Peter Quantrill

Fifty years after his death, it is worth remembering that Pablo Casals was the first celebrity cellist of the modern age. What Paganini had done for the violin, and then Clara Schumann and Liszt for the piano – making a viable career out of touring as a solo virtuoso, as singers had done – it took Casals until the turn of the 19th-20th century. Yet he commissioned very little for his instrument, and then abruptly ceased that solo career at its zenith.

Johann Strauss's third operetta was an instant hit when it opened at the Theater an der Wien in April 1874. Austria had suffered a stock-market crash the previous year and audiences were in the mood to rinse away their troubles with buckets of sekt and a slice of escapist nostalgia. Strauss set to work and sketched the whole operetta in six weeks, boiling down a typical, if confused-looking, medley of German farce, French vaudeville (the original story by Meilhac and Halévy) and Viennese adaptation.

We associate 'cultural cringe' with the reluctant debt felt by Australians towards 'the old country' (the UK), but the term easily fits the rapture shown by the New York public in December 1893 after the hotly awaited premiere of what was greeted as 'the first American symphony'. Department stores began selling 'Antonín Dvořák' shirts, ties and walking sticks. Becoming a brand does not seem entirely to have bemused this butcher's son from Bohemia.

In October 2023 the Emerson Quartet will take to the stage of Alice Tully Hall in New York. They will fiddle with the music on their stands, as they do. Their eyes will meet, their heads will lift a fraction and they will lay bow to string together for the very last time.