“For a young composer to feel the weight of that body, the finality, we know it affected him,” said celebrated cellist Lynn Harrell. He was describing the welter of feelings bearing down on 29-year-old Franz Schubert, one of six pallbearers carrying Beethoven’s coffin at his funeral in Vienna on March 29, 1827.
Of course, Harrell could have been speaking of his own painful youth. Like a pallbearer, he carried on his shoulders the deaths of two heavy figures.
“I was orphaned when I was 17,” he said. “My father died when I was 15 and my mother when I was 17.” His father Mack Harrell, a distinguished baritone and voice teacher, died of cancer. His mother Marjorie Fulton, a professional violinist, died in a car accident.
Orchestra Days
Harrell said being a cellist on the cusp of a professional career probably helped him cope with the trauma better than most. Still, moving from amateur to professional cellist was difficult; he lived out of a suitcase at the homes of family friends for a year or so. “I had to get things together; I had to get a job,” he said.
An audition with George Szell, the musical director of the Cleveland Orchestra and a friend of his late father, proved auspicious. “He hired me unbeknownst that I had no experience at all,” said Harrell, 65. “He assumed wrongly that being the son of Mack Harrell I would have had a better musical education than I did. I was a good cellist but I didn’t know diddly squat about playing in an orchestra or the orchestral literature. It was terrifying.”
Some classmates at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School of Music thought he sold out by going into an orchestra.
“[They thought] I should become a soloist, do a couple of competitions, get management and start playing around the world as a great many young people do today,” he said. “But at the time I took the advice of my cello teacher Leonard Rose who said that – up to certainly Yo Yo Ma and Jacqueline du Pre – every solo cello player came from the ranks of an orchestra.”
Harrell is convinced he made the right move. “I had to learn to make music with others,” he said. “I was the young person in the group, and although I could play well I had to learn to get the respect of my elders, first through my playing and then through my leadership abilities, which were non-existent when I started.”
One might also be tempted to say Harrell’s preference for playing in an orchestra over a solo career was his wish to reclaim his lost family. If true, he was only partially successful.
“All the children of my orchestra colleagues were too young and all the orchestra members were too old,” he said. “I didn’t have the types of friendships that a kid going to college has.” During these early years with the Cleveland Orchestra, Harrell said he struggled with loneliness and depression.
Still, he was playing for one of the finest orchestras in the world, and for a young, gifted and ambitious musician it was a learning laboratory seven days a week. While mentors were never lacking, one in particular could be brutal.
The Impact of Mentors
Anyone who worked for maestro Szell – musician, administrator or even the janitor — had stories of his authoritarian manner. “He in his very dramatic and rather harsh way helped me along a great deal,” Harrell said. Years later in a commencement address he described an unforgettable encounter with the volatile Hungarian.
“[O]ne day, George Szell — clearly frustrated beyond belief at my donkey-like sleepwalking — told me to stay back during the intermission of a rehearsal. He grabbed my right arm and started to play as I should play out. It was a terrible, terrible noise — but the passion was there again, the commitment. He was furious with me. He barked at me: ‘You don’t contribute. You don’t know anything. You’re not prepared. You just float along down the stream. You never know how the music goes.’ It was a tirade — and it amazed me. It had simply never entered my self-pitying state that this could all be my fault. That if I was bored, it was because I wasn’t trying hard enough. Music isn’t boring; people are.” 1
There were benign mentors too. Walter Levin, Myron Bloom, and Marc Lifschey taught Harrell to “delve into, absorb, and put myself into the place of the work I was trying to interpret,” he said. “It’s one thing to practice the cello and spend hours with it, day in and day out. It’s another thing to put the instrument down and pick up books that had relevancy to interpretative musical questions.”
Harrell, who would became an authority of orchestral literature, gave two famous examples from composers’ lives. “Beethoven ripped the title page off of the Eroica Symphony, dedicated to Napoleon, when he found out Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor,” he said. “And when he wrote the Eroica, Vienna was occupied by Napoleon’s army.
“Shostakovich had to work under a Soviet regime where he had very little freedom and could disappear in the night and find himself in the Gulag. Shostakovich had a suitcase under his bed, packed with essentials, expecting at any time he’d have to reach for it before being taken away.
“It’s very difficult, but it’s the job of the musician to put ourselves in these frameworks so we understand better where the expression comes from.”
A Very Difficult Decision
In 1964, Harrell became principal cellist which he held until 1971. But big changes were looming. In 1970 George Szell died and Lorin Maazel became the musical director.
By now Harrell “had fallen in love with orchestral music,” he said. “I didn’t want to be a soloist. I liked my life very, very much.” But one day he read a business book, Up the Organization, in which author Robert Townsend said a creative person should change what he does every five years.
“When I read that, I realized suddenly that over the eight years I had been with the Cleveland Orchestra I had become a good orchestra cellist — a much better cellist than I had been when I joined — a good colleague, a good section leader, and a good person in the community of a symphony orchestra. But it was time to stretch myself and do something else.”
So Harrell began planning next steps. “It was very difficult but I recognized that for my personal artistic growth I had to move on and become a soloist, and I also realized I had to get out of Cleveland,” he said.
“It upset me terribly; it was scary,” Harrell added. Mimicking his inner dialogue at the time, he said, “Okay, I’m going to leave the Cleveland Orchestra and become a soloist. [With mock panic in his voice] But I’ll miss Mozart, I’ll miss Mahler, I’ll miss all the music I won’t be able to play again [as a soloist].”
Despite his uncertainties, Harrell resigned from the Orchestra and his teaching position at the Cleveland Institute of Music. He didn’t move far, just far enough. He settled in Cincinnati. “I got a lucky offer from the College Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati.”
In 1971 he made his New York recital debut, but to his disappointment the concert was poorly attended. Undeterred, he performed smaller concerts and eventually came to the attention of New York impresarios. In 1972, while performing as a soloist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, he captivated audience and critics alike. The New York Times music critic bubbled enthusiastically, “This young man has everything.” 2
Harrell was catapulted onto the international classical music stage when he received the inaugural Avery Fisher Prize in 1975. 3 Since then he has dazzled audiences throughout the world as a cellist, chamber musician, recitalist, conductor, and recording artist.
A Teacher Passes on a Glorious Tradition
Harrell is also a venerated teacher. At prestigious music institutes and conservatories he has passed on invaluable lessons to young cellists, perhaps none more important than “seek the composer’s original intent.”
“I shy away from grandstanding, from playing music that brings glory to me,” he said. “I want to bring out what’s intrinsic in the music that reflects the greatness of the author, the composer, and leave it at that.”
Nevertheless, Harrell is delighted to see that certain “Lynn Harrellisms” have crept into cello works and are part of the performance tradition now. “I think I’ve been able to bring out aspects of vocal communication through my instrument in a way that has been emulated by new, young generations of cellists. I’m very pleased that has happened because I think it brings the performance closer to the meaning of the composer’s original creation.”
Harrell offered an example of how a composer’s intent can get lost over time. “When I read composers’ letters and critical comments of performances of their own works, I noticed two things came up the most. Either the conception was totally wrong. People were playing soft and languid when he wanted instead – I’m exaggerating – loud and ferocious. Or the player didn’t understand a singing or vocal communication of the music.”
Harrell noted that virtually all the greatest composers from pre-Bach to the 20th century have written for voice and chorus, not just for instruments. So he encourages young cellists to listen to opera and lieder and try to emulate vocal elements in their playing.
In the palette of new, young cellists he also sees aspects – Harrellisms — of color and vibrato he has stressed in his cello playing and teaching.
“It’s now not just loud and soft,” he said. “It has many more different colors of expression and vibrancy in phrasing. In verbal communication we go from whispering [he speaks very softly] ‘I do love you so much’ to [he shouts] ‘Goddamn it, put that down!’ But for some reason in the past generation they played things in a way that wouldn’t have those really dynamic values of tonal production.”
Sounding as counter-intuitive as a Zen monk, Harrell said, “It’s more expressive and communicative if it’s not audible and someone’s trying to hear it than if it is audible and they can hear it very clearly. It’s expanding the diversity of what’s possible in music communication.”
Residing in Santa Monica, California, he is married to Helen Nightengale, a professional violinist. Together, they have two young children, a boy and a girl. Harrell also has two adult children from a previous marriage.
During his career Harrell had received numerous honors, including the Piatigorsky Award, the Ford Foundation Concert Artists’ Award, and Grammy Awards for Best Chamber Music Performance with Vladimir Ashkenazy and Itzhak Perlman in 1982 and 1988. He has more than 30 recordings to his credit.
In April 1994, Harrell performed with the Royal Philharmonic at the Vatican commemorating for the first time the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. Pope John Paul II, Elio Toaff, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Oscar Scalfaro, the President of Italy and 200 Holocaust survivors from 12 countries were among the dignitaries to attend this historic event.
Reflecting on his legacy, he said, “I want to be remembered as a kind, caring and gentle person. I’ve made my career by not being difficult, ornery, aggravating or problematic. I think that’s partly because I’ve worked with people who were that way, and it just made it much harder to do well. So I’ve made an extra effort to be warm, enthusiastic, accommodating, nice, a regular guy. However, I am a very serious musician and I want to be remembered, and I think I will be, for the seriousness of my approach to the instrument in its basic meaning.”
Harrell is one of those rare individuals who has had the pleasure of seeing his legacy bear fruit in his lifetime — a life that spans tragedy and triumph. The once bereft orphan is today an ambassador of music and citizen of the world.
Copyright © 2009 by Vince Reardon
Endnotes
1. Harrell, Lynn. “Classical Notes.” Minnesota Public Radio. 14, May 1994. Cleveland Institute of Music. 9 Aug 2009 http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/comparing_notes/archive/2008/06/lynn_harrell_co.shtml
2. Harrell, Lynn. “Lynn Harrell.” Performing Arts Encyclopedia. 2005. Library of Congress. Web.10 Aug 2009. http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200152713/default.html
3. Stevenson, J. “Lynn Harrell.” All Music Guide to Classical Music. 2005. San Francisco: Backbeat Books, p. 563
