The greatest cellist

Emanuel who? New Yorkers in the late Thirties, who bought his records in preference to those of any other musician, would have told you in a flash, as would the Japanese collectors of his Nipponophone 78s. "The greatest cellist of all time," was Artur Rubinstein's verdict; "the Paganini of the cello," said our own master- cellist William Pleeth.

Sixty years ago, Emanuel Feuermann died at the height of his powers, not yet 40, when a minor op for haemorrhoids went calamitously wrong. Drawing on testimonies from surviving friends and relatives, this biography may be absurdly belated, but it will need no justification with those who still marvel, through the fog of shellac crackle, at the chaste expressiveness of Feuermann's melodic line.

Born the son of a celebrated local musician in an impoverished Galician shtetl, Emanuel grew up in the shadow of his violin-prodigy older brother Sigmund; Emanuel's preternatural ability on the cello - on which he could play as high and as accurately as a virtuoso on the fiddle - meant that father Meier could parade his boys like little Mozarts.

Sigmund never managed the transition from prodigy to pro, but Emanuel was appointed cello professor in Cologne when only 16. Nine years later, as an established international star, he landed the top cello job in Berlin's Hochschule, where Hindemith and Schnabel were among his illustrious peers.

Then came Hitler. Each Jewish member of the academy's staff was sacked on a different pretext: "cultural bolshevist", "shabby character", but against Feuermann's name the indictment was simply "intolerable Jew". Intolerable, presumably, because he was respected by his colleagues, loved by his students, adored by the public and had a famously sharp tongue. Also, no doubt, because he saw no reason to despise his cultural heritage and set great store by the brave new world in Palestine.

Annette Morreau chronicles every twist in his globe-trotting career, as he was ineluctably propelled towards the country he called "the last frontier of freedom for artists". In a New York awash with musicians escaping from Hitler, he gladly went native, playing for the troops, advertising Chesterfield cigarettes, leading from the podium on "I am an American" Day.

As a piece of music history, this book is impeccably thorough. Moron-reau has mined the archives and milked the witnesses, to compile a dizzyingly comprehensive portrait of a working life in which chamber music - notably with those capricious fellow-divinities Heifetz and Rubinstein - loomed large. She logs every recording, every concert, every deal. Extracts from Feuermann's unpublished treatise cello teaching illuminate his art, and copious quotes from his correspondence allow the complexity of his character to emerge: at once hedonistic and self-denying, frivolous and professionally austere. We get a whiff of the frustrations involved in his lateish marriage to a rich child-bride.

But this is, alas, a dreadfully indigestible tome. Morreau is a story-teller in the Gradgrind mould: never happier than when pointing out a bÃtise by some longdead critic, obsessively Stradspotting in a way which her subject, who dropped ash into his instrument, and whose real love was his Buick, would have found comic. The sort of information which helps a story along - who said what to whom - is relegated infuriatingly to the concluding footnotes, while the real footnote material clogs up the text.

More seriously, one has the constant feeling that the greater drama of Feuermann's life is happening offstage. We learn a little about Sigmund's tragedy, but absolutely nothing about the mother (to whom Morreau tells us at one point, quite unexpectedly, that Feuermann was always very close), and ditto about father Meier, who clearly represented a lifelong problem for his successful second son. In psychological terms, this account is full of things that don't add up.

INTERVIEWING Feuermann's younger sister Sophie, who was for many years the cellist's chosen accompanist, Morreau elicits the shocking revelation that their relationship ended after a recital in which he consistently tried to wrong-foot her. Rather than pausing to ask why, Morreau merely rushes on to the next record deal.