The cello - as the violin or the string instruments in general - has a long and important tradition from hundreds of years. We know about many masters of the cello who could really master the instrument and contribute with something significant for its development in technique and style of playing. I could mention many names: Boccherini, Duport, Kummer, Popper, Tortelier… All these cellist lived in different moments of the history, and they did important contributions to the cello. Those contributions made the cello be like it is today, the way we play it and the way we practice it in classical music. Are we aware of that?
In order to be a good player, we need to spend a lot of time working on the technique. It needs to be so good that we can master our instrument for playing the great repertoire of the instrument. Nowadays, one of the most spread ways of practicing the technique is by playing studies. Every instrument has its studies, which every professional classical musician must have played in order to become a good player.
I always enjoyed playing studies on the cello. During my growing period as a cellist, I played many of the most important works of this kind: starting with S.Lee or Dotzauer, continuing with Duport, Franchomme, Popper, Grützmacher… Every method has been written in a different time, for a different purpose, and to develop different technical skills.
Some years ago, my curiosity about this topic became more intense. It happened in a period where I came back into the practising of the Duport studies after many years of having done so. I realized that the edition I was using was made by the cellist Pierre Fournier (French cellist, 1906-1986). I wondered how the original version of Duport would be like, and where my edition came from. What I found out was something that changed my vision of the work and woke up my curiosity on the field of editions. All the modern versions of this Duport work are based in the edition made by F. Grützmacher. His edition is very different to the original. It reflects the way of playing and the aesthetics of other different period of time and it also reflects the strong personality of this cellist. Those modern versions are closer to the Grützmacher version than to the original, what made me think that this edition may have been so important and popular at its time that it became the standard version of the work. At that moment I started to be interested about Grützmacher. Who was him? How much did he influenced the modern cello style of playing? What can I learn from him?