In the Spirit of Guilhermina Suggia
Sunday, October 08, 2017
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| Marina Hasselberg |
Her bow niggles at the string like a hand
stroking skin it never wanted to touch.
Until the advent of Portuguese cello player Guilhermina Suggia (1885-1950) any woman who dared play the instrument had to perform side saddle. Holding the cello between the legs was seen as unfeminine and perhaps even obscene.
Suggia learned to play with Pablo Casals and became his
musical partner and lover. And of course she broke the male cello barrier and although
she wore a long dress she did hold the cello firmly between her legs. In the
famous painting by Augustus John you might note the endpin which helps balance
the instrument on the floor.
For those who frequent Early Music Vancouver concerts you
might note that the baroque cello does not have that endpin. The musician has
to put even more effort to keep the instrument firm between the legs.
It was in 1996, when I first went to a concert by the Pacific
Baroque Orchestra, that I noticed that they had a female cellist, a most handsome
one, who wore lovely high heeled shoes, fishnets and a silk dress. Since she
was playing a baroque instrument it had no endpin. I never got to photograph her as
she moved to Vancouver Island.
But since then I have corrected that mistake by taking the photographs of three cellists. One of them Marina Hasselberg chooses to wear fishnets, lovely shoes and she does play both the baroque and modern cello.
This Thanksgiving weekend, when nothing much is happening,
has led me to write this short essay so I can illustrate it with a good
selection of Marina Hasselberg photographs.
THE CELLIST
by Galway Kinnell
At intermission I find her backstage
still practicing the piece coming up next.
She calls it the "solo in high dreary."
Her bow niggles at the string like a hand
stroking skin it never wanted to touch.
Probably under her scorn she is sick
that she can't do better by it. As I am,
at the dreary in me, such as the disparity
between all the tenderness I've received
and the amount I've given, and the way
I used to shrug off the imbalance
simply as how things are, as if the male
were constituted like those coffeemakers
that produce less black bitter than the quantity
of sweet clear you poured in--forgetting about
how much I spilled through unsteady walking,
and that lot I threw on the ground
in suspicion, and for fear I wasn't worthy,
and all I poured out for reasons I don't understand yet.
"Break a leg!" somebody tells her.
Back in my seat, I can see she is nervous
when she comes out; her hand shakes as she
re-dog-ears the top corners of the big pages
that look about to flop over on their own.
Now she raises the bow--its flat bundle of hair
harvested from the rear ends of horses--like a whetted
scimitar she is about to draw across a throat,
and attacks. In a back alley a cat opens
her pink-ceilinged mouth, gets netted
in full yowl, clubbed, bagged, bicycled off, haggled
open,
gutted, the gut squeezed down to its highest pitch,
washed, sliced into cello strings, which bring
an ancient screaming into this duet of hair and gut.
Now she is flying--tossing back the goblets
of Saint-Amour standing empty,
half-empty, or full on the tablecloth-
like sheet music. Her knees tighten
and loosen around the big-hipped creature
wailing and groaning between them
as if in elemental amplexus.
The music seems to rise from the crater left
when heaven was torn up and taken off the earth;
more likely it comes up through her priest's dress,
up from that clump of hair which by now
may be so wet with its waters, like the waters
the fishes multiplied in at Galilee, that
each wick draws a portion all the way out
to its tip and fattens a droplet on the bush
of half notes now glittering in that dark.
At last she lifts off the bow and sits back.
Her face shines with the unselfconsciousness of a cat
screaming at night and the teary radiance of one
who gives everything no matter what has been given.
