Humble beginnings – début – student days – the viola

The date of 29 December 1876 presents musical history with a remarkable coincidence. For on that day Pau Casals was born in the small Catalonian town of Vendrell, while Lionel Tertis came into the world in the industrial town of West Hartlepool in the north of England. Each of these two remarkable men was the son of a musician, and was destined to bring his chosen instrument to new heights of virtuosity and popularity. Many books have been written about the legendary cellist Casals, but the equally charismatic Tertis has been comparatively neglected, perhaps because he played the more self-effacing viola.

Like so many great string players, Lionel Tertis was of Jewish origin: he was descended on both sides from cantors who sang the synagogue services of the Ashkenazi tradition. His maternal grandfather, whose surname was Hermann, was a Polish cantor with a brood of children. All of these emigrated in their early youth in order to escape the growing anti-Semitism in Poland, which culminated in the pogroms of the 1880s. One son, David, went to Germany, took the name Loewenstein; he became a prominent physician, and was honoured by the Kaiser for his paediatric work. One of his four daughters, Antonie, was a professional pianist and a member of Anton Rubinstein's circle. She came to England in 1898, taught at the Matthay School, and died in 1947.

Cantor Hermann's daughter Phoebe came to England around 1860; according to Tertis's own account, she came with her father, who himself became a British subject. Eventually Phoebe Hermann met her first husband, Harriss Cohen, a jeweller who was also from Poland. Harriss and Phoebe Cohen had three children: Solomon, Joseph – who became a doctor and a rabbi – and Rebecca (who became Mrs Reeve). Harriss died of tuberculosis on the last day of May 1868, and Phoebe looked after the children on her own for a number of years. She then met and married Alexander Tertis, born in Koudanov in the Russian province of Minsk, the son of Benjamin and Sarah Tertis, who emigrated to England when Alexander was thirteen. Phoebe and Alexander's children were Lionel, Annie and Samuel. Lionel's birthplace, West Hartlepool, County Durham, where the family lived at 14 Regents Place, was not to play a large part in his life.