book's main note, but its presence is undeniable.

As I read "Cello," I was reminded of the workings of a string quartet. Typically, the first violin has the melody; the viola and the second violin handle the understated inner parts, adding texture without calling undue attention; and the cello mostly provides the bass line, guiding and influencing the harmonies we hear. Playing the role of the cello in the book is, unsurprisingly, the cello. Its guiding influence holds everything together. The melody is taken by the four memorable cellists.

And the inner part is Ms. Kennedy's underplayed story about her own relationship to her instrument. She spends far more time on the lives of her cellists than on her own, and this is one of the book's main attractions.

Goethe, in a letter to the composer Carl Zelter, likened string-quartet music to the conversation of four intelligent people. Ms. Kennedy's book is itself an intelligent conversation among Musicians-"with a capital M"-whose lives have been shaped, and even saved, by the encompassing world of the cello.