Introduction to the Translation

Miranda Wilson

Jean Otto Eric Hugo Becker (1863-1941), known as Hugo, was one of the most distinguished solo cellists, chamber musicians, and pedagogues of his time. He also found time to compose etudes and cello pieces, publish dozens of editions, and spend twenty years researching and writing one of the most important books on cello technique.

Becker’s Mechanics and Aesthetics of Cello Playing is informed by decades of teaching, first at the Hoch Conservatorium in Frankfurt, then at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Becker’s list of alumni includes top players from all over the world—Paul Grümmer, Boris Hambourg, Beatrice Harrison, Johannes Hegar, Enrico Mainardi, Arnold Trowell, Herbert Walenn—and his reputation as a teacher was rivaled only by that of Julius Klengel. Becker’s own pedagogical family tree included lessons with Friedrich Grützmacher, placing him in the third generation of so-called Dresden School cellist-pedagogues. He also studied with the eminent Belgian cellist Jules de Swert (a student of Adrien-François Servais) and with Alfredo Piatti, who dedicated his first cello sonata to “suo amico Hugo Becker.” Well-versed in pedagogical publications, and doubtless conscious of his own place in the lineage of cello pedagogues, Becker published several editions of pedagogical works by Franchomme, Grützmacher, Kummer, Lee, and Servais.

Becker was born into a family of musicians in Strasbourg in 1863. His violinist father, Jean Becker, was very involved in the musical education of his children. After attempting to make a violinist of his youngest son, the elder Becker let little Hugo switch to cello aged nine after the boy was entranced by the sound of the instrument in a church. Together with Hugo and his two other children, Hans and Jeanne, Jean Becker led a family chamber ensemble that performed to acclaim around the European continent and in Britain. It may have been this early experience of chamber music that inspired Becker’s lifelong love of small ensemble playing. He went on to perform for many years in the Heermann-Becker Quartet (and published a respected edition of the Mozart string quartets), and also played in piano trios with with Eugène Ysaÿe and Ferrucio Busoni, Henri Marteau and Ernő Dohnányi, and Carl Flesch and Arthur Schnabel. He won the respect of the musicians at the very top of the profession, such as Hans von Bülow, who described Becker as “the only cellist who plays manfully.” ^[1]

Becker was a lifelong advocate for the music of living composers. Dohnányi, Eugen d’Albert, David Popper, and Max Reger dedicated works to him. He performed Brahms’s Sonata in F major (Op. 99) with the composer himself at the piano. His understanding of the Schumann Concerto came from conversations with Clara Schumann. A handful of adjustments he made to the Dvořák Concerto met with “the approval of the Bohemian master.” A longtime association with Richard Strauss meant that Becker became the leading interpreter of Don Quixote during Strauss’s lifetime.

All of these musicians make appearances in The Mechanics and Aesthetics of Cello Playing. This alone would make the book an invaluable primary document for performance practice in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century repertoire. But Becker’s three-volume magnum opus is much more than that: it is the first book to address the biomechanics of cello playing. At this time, physiology was a relatively new field in medical science, and research by physiologists on the optimal use of the body in violin playing created a stir among string pedagogues. Friedrich Steinhausen’s Die Physiologie der Bogenführung auf den Streich-Instrumenten (1903) appears to have inspired Becker to create a similar resource for cellists. Unlike Steinhausen, Becker had no medical training, so he approached Dago Rynar, a doctor and amateur cellist, with the idea for Mechanics and Aesthetics. The pair spent many years working on their research, seemingly with no expense spared. They were not content only to tell cellists what to do and how to do it, but also why their way worked best. Every technique in Mechanics and Aesthetics was put rigorously to the test using the most advanced technologies of the day, including measuring the electrical current of muscular contractions during bowing. “With such an approach towards technical problems,” Becker wrote, “we believe we can demand either that the reader agrees, or can produce proof of error.”

A third volume of Mechanics and Aesthetics is an appendix with 81 photographs. Unusually for 1929, when film technology was not especially advanced, Becker commissioned a studio to create footage of him demonstrating technical concepts from the book. The images in the appendix are stills from these films. The way Becker organizes and presents the images are yet more testimony to his pedagogical thoughtfulness. To avoid misinterpretation, he often shows more than one view of a signature technique. These include “bowing height” (Strichhöhe), where he uses the arm’s range of motion to determine posture and instrument hold as well as optimal bow usage; “grip change” (Griffwechsel), a way of adjusting hand shape and motion to execute changes in bow direction smoothly; and “phases of the bow”—a demonstration of what the hand and arm should be doing at any point in a bowstroke.

Mechanics and Aesthetics was published at last in 1929. It remained the most exhaustive description of the biomechanics of cello playing until the publication of Gerhard Mantel’s Cellotechnik (which references Mechanics and Aesthetics) four decades later.^[2] Though Becker’s work is still reasonably well-known in the German-speaking cello world, few English-speaking cellists are familiar with it. The only English translation prior to this one is an unpublished version on microfilm by the American cellist Gordon Kinney (1978), which is held by only a small handful of libraries. It is difficult to access, since microfilm degenerates over time and librarians are understandably reluctant to release frail materials on interlibrary loan. After a few unsuccessful attempts to get my hands on Kinney’s translation, the thought occurred to me that I could make one myself. As plans got underway, I started wondering this important book was not more accessible to English speakers. The most likely explanation was copyright issues, since Mechanics and Aesthetics has only been in the public domain since 2025 in the United States.

Another reason could be that Mechanics and Aesthetics was not especially well-received even in German-speaking countries. Even if Becker was one of the most respected cello teachers in Europe, he seems to have had a problematic reputation. The reminiscences of people close to him give the impression of a difficult, argumentative man whose tendency to pick fights sometimes got him in trouble. In 1906, Becker made news headlines in the city of Saarbrücken for slapping his quartet colleague Adolf Rebner, who had forgotten his music and delayed the start time of their concert. The furious Rebner reported Becker to the police, though once tempers had calmed down the two managed to resolve their differences without going to court.^[3]

On another occasion, during a rehearsal of Brahms’s double concerto with the violinist Maurice Sons, Becker tested the patience of the famously genial Henry Wood, who was on the podium. Wood admired Becker as “a handsome Strassbourgian who knew the Brahms tradition probably as no one else in the world did,” but recalled having a “high old time” trying to stop Sons and Becker from arguing.

“Becker pulled Sons up about every third bar, illustrating on his ‘cello how he wanted him to play the violin part. Sons contradicted everything Becker said. However, by dint of exerting considerable tact and telling more lies in one hour than I ever told before or since, I managed to prevent these two coming to blows in my drawing-room.”^[4]

Even Carl Flesch, a close friend, despaired of Becker’s dogmatism:

“He would remark drily: ‘You play it like this, not because you want to, but because you have to; not because you feel it like that, but because you lack the technical means for the correct way to play it.’ But he would not have any argument about what he thought the correct way. In this respect he was unbending, obstinate, and pedantic. He only knew one logical way of interpretation and only one kind of performing mechanics—his own. Of a tyrannical disposition, he demanded slavish submission in every respect from his pupils. Although he was passionately devoted to teaching, his pupils feared rather than loved him. The most advanced student was forced to start from scratch and alter his bowing, even when the audible result of his technique was sufficiently satisfactory to make changes unnecessary. In consequence, there are very few Becker pupils who unreservedly acknowledge his qualities as a teacher. This is a pity, for had he known how to adjust himself to his pupils instead of applying his Procrustean methods, his knowledge, ability, intelligence and musicality would have made him an exemplary teacher.

[…] Becker had hoped to revolutionize ‘cello playing with his publication, to introduce a new era, but in the event, the book was almost unanimously rejected by the profession. The sales, too, were negligible—a bitter experience for this ambitious and self-confident man.”^[5]

It is a pity that the best-known account of Becker’s teaching from a student’s point of view is the unflattering portrait in Gregor Piatigorsky’s autobiography.^[6] While Piatigorsky’s complaints of Becker’s condescension ring true, his scathing description of Becker’s teaching may be exaggerated. However, not everyone hated Becker. We learn of his gentler side in The Cello and the Nightingales, the memoirs of Beatrice Harrison, who described him as “kind and charming.”^[7] Harrison’s mother Annie, who sometimes observed her daughter’s lessons with Becker, sent a long letter to Beatrice’s sister May about one of them:

“I think Becker gets the effect of almost breathing as it were on a note by putting his bow down on [the] fingerboard and then working gradually towards [the] bridge…It sort of leaves you with your mouth wide open and a sigh, it is wonderful. […] You sort of open your vocal chords [sic] and let the sound gradually out, Becker treats his instrument exactly like a voice. Mind you sing your own passages. Baba’s [Beatrice’s nickname] cantabile is excellent now…And Becker says you must always play everything a little larger for a concert platform… Twice this morning Becker said ‘Bravo’ to Baba and he looked so delighted but he says Baba plays like a man but she must have all the tenderness and grace of a woman, what is a woman without tenderness and grace?”^[8]

While telling a woman cellist she plays like a man is no longer the compliment it was a century ago, it is this version of Becker—passionate, attentive to detail, insistent upon beauty of tone—that we encounter in Mechanics and Aesthetics. Becker did not content himself with just teaching his students to be accomplished cellists—he cared about their intellectual development. Mechanics and Aesthetics quotes Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, theory textbooks, and research on the interpretation of Baroque ornamentation, revealing Becker as an early adopter of historically informed performance practices. (His 1911 edition of the Bach Cello Suites is well worth studying.)

Making Becker’s work more widely accessible is the fulfillment of a long-held dream. It is my hope that performers, teachers, and students of the cello will learn as much from his transformative pedagogy as I have. This publication would not have been possible without the assistance of several University of Idaho colleagues. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Evan Williamson and the University of Idaho Library Digital Scholarship and Open Strategies team, and to Luke Sheneman, John Brunsfeld, Michael Overton, and Barrie Robison of the University of Idaho Institute for Interdisciplinary Data Sciences, for their technical wizardry and their support of my research.

Moscow, Idaho, 2025