By Anne Gray
Elsa Hilger, the noted cellist, celebrated her 100th birthday in April of this year. Anne Gray and her husband motored across country from the West to the East Coast to share the momentous occasion and to present Elsa Hilger with a “This is Your Life” booklet replete with photos and concert programs. The following article is taken from this booklet.
Elsa Hilger, born April 13, 1904, in Trautenau, Austria (after WWI, Trutnov, Czechoslovakia), was the youngest of 18 children. The family moved to Pisek when Elsa was seven so that her 14-year-old sister Maria could study violin with Otakar Sevcik, noted Czech violinist and pedagogue. Watching Maria’s lessons, Elsa sat down and placed the violin upright between her legs. Sevcik immediately suggested starting the child on the cello, a decision that marked the beginning of a remarkable concert career. Elsa’s other sister, Greta, called Gretel, studied piano.
The professor was so impressed with the girls’ talent that he secured scholarships for all three at the Vienna Conservatory—a most unusual occurrence in one family. Fortunately, Kaiser Franz Josef, who sponsored the awards, was fond of the prodigies. The family moved to Vienna in 1912, and within a year, Elsa, at age nine, was playing first chair in the Conservatory orchestra. At 12 she made her solo debut with the Vienna Philharmonic performing Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, accompanied, she remembered, “...by a growling stomach. There was a war—and no food! Ration cards got you only a loaf of bread a week. And when you cut into the loaf odd objects often came out—straw and things.”
In the next two years Elsa appeared six times with the Vienna Philharmonic. Renowned tenor Leo Slezak thought she was a wonder, and the world’s foremost cellist, Pablo Casals, called the little girl “a genius on the cello.” The novelty of three sisters attracted wide attention. With a revolution brewing in Czechoslovakia, and because the girls spoke both Bohemian and German, they were suspected of being spies! During border crossings, their instruments and music would be examined for messages and, on occasion, the guards made them disrobe and examined their clothing. Despite the hardships, the trio performed throughout Europe. After a tour of Holland and Belgium—reached only by posing as under-nourished children sent there for their health, they came to America in May 1920 with their mother and older brother, Franz. They were offered $1,000 a week to appear in variety shows, but their mother would not hear of it. “We didn’t come to America to play vaudeville!” was her firm refusal. (Their father had died during WWI.)
In the Hilgers’ first year in America, the Trio played 60 concerts including Madison Square Garden, the Hippodrome and Aeolian Hall, where Elsa also gave three solo recitals. She met composer-cellist Victor Herbert, who asked her to play his Cello Concerto with maestro Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony. The promised concert never materialized, however, because Herbert died suddenly in 1924.
In 1922 they gave three subscription concerts at Town Hall, and over the next Depression years, Elsa and her sisters, chaperoned by their mother, began a series of coast-to-coast concert tours, first by train and then bumping in an old Buick over rutted, barely paved highways. Once, driving from Minnesota to Iowa, their car was half buried in a snowdrift during a blizzard. Gretel walked miles to a farmhouse and brought help. They made it to the concert! Elsa always drove because, she recalled, “My sisters were too nervous.”
In February 1932 Elsa performed the Haydn Cello Concerto with the Manhattan Symphony. In March the Trio played a concert honoring the 80th birthday of their mentor, Sevcik, who was visiting in Boston. Also in 1932 they made their debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Robin Hood Dell, the summer venue of the orchestra. Their touring, which by Elsa’s estimate had covered 600,000 miles, included a concert for John D. Rockefeller and an afternoon with Albert Einstein in Princeton, in which the scientist participated by playing his own violin.
In 1934 the cello that Elsa had brought from Europe was wrenched from her life! Her precious 1730 Petrus Guarnerius, valued at $10,000—a princely sum in those days, had been given to her in 1917 by her mother. On January 2 it was taken from her car in New York City through a smashed window. Even with the efforts of Mayor La Guardia and Governor Lehman (himself a cellist), the instrument was not recovered, leaving the young cellist greatly bereft.
Two years later, during a Carnegie Hall concert (February 1936), Elsa heard her cello! It was being played by her stand partner, Victor Gottlieb. Asked where he got it, he replied, “A dealer gave it to me for a tryout.” After the concert, there unfolded a bizarre tale. It appeared that S. N. Rosenthal, a prominent New York violin maker and dealer (who was in the audience that evening), had purchased the instrument for $75. It had come to him from Frank Webb, a musician who had recovered it from a moving van; Webb paid the lawyer, who was disposing of his client’s estate, $12 for it. Rosenthal, and every dealer in New York, knew that Elsa’s instrument was missing, but coming to him at such a low price, he never dreamed it was the priceless Hilger cello. The following day proof of ownership was provided and the cello was returned to Elsa. The thief was never discovered. Thirty-five years later, after her retirement, she gave the instrument to her son, Robert. It was subsequently played by grandson Alex during his undergraduate years at Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio.
Trio performances continued until 1935, when there was an opening in the cello section of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Elsa, who had already soloed with them, was asked to audition by Leopold Stokowski, prompted by pianist Olga Samaroff, his first wife, who had heard the girls perform. The maestro hired Elsa, thus making her the first woman instrumentalist in a major orchestra—other than the occasional female harpist. (Cellist Dorothy Passmore was hired by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in 1925, but the orchestra was not as significant as the Philadelphia at that time.) Elsa did have to go through the formality of auditioning for the Musicians’ Union. They wanted to be sure she could read orchestral music! On joining the orchestra, Elsa observed, “In those days if you were a woman you had to be better than any man to get in.”
For the next 35 years she performed throughout the world as soloist and orchestral musician. Tours included Japan, South America, Europe and the Soviet Union. In the early days, the musicians were dubious as to whether this petite young woman could stand up to the physical demands of the schedule. She told them, “I’m used to driving 200 to 300 miles a day and playing a concert in the evening!” She reminisced to me, “Not only could I stand it, I stood it better than the men!”
On April 6, 1936, Elsa gave a recital in the Philadelphia Academy of Music accompanied by Greta on piano. Her program featured her own cello transcription of Paganini’s Fantasy on the G String. Also included was the virtuoso piece Hummingbirds, especially written for her by Henry Hadley. Philip Klein, of the Philadelphia Daily News, said: “The audience of fellow musicians agreed by its ovation that Stokowski had not made a hit-and-miss choice by appointing Miss Hilger to her auspicious post.”
Elsa began her orchestral career in the last chair of the cello section. It took ten years until she was appointed second chair in 1945. She held that position until 1963, when she graduated to Associate Principal. Eugene Ormandy, who led the orchestra from 1938 to 1980, inferred that he would have invited her to be Principal long ago. In his words: “Elsa, I wish your pants were longer. I’d put you in first chair.” She shared the first stand until her retirement in 1969. It was the same chair occupied by her father-in-law, D. Hendrik Ezerman, in 1901 before he left the orchestra to pursue his passion—teaching at the Philadelphia Conservatory.
On February 17, 1940, the appointment of Elsa to Principal Cello in the Robin Hood Dell summer concerts was announced. It was the first time a woman had sat the first chair of any major American orchestra. In November of that year, Ormandy programmed an all-Beethoven concert including the Triple Concerto with Elsa, Curtis Institute faculty violinist Lea Luboshutz and pianist Edith Braun. Having three women soloists at a performance was another first.
With the exception of maternity leave—her son Robert was born March 13, 1941—Elsa was proud of her record of missing only one performance in her 34-year career. It was a Saturday night in her last year with the orchestra, and the entire cello section refused to fill her seat! She had become very popular with her colleagues—a “mother confessor” to all.
In 1965 she received the Philadelphia Orchestra’s C. Hartman Kuhn award, presented annually to an orchestra member “whose character enhances the standard and reputation of the orchestra.” The same year (in January) she was the Wister Memorial Soloist, and she performed as principal cellist with the orchestra in February and March during the indisposition of Principal Cellist Samuel Mayes.
A mandatory requirement in Philadelphia, and with most orchestras at that time, was retirement at age 65. Elsa’s comment, “My life was filled with teaching, practicing, rehearsing—as well as home and family duties—then one day, I am a day older and too old to play in the Orchestra! It isn’t right for someone who still feels good and plays as well as they always have. But life is too short to be bitter.” Her final performance was in the Spring of 1969, playing the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations, the same music she performed at age 12 in her debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1916.
Beginning in April 1936, Elsa gave recitals, some with faculty, at the Philadelphia Conservatory Ethical Cultural Auditorium. The March 8, 1937 program featured Elsa and Rosalyn Tureck. January to March 1938 brought three concerts of Modern Chamber Music at the same venue. The Conservatory’s credo—which has been echoed through succeeding generations—was: “Unless artists and institutions keep modern music before the public it cannot find a lasting place in the world of art.”
Besides her solo appearances and recitals, Elsa had a distinguished teaching career at Temple University and the Philadelphia Conservatory. When asked about teaching cello to women and the strict self-discipline required, Elsa would say, “True, then along comes a talent like Jacqueline DuPré, whose extraordinary virtuosity at age 24 makes you think the cello is a toy. But the instrument is large and clumsy, and playing it requires the strength of a football player!”
Elsa was awarded an honorary doctorate from Temple University in 1956, and the following year she won the Americanization Medal of the Daughters of the American Revolution for service, leadership and patriotism.
Elsa’s retirement turned out to be only from the orchestra. Elsa chose Vermont for her retirement because it reminded her of Austria. She had spent 40 summers on Lake Dunmore, the site of her 1938 honeymoon, where she indulged in her other passion, fishing, before making Middlebury her permanent home in 1979. Although she managed to get in a lot more fishing, she was much in demand for recitals in the Vermont area. In 1985, she was honored by the Vermont Council on the Arts with the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, presented by Governor Madeleine Kunin at Middlebury College. In June 1986, she received a letter of thanks from master cellist/pedagogue Janos Starker, for her Orchestral Technique seminar at the Third American Cello Congress at Indiana University.
It was in Middlebury that Elsa met piano teacher/adjudicator Catherine Baird. Baird had grown up listening to the Philadelphia Orchestra and admiring Elsa from afar. Decades later, with both of them living in the same state, they began a 20-year collaboration, playing on public radio and television and giving concerts in the Eastern United States and Canada. A Detroit Free Press review of February 25, 1991, proclaimed: “Cellist Elsa Hilger, who turns 87 on April 13, accompanied by Catherine Baird, played a generous program of Haydn, Bach, Bruch, Saint-Saëns, Boccherini and Popper....There were a few signs of Hilger’s advanced age....Did they matter? About as much as a whisper in a windstorm.”
There were also annual birthday recitals for Elsa at St. Lawrence University (Canton, NY), Stonehill College (North Easton, Massachusetts), Saint Michael’s College (Winooski, Vermont)—all of whom bestowed honorary degrees upon her—plus solo appearances with the Vermont Symphony, and Christmas concerts in Baird’s spacious home recital room. In May 1999, Baird died suddenly. Elsa, 40 years her senior, sadly played at her beloved accompanist’s funeral. Baird’s death proved a time of introspection for the 95-year-old cellist. Elsa pondered many months about passing her beloved cello on to her grandson Alex. In 1943 she had taken her Guarnerius for repair to the reputable Moenig & Company in Philadelphia. Prominently displayed in their showroom was a golden-hued cello begging Elsa to try it. It was love at first bow stroke! Incredibly, the papers that came with the purchase showed that this wonderful instrument, a prized 1745 Januarus Gagliano, came from Holland. The instrument had been put on the market out of financial necessity by a family named Ezerman! They, of course, turned out to be related to her husband. In August of that year Elsa parted with her Gagliano cello so that the legacy would be carried on within the family. Her grandson was a member of the cello faculty of Texas Tech and first chair in the Lubbock (Texas) Symphony. Elsa has not given up music; in her 100th year she is still teaching cello students.
Anne Gray, Ph.D., President of WordWorld Literary Services, is author of The Popular Guide to Classical Music and The Popular Guide to WOMEN in Classical Music. Dr. Gray thanks Elsa Hilger and her family, Robert, Betsy and Alex Ezerman, photographers Tom and Betsy Melvin, and Philadelphia Orchestra Archivist JoAnne Barry for their input, information and priceless photos.