The lost genius of the cello

Emanuel Feuermann's talent burnt brightly, but all too briefly. Annette Morreau on a forgotten virtuoso

Musicians are a competitive lot. Universal praise for a fellow artist is virtually unknown. But the cellist Emanuel Feuermann was unique. "A talent like Feuermann's comes around once in a hundred years," said Jascha Heifetz. Artur Rubinstein was equally emphatic: "He became for me the greatest cellist of all times, because I did hear Casals at his best. He had everything in the world, but he never reached the musicianship of Feuermann. And this is a declaration."

In September 1941, Feuermann had begun to record chamber music with Heifetz and Rubinstein. The Victor record company hoped this series would be matchless. It was and still is but the venture was agonisingly short-lived. Eight months later, at the age of 39, Feuermann was dead.

Feuermann was born on 22 November 1902. (The same birthday as Purcell and Britten, St Cecilia's Day, the patron saint of musicians.) From the humblest of beginnings – he was a "stettl" Jew from Kolomea (now in the Ukraine) – Feuermann crossed boundaries of class and ethnicity to become the greatest virtuoso cellist of the 20th century.

The period of his short life coincided with the horrors of two world wars, economic upheaval and the forced migration of Jews from Europe. But Feuermann's talent was meteoric: nothing should have impeded it. Catastrophically, a botched operation in the US for a trivial complaint caused his death.

Feuermann, in a real sense, was always a young man. He was a child prodigy making his orchestral debut in Vienna's Musikverein in 1914 with Felix Weingartner and the Tonkünstler Orchestra in Brahms's Double Concerto with his brother Sigmund. For in the Feuermann family, Emanuel was the second prodigy. That Emanuel competed with his violinist elder brother is of crucial importance: the sound of the violin was in his ear. And it was to his brother's lessons with the great violin pedagogue, Otakar Sevcik, that Feuermann was taken. The discipline, clarity of articulation, focus of sound demanded by Sevcik became second nature to him.

Despite the obvious difference in size between a cello and a violin, Feuermann played with the same fluency as a virtuoso violinist and indeed played virtuoso works for the violin on the cello often at violin pitch – his Mendelssohn Violin Concerto was a legendary party trick. George Sopkin (cellist of the Fine Arts Quartet) remarked: "He was the most comfortable player up at the top that I have ever heard before or since."

Feuermann never reached his 40th birthday but his achievements were staggering: aged 16 he was appointed "professor" of cello at the Cologne Conservatory (the title was in fact withheld on account of his age); three years later, despite the infancy of the recording industry, Parlophon engaged orchestral forces at his first commercial recording session – a recording of Haydn's D major Concerto; 10 years later in 1930, he completed the first commercial recording (also for Parlophon) of the Dvorak concerto. (Casals, generally credited with its first recording, made his in 1937.)

The Dvorak recording took place in Berlin where Feuermann at the age of 26 had been appointed professor of Cello at the Hochschule für Musik, Europe's finest music academy. But in 1933 with the Nazis in power, he was thrown out of the Hochschule, described as "an intolerable Jew". After five years of almost continuous worldwide touring, America became his home. Feuermann's New York debut had taken place in 1935 with Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic-Symphony. His reviews in the next few years from the feared New York critics were extraordinary: "...as far as the cello and cello-playing are concerned, Mr Feuermann is a one-man revolution"; "Difficulties do not exist for Mr Feuermann"; "Emanuel Feuermann was at Carnegie Hall again last night, playing cello in a way that would start our grandfathers on a witch hunt". It is little wonder that Heifetz regarded Feuermann as his greatest cello partner – their recording of the Brahms Double Concerto with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra remains one of the very finest.

How is it possible that an artist of Feuermann's calibre can have sunk from sight? Feuermann performed with the greatest conductors of the day – Weingartener, Nikisch, Furtwängler, Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Hermann Scherchen, Monteux, Mengelberg, Sargent, Beecham, Toscanini, Ormandy, Stokowski, Fritz Reiner – and played recitals and chamber music with some of the most illustrious artists – Schnabel, Edwin Fischer, Szymon Goldberg, Hindemith, Huberman, Primrose, Gerald Moore, Myra Hess, Franz Rupp, the Busch Trio and Kolisch Quartet.

And there is more: it was Feuermann who gave the world premiere of Schönberg's Cello Concerto; Feuermann who gave the first "marathon" for cello (13 works for soloist and orchestra in four concerts in Carnegie Hall); Feuermann who "resuscitated" the original version of Haydn's D major Concerto, recording it in 1935.

He was also a great teacher, often acutely acerbic. "I realise that in performing, as in all other things, there must be a scale from best to worst. Nevertheless, the question arises why in other professions attempts are made to raise the standard and average, while in our profession there is not even the slightest attempt to recognise existing weaknesses, let alone eliminate them. Nine times out of 10 when I hear cello playing, I cannot but ask myself; does cello playing mean turning off the brain and ear and the connecting muscular system?'

No complete edition on CD of Feuermann's recordings exists but most of the 100 or so can be found, all made before the age of cutting and splicing. Their quality will amaze. Yo-Yo Ma has remarked: "He is an ideal that one strives towards in that kind of honesty, integrity and virtuosity." Janos Starker has said: "I place him as the most important figure for 20th-century cello playing because he was the one who proceeded to carry cello playing as such to a higher level. If he had lived longer he would literally have taken the place of Casals."

'Emanuel Feuermann' by Annette Morreau, Yale University Press, £25. It includes a CD of his performances, some never previously released