When a Man Loves a Cello
In January, 2022, the British cellist Steven Isserlis was walking to a professional engagement when catastrophe struck. The skies opened. Isserlis was holding the three-hundred-year-old cello he prizes above all other possessions, and he watched in horror as it was ruined in the pouring rain. At last, to his inexpressible relief, he woke up.
Isserlis often has nightmares about his cello. Losing it. Leaving it somewhere. The strings falling off without warning. At sixty-seven, he is one of the world’s most celebrated concert cellists, but when he thinks about these scenarios he frowns and gently shakes his baroque gray ringlets. For more than fifteen years, Isserlis has been playing an eighteenth-century Stradivarius cello named the Marquis de Corberon, for the French aristocrat who once owned it. Though it spends most of its time in a white hard-shell case, it faces an array of dangers limited only by the whims of fate and, perhaps, the scope of its owner’s imagination. Speaking to me at his living-room table, in North London, Isserlis suddenly stood up and began speed-walking away. “I’m just going to rush into the other room and put the cello in the case,” he said, his voice growing fainter, “because I’m worried it’s getting cold.”
Isserlis’s instrument is about four feet tall. Worth millions of British pounds, it was crafted in 1726, when Antonio Stradivari, the Cremonese luthier, was in his eighties. Over the course of his career, Stradivari went from making large, lumbering cellos to creating smaller, more innovative ones that became the blueprint for the modern instrument. The Marquis is one of the last pieces he made in this classic form. “The sound is uniquely magnificent,” Robert Brewer Young, a luthier who has made more than fifteen copies of this specific instrument, told me. “There’s an archetypal form of cello that has a perfect evolution, and ends, as far as we know, with the Marquis de Corberon.”
Each evening, Isserlis plants a goodnight kiss on the cello’s beechwood scroll as he returns it to its case. Someday, he knows, he will do this for the last time—not because the instrument will be stolen, or damaged, but because it doesn’t belong to him. The 1726 Marquis de Corberon Stradivarius is owned by London’s Royal Academy of Music, which has entrusted it to Isserlis on a long-term loan.
The Academy provides plenty of students with instruments from its collection, but the Marquis is the only trophy piece that also lives and travels with an international soloist. People at the Academy speak about the pair as if they were joint and equal envoys for the institution. “Steven is a great ambassador for the collection and for the Academy,” Susana Caldeira, the Academy’s head of collections, said. “And so is the instrument.” The loan comes with strict conditions about travel, security, and maintenance; if Isserlis violates these conditions, the instrument could be instantly recalled. In fact, it could be recalled at almost any time. When the arrangement was most recently renewed, the academy reminded Isserlis that the loan’s term was five years. “I said, ‘No, it’s a loan for life’,” Isserlis told me. “ ‘Because if you take it away from me, I’ll kill myself.’ ”
Isserlis was born in London to a musical family, and rose to prominence around 1992, when his recording of “The Protecting Veil,” a soaring, hypnotic work for cello and orchestra by John Tavener, became a rare classical best-seller. In Britain, he is now something of a classical-music celebrity, interviewing widely, presenting documentaries, and publishing children’s books about the lives of great composers. His concert schedule is considered extreme even by industry veterans. “He can’t do anything less than a hundred and ten per cent all of the time,” Jonathan Freeman-Attwood, the principal of the Royal Academy of Music, told me. “That’s the way he plays the cello. That’s him.”
Isserlis told me that he flies at least a hundred times a year, and mostly he brings the Marquis with him. Flying is difficult. The cello can’t go in the hold, he explained. (“Would you put your baby in the hold?” he asked.) The Marquis gets its own seat. What it lacks is a passport number, which means it has spent a lot of time being snarled in airline check-in systems. Isserlis has often missed a can’t-miss flight while standing in a terminal lobby, watching the clock tick down.
