Authenticity problems in Herman Bonicke’s Violoncell – Schule

Abstract

In 2010 - amongst other old scores - a cello tutorial entitled, Violoncell-Schule, signed by H. Bönicke, was discovered in the archive of the Black Church in Brasov by the actual cantor of this, Steffen Schlandt. While the document might have provided valuable evidence of musical pedagogy in nineteenth-century Transylvania, unfortunately, the work is not an original, but a copy after The Violoncello Method by Friedrich Dotzauer, a great cellist and pedagogue, founder of the Dresden Cello School. However, its discovery proves that Transylvanian cellists of this era were well-informed about the Western cello technique.