Gregor Piatigorsky

Early life

Gregor Piatigorsky was born in Yekaterinoslav (present-day Dnipro), Ukraine into a Jewish family. As a child, he was taught violin and piano by his father. But after being captivated by the cello at an orchestra concert, he was inspired to become a cellist. Piatigorsky constructed a cello made from two sticks, a long stick for the cello, and a short stick for the bow, and performed on it. Soon after, he received his first cello for his seventh birthday.

Piatigorsky won a scholarship to the Moscow Conservatory, studying with Alfred von Glehn, Anatoliy Brandukov, and a certain Gubariov. At the same time, he was earning money for his family by playing in local cafés, brothels and silent movie houses.

Piatigorsky was 13 when the Russian Revolution took place. Shortly afterward, he started playing in the Lenin Quartet. At 15, he was hired as the principal cellist for the Bolshoi Theater.

The Soviet authorities, specifically Anatoly Lunacharsky, would not allow Piatigorsky to travel abroad to further his musical studies, so he smuggled himself and his cello into Poland on a cattle train with a group of artists. One of the women was a heavy-set soprano who, when the border guards started shooting at them, grabbed Piatigorsky and his cello. The cello did not survive intact, but it was the only casualty.

Now 18, Piatigorsky studied briefly in Berlin and Leipzig, with Hugo Becker and Julius Klengel, playing in a trio in a Russian café to earn money for food. Among the patrons of the café were Emanuel Feuermann and Wilhelm Furtwängler. Furtwängler heard Piatigorsky and hired him as the principal cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic.

Family

In January 1937, Piatigorsky married Jacqueline de Rothschild, daughter of Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild of the wealthy Rothschild banking family of France. That fall, after returning to France, they had their first child, Jephta. After the Nazi occupation in World War II, the family left France on September 5, 1939, by boat for the United States from Le Havre and settled in Elizabethtown in the Adirondack Mountains, New York, where Piatigorsky had already bought a house. It was also his parents-in-law's first U.S. residence after their flight from France in 1940. Their son, Joram, was born in Elizabethtown in 1940. Piatigorsky had three grandsons by Jephta (Jonathan, Evan, Eric) and two by Joram (Auran, Anton).