String Pioneers: Female Cellists Owe Much to the Intrepid Lise Cristiani

By Miranda Wilson | From the May/June 2025 issue of Strings

In the cupola of the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Saronno, Italy, a fresco from the mid-1530s by Gaudenzio Ferrari shows angels performing on over 50 types of musical instruments. Among them is the first known image of the newest member of the violin family—the cello—in the hands of a female angel. The woman’s left hand holds the neck of the instrument in a slanted manner; the right grips the bow overhand, the pinky behind the frog. We don’t know the identity of Ferrari’s model for this cello-playing angel, nor if she existed outside his imagination, but it’s intriguing to contemplate the possibility that women cellists may have been around for as long as the cello has.

Over the next 300 years, artistic depictions of women playing the cello (or, more often, the viola da gamba) were not unknown, but professional women cellists were rare. While we can find the odd tantalizing reference to a woman cellist in the footnotes of long-forgotten histories, it wasn’t until the 1860s that we find evidence of women taking up the cello in higher numbers. We may attribute this to the increasing popularity of the endpin, which made it possible for women to play the cello in the long, bulky skirts of the era, possibly in a “sidesaddle” position. Even so, women cellists had to contend with worse obstacles than 19th-century fashions: professional glass ceilings, condescending critics, and the opprobrium of polite society. It took rare determination for a woman to attempt a career as a cellist.

No one could’ve been more determined than Lise Cristiani (1827–53), whose fans included Felix Mendelssohn, Joseph Joachim, Ferdinand David, and Niels Gade—top musicians of the Romantic era whose good opinions were not easily won. Despite this, many of Cristiani’s less open-minded contemporaries could not get over the idea of a woman daring to play the cello at all. In an age when the playing position was considered by some to be unacceptably unladylike, Cristiani was highly unusual. We don’t know for sure if she used an endpin, since the only verified image of her doesn’t show the lower half of her cello, but some commentators consider it likely. 

Whichever way she held it, the sight of a woman playing a cello in public caused a stir in the press. One French critic of 1845 sneered, “We can hardly invite [Cristiani] to play this instrument in a broad, severe way; to attack the low strings vigorously instead of meowing prayers and boleros like a pretty little white cat, since all that is not very suitable for the fair sex.” Even when they weren’t comparing Cristiani to a cat, the reviews patronized her. A German critic of 1847, after fulminating for several paragraphs about Cristiani’s choice to play an instrument “primarily suited for masculine handling,” was astonished to discover that “she possesses real talent . . . and just as she holds her instrument gracefully, her playing is also graceful and beautiful . . . her main strength lies in performing melodies, which she not only presents with that delicate aesthetic sensitivity characteristic of ladies’ artistic achievements, but also understands how to phrase masterfully.”

Historians of women in music are used to reading 19th-century journalism that comments more on female musicians’ appearances than on their musicianship, but it’s disappointing to read a present-day entry in Grove Music Online that attributes Cristiani’s success to her “beauty and charm” and describes her repertoire as “salon pieces” performed with a “small tone.” Happily, better research supplants the outdated repetition of 19th-century prejudices. Books, articles, videos, and radio documentaries by researchers including Freia Hoffmann, Katharina Deserno, Rene de Vries, Marie-Thérèse Grisenti, Andrea Stewart, and Kate Kennedy reveal a more nuanced portrait of Cristiani as both a musician and a travel writer.

Lise (or Elise) Barbier was born into an artistic family in around 1827. After the early death of her parents, she went to live with her maternal grandparents and adopted their family name of Chrétien, which she later Italianized to Cristiani. Though her initial music education was in the more traditionally feminine activities of singing and piano, she boldly made the switch to cello. Her teacher was Bernard Benazet (1781–1846), the solo cellist of the Théâtre-Italien in Paris and a onetime student of the great Bernhard Romberg. 

By her late teens, Cristiani was enjoying a successful career as a touring virtuoso, performing as a soloist in cities around France, Austria, and Germany. She favored repertoire in the bel canto style, such as transcriptions of operatic arias and lieder. This was evidently a hit with her audiences, since her earnings were enough for her to purchase a magnificent Stradivari cello of 1700 that had once been the property of Jean-Pierre Duport. On tour in Leipzig, Cristiani encountered Felix Mendelssohn, who wrote his Lied ohne Worte, Op. 109, for her. This heartrending one-movement work hints at Cristiani’s gift for lyricism and supposed love of the upper register.

If this was all Cristiani had accomplished, she still would have made it into the history books. But the remarkable story of her travels immortalizes her as one of the most intrepid women explorers of her time. By the mid-19th century, faster and more efficient transportation systems, including railroads, meant that Europe’s traveling virtuosi could extend their concert tours farther and farther. Cristiani’s blossoming career took her to northern Europe, where the King of Denmark pronounced her a Virtuosa di Corte, and to Sweden, where adoring fans gave her the nickname “Saint Cecilia of France.” But this was not enough to satisfy Cristiani’s taste for adventure. 

By the 1840s, St. Petersburg was becoming part of the regular concert circuit for international artists. Clara and Robert Schumann, among others, had already made the journey there. Cristiani may have taken inspiration from the travels of the Belgian virtuoso Adrien-François Servais (1807–66), who traveled beyond the major Russian cities into more remote areas on his concert tours.

Cristiani was determined to go farther even than Servais. Starting in 1848, she began her travels into the vast landmass of Russia, chronicling her adventures in a travel journal published posthumously (and with a few editorial embellishments) by a French magazine. Seemingly fearless, Cristiani and her cello ventured into parts of Russia where no European cellist had performed before, riding in carts and sledges pulled by horses, dogs, and occasionally reindeer, stopping to perform dozens of concerts and private soirées along the way. 

Cristiani’s Stradivari traveled alongside her in a metal container, insulated from the bone-chilling cold with wolf skins. Together, they sailed down rivers, traveling as far as the Kamchatka Peninsula—the easternmost part of Russia. On one memorable occasion, Cristiani’s travelogue describes an encounter with whales underneath her ship as she sailed the Pacific Ocean. Eventually, she headed west again to bring her talents to Ukraine, Lithuania, and the Caucasus, where her audiences included the likes of Leo Tolstoy.

Cristiani’s swashbuckling adventures came to a tragic end when she arrived in the city of Novocherkassk, a city in the Rostov Oblast district. Having survived all manner of dangers and difficulties on her travels, she fell victim to a cholera epidemic there aged only 26. For a while, Cristiani’s beloved Stradivari stayed on in Novocherkassk while her family figured out how to retrieve it; eventually, a French diplomat was dispatched to accompany the cello on its long journey home. Today, known as the “Cristiani, Stauffer,” it resides in the Museo del Violino in Cremona. Its own fascinating biography can be read on the Tarisio website.

Cristiani’s life may have been cruelly cut short, but her legacy was long-reaching. Thanks to her example, it became less and less unusual for a woman to play the cello. The database of the Sophie Drinker Institute chronicles the careers of the next generations of 19th-century women cellists, several of whom (including Élisa de Try, Hélène de Katow, and Gabrielle Platteau) were students of the enlightened Servais. By the 1890s, cello professor Jules Delsart had made endpins de rigueur at the Paris Conservatoire and was known to accept women as students. 

By 1905, when Edmund van der Straeten published his Technics of Violoncello Playing, playing the cello was completely normalized for women. Writing of the cello hold, he observes that almost all women cellists by that time handled the instrument the same way men did. Of the ladylike “sidesaddle” positions earlier female cellists were obliged to adopt, he states that while they were “considered more graceful, [they] have become almost obsolete on account of the obvious disadvantages.” 

The early 20th century saw the rise of several female international soloists, including Guilhermina Suggia and Beatrice Harrison. By the middle of the 20th century, there were many, including luminaries such as Jacqueline du Pré. By then, no sensible person would ever have suggested that the cello—or any other instrument—was unsuitable for women. Whether we realize it or not, every subsequent generation of women cellists stands on the shoulders of these brave early pioneers. None could’ve been braver than the trailblazing Cristiani, the cello-grandmother to us all.