Remarks by John Gilhooly at the unveiling of a Blue Plaque in honour of Lionel Tertis

I am thrilled to unveil a Blue Plaque in honour of the great virtuoso player Lionel Tertis, who lived at this address with his wife Lillian from 1961, until his death in February 1975 (Lillian would have been 100 on the 1 May this year).

I am particularly pleased to have been given this privilege as Lionel Tertis is the only viola player to have been awarded the Society’s highest accolade, the Gold Medal, placing him alongside other distinguished winners including Brahms, Delius, Elgar and Sir John Barbirolli. In fact it was Barbirolli who presented Tertis with the medal, at a Royal Philharmonic Society concert given by the Hallé

Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, on the 22 April 1964 - an acknowledgement of his extraordinary achievement in ‘the establishment of the viola’s rights as a solo instrument’.

Lionel Tertis has been called ‘the father of modern viola playing’, although there were so few violists in his youth that he was really a single parent. He was born on 29 December 1876 (the very same day, incidentally, as cellist Pablo Casals) in West Hartlepool, a wealthy Victorian new town on the north east coast of England. He was the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants who sent him to study the violin first at Leipzig then at the in London. There he was encouraged by the Principal, Alexander Mackenzie, to take up the viola instead. Its beauty appealed to him and, under the influence of , he rapidly became one of the best known violists of his time, touring Europe and the USA as a soloist.

Many composers, including Bax, Walton and Vaughan Williams, wrote significant works for him, a number of these being premiered at Wigmore Hall. Indeed, as a professor at the Royal Academy, he encouraged students and colleagues to compose and transcribe works for the viola thus expanding the instrument’s repertoire exponentially. He was a member of a number of prominent string quartets; and he was later to design his own ‘Tertis model’ viola to combine an almost cello-like tone with ease of handling.

Tertis’s idealism and visionary zeal is fittingly described by his pupil and friend, the renowned violist

William Primrose, in his ‘Walk on the North Side: Memoirs of a Violist’:

Tertis was an indomitable man. He initiated all this viola business and set the string world on its ear.

He was the first person to attempt to persuade the public at large to listen to the viola as a solo instrument and in so doing upset many apple carts. For those of us who followed in his train, our task was rendered all the more easy and rewarding because of him. He was the first to insist that the viola was an instrument distinct from other string instruments, that it had a personality of its own.”

Tertis’s legacy is profound and far outreaches the confines of viola playing as it set a precedent for many other instruments and solo performers. This legacy lives on through The Lionel Tertis

International Viola Festival and Competition, founded five years after his death in 1980. This is now well-established and recognised throughout the musical world for fostering a new generation of advocates for the viola, as is the work of Margaret and Robert Lyons and the Tertis Foundation in supporting his legacy.

It is therefore with great pleasure that I unveil this plaque in memory of an extraordinary man who stands in the company of, amongst others, Kreisler, Casals and Rubinstein as one of the greatest instrumentalists of his age.