18 mins
SOVEREIGN VOICE
Marius May, who died last year, led the generation of British cellists that emerged after Jacqueline du Pré. Here, Simon May tells the story of his younger brother’s astonishing flowering as a teenage musical talent, and his eventual decision to withdraw from performing life
Marius May: born 26 May 1958; died 10 February 2020
MAY PHOTO PRIVATE COLLECTION OF DEBORAH MARTELL. ISSERLIS PHOTO JOANNA BERGIN
Aged five, my brother Marius was handed a quarter-size cello and bow by our mother, the violinist Maria Lidka. She had decided that one violinist in the family was enough, and he was assigned the cello on the grounds that he had the right fingers for that instrument.
To her astonishment, within days he was holding the bow in the elegant and effortless way that she would later labour to instil in her teenage students at the Royal College of Music in London. Marius did intuitively what musicians several times his age would need hours of practice to master. His left hand, too, moved up and down the fingerboard with the naturalness of an outrageous talent. Almost from the beginning he had a tone of sensuous clarity, at once seductive, revelatory, insightful, and refusing all intercourse with sentimentality.
Our mother held, with the force of religious dogma, that if you undertook something it had to be ‘the very best’. It was a conviction she had inherited from her parents – highly cultivated German Jews who had raised her in Berlin, from where she had emigrated to London in 1934, following her violin teacher Max Rostal. As soon as she discovered Marius’s talent, Mother sent him to study with Jennifer Ward Clarke, and two years later he went to Anna Shuttleworth. Then, at the age of eleven, he began lessons at the Paris Conservatoire with legendary teacher André Navarra.
Far too young to live away from home, Marius commuted to Paris once a month, flying there and back in a day, at first accompanied by our mother, and then alone, a child-passenger’s pass hanging around his neck and an extra boarding pass for ‘Mr A. Cello’ in his hand. His enormously fruitful relationship with Navarra nourished a soaring technical command of the cello and, even more strikingly, led him to his greatest early accomplishment: an astounding mastery of Bach’s Cello Suites. In her inimitable way, however, our mother was soon to deem the interpretative side of Navarra’s teaching, magnificent though it was, to be essentially alien to her stubbornly Germanic approach to music making, which had been formed by her early upbringing at the feet of such artists as Furtwängler, Schnabel, Walter and others in that musical, scientific and cultural efflorescence that was Weimar-era Berlin. These figures, as well as violinists like Heifetz, Huberman and Kreisler, and cellists like Casals, Feuermann and Piatigorsky, would be Marius’s greatest musical inspirations for life.
My brother wholly concurred that Navarra’s style of music making was at odds with his emerging voice –a highly individual one born not from imitation but from his own sovereign artistry. So at the age of 13 he began commuting to Geneva, where he studied with Fournier for the following two years, 1971–3, again departing London in the morning and returning the same evening after a four-hour lesson at the master’s lakeside apartment.
Icannot remember why Marius decided to cease his lessons with Fournier. Fournier himself did remark that Marius’s musical maturity was such that from then on he could just as well work out his own path, without supervision. In any event, Marius now saw playing with great musicians and studying recordings as the key to his development. He had made his UK debut when he was eleven, playing Saint-Saëns’s First Cello Concerto at the Edinburgh International Festival; and four years later, in March 1973, the year he left Fournier, he debuted at Wigmore Hall, London, accompanied by pianist Paul Hamburger in a programme that included the Bach Suite in C major, Beethoven’s Sonata op.69 and the cello adaptation of Franck’s virtuosic Violin Sonata. It was a triumph. The Guardian declared Marius to be an ‘exceptional talent’ with a maturity that ‘played havoc with all one’s preconceptions of child prodigies’; while the Daily Telegraph praised ‘his exceptional technique and interpretative talents’, proclaiming: ‘There were long stretches during 14-year-old Marius May’s ’cello recital at Wigmore Hall last night when genius was present.’
STEVEN ISSERLIS, CELLIST
When I started the cello the reigning idol for us young cellists was Jacqueline du Pré. The next star to shoot into the cellistic firmament – some ten years after Du Pré’s emergence – was Marius May. Alas, both were to have their careers drastically cut short: in her case by tragic illness, in his by a form of breakdown caused, I think, by too much pressure at too young an age. Of course, she is now a worldwide legend whereas Marius’s name is far less well known; but his, too, was a quite extraordinary talent.
Marius was the son of the German–Jewish violinist Maria Lidka, a distinguished figure within London musical circles. (And rather fierce! In later years, she would occasionally lead a quartet with my father, George Isserlis, a keen amateur, playing second violin.
Her violent hisses of, ‘Shhh, George!’ became legend in our Decca recording contract. He played with astonishing authority; household.) Marius showed amazing early promise, and in his mid-teens made a phenomenally successful Wigmore Hall debut, stunning everyone and earning him a he was totally at home with the cello and with the music he played, and his interpretations and emotional depth those of a mature artist. As it turned out, a soloist’s career didn’t suit him, but those of us who attended his concerts will never forget them.
He was the most generous of colleagues and friends, with not a flicker of competitiveness. I remember feeling depressed the day after my own Wigmore debut (a more mixed success!). The phone rang: it was Marius, then at the height of his fame, and he talked about the concert in such a generous way that my blues totally vanished.
He was also incorrigible. I remember once, during my (brief) driving days, stopping at a junction. Suddenly I felt the car behind me bumping – slowly, gently, inexorably – into me. I turned around, furious, and there was Marius at the wheel. He smiled broadly, his characteristic roguish grin, and of course he was instantly forgiven. He could get away with anything! He was – well, he was Marius.
FOURNIER REMARKED THAT MARIUS’S MUSICAL MATURIT Y WAS SUCH THAT HE COULD JUST AS WELL WORK OUT HIS OWN PATH, WITHOUT SUPERVISION
May made his Wigmore Hall debut at the age of 14. A recording contract with Decca followed swiftly, and then many more concerts throughout his teens
MAY PHOTO PRIVATE COLLECTION OF DEBORAH MARTELL. LLOYD WEBBER PHOTO DECCA CLASSICS
JULIAN LLOYD WEBBER, CELLIST
The 1970s was a heady decade for emerging young cellists in the UK. Marius May was the ‘child prodigy’ among us, making his debut – and, it seems, only – recording when he was barely 15 years old. When I first met Marius I thought he was absolutely cut out for the music profession; I even remember one festival promoter describing him to me as being ‘tough as old boots’! But as the decade drew to its close, Marius’s concert appearances became increasingly rare and by the 80s they were almost invisible. This can have had nothing to do with his playing, for Marius was a first-rate cellist.
It is important for young musicians attracted to the apparent glamour of being a soloist to understand that the word ‘solo’ means ‘on your own’. Solitary practice, solitary travelling and solitary hotel rooms are the norm alongside constant jet lag, dyspeptic conductors, a fractured family life and – for cellists – airline staff singularly unsympathetic to the joys of travelling with a bulky, yet irreplaceable, instrument. Evidently Marius decided that this was not the life for him, but that does not detract from the quality of his playing which I remember as profound and aristocratic, despite his tender years.
Those lucky enough to have heard Marius May in concert will never forget his touching, focused tone and intense concentration. For the many who never had that privilege it is to be hoped that the BBC will re-broadcast some of the performances he gave for Radio 3 as a tribute to this consummate artist.
Sitting in the Wigmore Hall audience was Howard Hartog, head of artist management company Ingpen & Williams, who promptly signed Marius. A recording contract with Decca followed swiftly. At the age of sixteen, he made his Royal Festival Hall debut, playing the Schumann Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Andrew Davis. Many more concerts followed, throughout his teens and beyond: on London’s South Bank and at the Barbican; in cities across the UK; in Germany, Holland, France, Switzerland, Denmark and, after he had joined the Sequoia Quartet in Los Angeles in 1985, the US. He also performed regularly on BBC television –I particularly remember his Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations with the London Philharmonic Orchestra – and on BBC Radio 3.
Marius played with pianists such as Imogen Cooper, Richard Goode, Jeremy Menuhin, András Schiff and Tamás Vásáry; and he performed concertos with conductors including Mark Elder, Charles Groves and Mariss Jansons. With Yehudi Menuhin he played quartets, string trios and other chamber music, as well as Delius’s ‘Double’ Concerto at Berlin’s Philharmonie with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1980. He was close to other remarkable young British cellists of his generation, among them Colin Carr, Robert Cohen, Steven Isserlis and Raphael Wallfisch; and he worked with great violinists of his age, including Nigel Kennedy.
IMOGEN COOPER, PIANIST
Marius was one of the most remarkable people I have known. I met him in the late 1970s through our agent, when he was around twenty and I was in my late twenties, and from the start I had the impression of a huge and complex talent. His musical maturity was startling, steeped as he was in the old German tradition, and his capacity to articulate his ideas, both verbally and on the cello, seemed limitless. In concert, once the process of decision-making was over, inspiration flowed and risks were taken, and performing with him was a joy.
His sound has remained with me all my life. Through it I experienced for the first time some of the great cello works, such as Bach’s D major Suite with its magisterial Prelude. One was struck by the inner energy and expressiveness of Marius’s playing, and also by his strong sense of the long line, which evolved as though propelled by a noble life force. Even at this early stage he could reach the heart of a work, producing interpretations that felt both fresh and inevitable.
MAY PHOTO PRIVATE COLLECTION OF DEBORAH MARTELL. COOPER PHOTO MICHAEL ELEFTHERIADES
Marius regarded those around him with lucidity and great humanity. He saw through fake playing in an instant, but he was not judgemental; he simply had an instinct for what mattered and he could easily discern absurdity, occasionally even his own. His complexity was clearly to determine where his own truth lay. Whether this to the fore in those early years. His background was a mixture of German, English, Jewish and Catholic, and I think he struggled quest was made more acute by the parallel truthfulness of his music making, or less urgent because of it, I do not know.
If I say that there was a deep purity about him, the picture would not be complete. He had an irrepressibly playful side, and our rehearsals frequently collapsed into fits of giggles. Laughter acted like the valve on a pressure cooker, but it could be dangerous! During one memorable performance, in King’s Lynn, Marius was derailed by the fiendishly difficult bar of pizzicati at the start of Janáček’s Pohádka, and we dissolved into paroxysms of giggles, which threatened to capsize the entire piece. He was still laughing as we came offstage, and I had to put on a show of vexation to get us back on kilter.
I had no contact with Marius after he moved to Israel. There was just the feeling that he had chosen a new life. I was not surprised. My gratitude for having had this period of work with him has remained always.
May was an intuitive musician from the start
THE CAUSES OF HIS CRISIS WERE COMPLEX, BUT ONE OF THEM WAS HIS LARGELY ISOLATED CHILDHOOD DEVOTED TO PRACTISING AND CONCERTS
It was a heady time, but also a time of gathering clouds as Marius began to suffer from a profound crisis. No doubt the causes were complex, but one of them was surely his almost entirely isolated childhood devoted to practising and concerts. Our mother had taken him out of school at the age of eleven so that he could focus on the cello, a move common in her own youth, when the cult of the prodigy motivated ambitious parents to propel their wunderkinder into an international concert life, with the expectation that their careers would be well on their way by the time they were aged twelve or thirteen at the latest.
Another cause of Marius’s crisis was, I think, the intense pressure on him somehow to recreate, through music, the world of Bildung (self-cultivation) and Kultur, which our mother and father had taken with them when they fled Germany in the 1930s. Our upbringing – unlike that of many other offspring of German–
Jewish refugees whose parents had more readily acclimatised to life in exile – had lingered in a pre-war, pre-emigration time warp. Our father, who had escaped from Cologne in 1937, died when Marius was four years old; and our mother, who raised us on her own with iron discipline, had, in essence, refused to accept that this world had vanished once and for all.
PETER BIDDULPH, INSTRUMENT DEALER
I met Marius for the first time at a Sotheby’s sale in November 1978. I had just bought the ‘Gore-Booth’ Stradivari cello and he wanted an introduction to the cello, not me!
This was the beginning of a long friendship and Marius was always welcome to my workshop and family home.
He was blessed with a great ear for sound, so it was always a pleasure to hand him a cello and let him play some movements of a Bach suite. I really enjoyed these quiet moments listening to him play. I soon realised that he also had another rare talent, as he had a very gifted eye for instruments.
On one occasion in the mid-80s, I called Marius in for an opinion about an instrument. He played for a couple of minutes and said, ‘It plays like a Stradivari.’ How right he was! Jean-Frédéric Schmitt in Lyon restored the cello and soon afterwards it was sold to Ko Iwasaki.
Marius was lucky enough to know Charles Beare long before he met me, so he had an excellent early training in how to pick a good cello. Somehow the holy grail of sound eluded him as he kept moving on to other instruments –a dream client for any violin shop. He had a succession of fine Venetian cellos and none more famous than the ‘Beatrice Harrison’ Pietro Guarneri of Venice.
Robert Bein and Geoffrey Fushi, known as B&F in the trade, were frequent visitors to my shop in London so it was only natural that Marius got to know them as well. Marius was always very generous with his time and introduced us to some spectacular instruments. Geoff had now elevated Marius to mascot status as he always brought us good luck.
During the time of the Guarneri exhibition in 1994, I asked Marius to bring the Pietro Guarneri to New York. He showed it to David Fulton who became the next lucky owner a few years later. I should add that David Fulton assembled the finest collection of instruments of any living person.
After the departure of the ‘Beatrice Harrison’ Guarneri I sent Marius off to Basel as I had seen a very nice Gofriller cello that I thought he would like. He had already moved to Jerusalem where he quietly lived with his partner Deborah and his two children, Amiel and Alma. He liked the Gofriller enough, so that was his next cello. A few years later he had a chance to buy a very fine Giuseppe Guarneri ‘filius Andreae’, so the Gofriller was sold.
The ‘filius’ was to be his final instrument.
‘The holy grail of sound eluded him as he kept moving on to other instruments –a dream client for any violin shop’
Main and inset May’s most famous instrument was the ‘Beatrice Harrison’ Pietro Guarneri of Venice
PHOTOS COURTESY DAVID FULTON
DEBORAH MARTELL, LONG-TIME PARTNER
I have often felt there was a similarity between Marius’s relationship with our children and his relationship with his music. After our son Amiel was born and then our daughter Alma, he committed himself to fatherhood. It came before everything.
He was always there for them, exactly as they needed him to be, and he understood their needs and supported them in a way that was intimate, kind, encouraging, honest, humorous, authoritative and wise.
In his music making, too, Marius displayed a rare clarity and understanding. He had a deep appreciation for what is natural, modest, balanced, proportional and unsentimental, and these values came to define his playing. He had his own voice – eschewing common knowledge and superficial clichés – and his playing was warm, present, calm, poised and underpinned with a profound sense of timing.
Yet there was a difference. With music he was ever searching and studying, and he was rarely satisfied.
There was always some suffering involved. But with the children he had an innate feeling for what was right. He spent nights learning algebra to help Alma with her homework, and for days he researched electric guitar special effects to help Amiel with his playing.
He guided Amiel in his songwriting and composing, and inspired Alma in her singing and piano practice.
Through his own example, Marius taught our children the value of friendship. He was endlessly curious about the complexity of the human psyche, and he had a strong inclination – perhaps even an imperative – to discover people’s true, authentic selves. He was entirely empathetic to human suffering, never judgemental, and always wanted to help his friends.
After he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in April 2018 an astonishing calm took over Marius. The emotional weight he had carried in his cello playing for 40 years suddenly lifted. What he used to call his malaise was gone, and his playing was finally free. He rediscovered the joy he had experienced as a boy, but with the depth and wisdom of the man he had become. During his final 20 months Marius worked every day towards recording his unique understanding of Bach, knowing he had something to say to the world.
Until the very end he was with his beloved Guarneri. He felt that, in some mysterious way, the vibrations of the strings and their resonance and harmonies were helping to keep him alive for so long, despite the metastasis. Even when he could hardly function, he would still take out his instrument, and the music would give him strength and peace.
May’s playing was ‘warm and poised’
MAY PHOTO PRIVATE COLLECTION OF DEBORAH MARTELL
Despite these pressures, Marius continued to grow in musical stature, and with his charm, his sense of humour and his intuition that allowed him to enter into the spirit of all manner of subjects – even those in which he had scarcely had the opportunity to be educated such as theology, history and philosophy – he prevailed. One of the greatest concerts he ever gave (and that I have ever attended) occurred during one of the hardest times of his life, when he was 29. It was at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with Imogen Cooper, and I still remember listening transfixed, along with an audience that included much of musical London but also luminaries of other fields, such as the architect Denys Lasdun, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, the statistician and Royal Opera House chairman Claus Moser and the economist Peter Oppenheimer.
Marius’s perfectionism and fastidiousness inhibited him from making more than one recording for Decca (at the age of 15 he produced a disc of Brahms, Chopin, Dvořák and Schumann with Paul Hamburger, right), though many of his broadcasts were captured by admirers and friends, and I expect will be issued in due course. At the end of his twenties he increasingly withdrew into solitary musical meditation, working with loving obsession on Bach in particular, at first in London and then, after his own emigration, in Israel.
Marius’s decision to move to Israel had, I think, many sources: his determination to reclaim a Jewish heritage that had been obscured in our family; his love of the country, fuelled (as it was for so many Jews) by the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi period which had been experienced at first hand on both sides of our family, but especially on our mother’s; his intense feeling of not being at home in England, which was the inevitable result of our upbringing – dare I say our indoctrination – as displaced German Jews, born posthumously into an alien land. And all that for starters.
What is indubitable, though, is that in Israel Marius did find the spiritual home for which he yearned. There he met Deborah Martell, a native of Milan, and with her had his two children, Amiel and Alma, respectively 17 and 14 when their father died. For these two children he bore the profoundest love and respect and harboured the deepest pride. He determined to raise them in a manner that was free of the impossible ideals we had been brought up to revere; and in this, as in so many of his musical interpretations, he succeeded brilliantly. The rest of his life continued to be consumed by music, above all by Bach, Beethoven and the other great composers and performers of the German and German–Jewish world from which we both hailed, and which became our deepest and finest inspiration. In the end, he was – and I am – devoted to that world, intensely but by no means exclusively; and out of the kind of fated choice that issues from inbuilt and overwhelming necessity.