Kreisler, Fritz: Kreisler for Cello

To the modern listener, Fritz Kreisler evokes the elegance, romance, and old world charm of the Viennese ballroom, with sweeping cantabile melodies and bubbly arpeggiated passages that delight audiences. Violinists are already aware of Kreisler’s rich, romantic, and crowd-pleasing repertoire for the violin, but he was a prolific composer and transcriber for cello as well. In addition to many audience and player favorites, Kreisler was famous for attributing the authorship of many of his original works to other composers, such as Pugnani, Tartini and Vivaldi. Only later in his career did he acknowledge that they were original compositions. When subjected to public criticism for these “musical hoaxes,” he nonchalantly observed that, “The name changes, the value remains.”