Elsa Hilger: Genius on the Cello

By Margaret Bartley

Portrait by Jamie Cope

You are a little flat on the A," Elsa tells her newest student. "Go higher."

At 100 years of age, Elsa Hilger has not lost her ear. Born on April 13, 1904 in Trautenau, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Elsa loved music long before she ever picked up the cello. The youngest of eighteen children (only four of whom survived), Elsa sat in a corner listening to her sister’s violin lessons with the famous instructor Ottokar Sevcik. Impressed by the 9 year old’s attentiveness during the lessons, he told her parents, "She has a cellist’s hands, such a good stretch." Convinced he was right, they bought their daughter a half-size cello and Sevcik became her first teacher.

"Because he was a violinist," Elsa remembers, "I learned to play treble clef before I learned the bass. The high notes were easy for me. It took me years of practice to undo that early learning."

After Elsa’s father’s death in World War I, Elsa’s mother took her three daughters — Maria who played violin, Greta the pianist, and the cellist Elsa — to Vienna where all three girls, with Sevcik’s help, won scholarships to the prestigious Vienna Conservatory and, for Elsa, the right to borrow a rare Guarnerius cello.

Elsa became the youngest member of the Conservatory Orchestra, where she studied with Paul Grummer, head of the cello department and a member of the Busch Quartet. In 1916, at age of twelve, she made her premiere performance playing Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations with the Vienna Philharmonic. Her memory of that concert is clear.

"I was hungry; it was the war years. They put wood blocks beneath my feet because I was so short my feet would not reach the floor."

The next year, in recognition of her talent, Grummer presented her with the Guarnerius cello, which she played for the remainder of her career.

When World War I ended, The Hilger Trio, as the three sisters came to be known, began touring. In 1920 the girls and their mother arrived in America. They were soon offered $1000 a week to play on the vaudeville circuit, but their mother, wanting to preserve the girls’ musical integrity, turned down the job.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, the Hilger Trio toured North and South America. Living out of a suitcase, traveling by car and train, sleeping in hotels became a way of life. During the Depression the family traveled across the United States by Buick with Elsa at the wheel.

"Two hundred miles on unpaved roads and a concert at night," Elsa remembers. "My sisters were too nervous to drive."

In the winter of 1934-35, the three sisters presented more than 37 solo and ensemble concerts.

"We were the Nuns and our Mother, she was Mother Superior," Elsa says. "She organized everything, made our clothes, and handled the money."

During those touring years, Elsa was invited to play for Pablo Casals, who called her "a genius on the cello." Several times she and her sisters played quartets with Albert Einstein, mathematician and violinist. "That was very interesting. We were surprised because we never heard that he was also a musician. He was wonderful! We played several Beethoven quartets with him and had such a good time."

In 1935, Elsa became the first woman to be hired as a full-time member of a major symphony orchestra. She was invited to join the Philadelphia Orchestra by conductor Leopold Stokowski.

Elsa had become friends with Stokowski’s wife, pianist Olga Samaroff. One day Olga called her to say that her husband was looking for a cellist and wanted to hear Elsa play. With no time to get nervous, she picked up her instrument and took the next train into Philadelphia from the home she and her sister shared in New Jersey.

The audition with Stokowski was held in secret, but the conductor was so impressed by Elsa’s playing that he wanted to hire her. However, he explained, she had to audition before a panel from the musician’s union, a requirement at that time. The following week Elsa played solo pieces and sight read for two hours on the stage of the Academy of Music, convincing the skeptics that she was a professional and worthy of being hired.

In 1935, it was a risky venture to hire a woman, but Stokowski took a chance with Elsa and he never regretted it. But to pacify the critics, he offered her the fourth chair, the lowest ranked position in the orchestra. It took years for the new conductor, Eugene Ormandy, to promote her to third chair and finally to assistant principal cellist. The position of Principal Cellist was never hers, despite her incredible talent.

"You would have had the first chair," Ormandy once told her. "But your pants were not long enough."

"I had no idea what I was in for that first year," she remembers, "but traveling was nothing new for me. We had a lot of tours with the Philadelphia Orchestra, all the way to California and back, even to South America. Always there was a big newspaper article, usually on the front page. First woman musician in an orchestra! I think they got their money’s worth out of that."

Elsa was a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra for 35 years. During those years she also taught as many as 40 students at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music. In 1935 she married Willem Ezerman, son of Hendrik Ezerman. An immigrant from the Nethe-rlands, Hendrick had been the first cellist in the Philadelphia Orchestra before World War I, and later became the director of the Philadelphia Music Conservatory.

During her tenure with the orchestra, Elsa missed only one concert — the day she gave birth to her son. On that occasion members of the orchestra allowed her chair to remain empty rather than try to take her place. Both her son, Robert Ezerman, and later her grandson, Alexander Ezerman learned to play the cello from Elsa.

In 1969, Elsa retired and moved to Lake Dunmore, Vermont, where her greatest love, besides music, was fishing. Even in retirement she continued playing and performing until she was 98. Not quite ready to lay down the instrument, she still teaches cello from her home at the Wake Robin Retirement Community in Shelburne, Vermont.

"I just took a new student, a girl who is seven years old. Last year the girl played for me but she was all squeaks and scratches. This year she is ready to learn."

Margaret Bartley is a freelance writer who taught history for 25 years. She recently completed a biography of the great Russian-American cellist Gregor Piatigorsky.