Introduction

The cellist, composer, and pedagogue Carl Davidoff (1838-1889) was born in Latvia and educated in Moscow. His main teacher was Carl Schuberth (1811-1863), a onetime student of the celebrated Johann Justus Friedrich Dotzauer (1783-1860). Davidoff was therefore a descendant of the Dresden school of cello pedagogy as well as the founder of a Russian school that continues to the present day.

After graduating from Moscow University with a degree in mathematics, Davidoff relocated to Leipzig to study composition with Moritz Hauptmann. When Ignaz Moscheles and Ferdinand David heard him, they engaged him to perform his own Concerto in B Minor with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1858. A year later, he succeeded Friedrich Grützmacher as principal cellist of the same orchestra and as professor of cello at Leipzig Conservatory.

Davidoff returned to Russia in 1862 to teach at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, lead the cello section of the Imperial Italian Opera, and play in the Russian Musical Society Quartet. One of his quartet colleagues there was none other than the legendary violinist and pedagogue Leopold Auer. According to the cello historian Edmund van der Straeten, Davidoff often directed young cellists to “go and listen attentively and observantly to the best violinists, as it was to them he owed all he had learned.”¹ Perhaps Davidoff aspired to be the Auer of the cello: a leading performer-pedagogue with a legacy of high-profile publications and students.

One such student, Carl Fuchs (1865-1951), whose distinguished career included many years as a cello professor in Britain, described his lessons with Davidoff in his memoir. “The remarkable part about Davidoff’s playing,” Fuchs wrote, “was the ease with which he overcame the greatest difficulties, also his noble, highly musical conception and wonderful beauty of tone. He said anybody could play song-like melodies, but art was needed to produce passage-work clearly and with a good tone. He was a great ‘cellist, far above all the others.”²

Given this praise, it seems surprising that Davidoff’s Violoncell-Schule, first published in 1888 by Edition Peters, has never appeared in English. The scope of Davidoff’s pedagogy includes the earliest codification of the different types of position shift and some of the earliest discussions of joint movement and arm pronation in bowing. Davidoff was also an early adopter of the endpin, and one of the first to discuss how it changed the standard pedagogy for holding the cello. His approach to teaching cello technique has been central to Russian pedagogy since his lifetime and continues through the “Russian diaspora” of teachers who immigrated to other countries. Sadly, Davidoff’s early death robbed cellists of a follow-up volume that might have captured his methods for thumb position and virtuoso bowstrokes. We have indirectly inherited them, perhaps, through Davidoff’s students and their students, who taught some today’s greatest cellists.

I first became acquainted with Davidoff’s Violoncell-Schule during my student days in New Zealand, when my Russian cello teacher Natalia Pavlutskaya regularly gave me photocopied pages from the Russian translation by Lev Ginzburg.³ To my embarrassment, I don’t recall ever asking Natasha who had written what I thought of as “those amazing Russian exercises.” Years later, while researching for a book on historically-informed string pedagogy,⁴ I realized that the author was Carl Davidoff.

Once I got hold of Violoncell-Schule in the original German,⁵ I set about translating it for my own purposes. The further I got, the more I felt that other English-speaking cellists needed access to his remarkable work. I approached Evan Williamson and Marco Seiferle-Valencia of the University of Idaho Library to ask if they would be interested in collaborating an open-access publication that would make Davidoff’s pedagogy available in English. Thanks to their vision and technological expertise, and to the generosity of the University of Idaho Library Think Open Fellowship, we have accomplished this goal. I hope Davidoff’s School of Cello Playing will inspire other cellists as much as it has inspired me.