Saying Goodbye to Bernard Greenhouse’s Beloved Cello

Bernard Greenhouse, who died last October at the age of ninety-five, was the founding member of the Beaux Arts Trio and a great teacher. He had been the owner for fifty-four years of perhaps the greatest surviving Stradivarius cello, known as The Countess of Stainlein, ex-Paganini of 1707. Last week, according to Musical America, it sold in Boston for six million dollars.

The sale “made emotional sense” to Greenhouse’s daughter Elena Delbanco, who hoped that a wonderful young talent was going to play it. This seems to have happened. It was a private sale that required her consent.

Her husband, Nicholas Delbanco, wrote a book about the instrument in which he quoted Greenhouse describing its sound: “The quality of sound is something that one wears, that adorns an individual as though it were a beautiful piece of apparel.”

In an article about Greenhouse and his cello, Daniel J. Wakin wrote in The New York Times Magazine (January 15): “In a Beaux Arts recording of Schubert’s Trio in E Flat, the elegiac opening measures of the Andante con Moto movement convey everything beautiful about his playing. The vibrato is light and warm: the notes taper elegantly. The drop in the 15th measure to a low G sounds like a cat jumping onto a carpet.”