Cellist, oboist, photographer, and painter Adrian Siegel was born to a Russian Jewish immigrant couple on 17 July 1898. They lived in what was then the Jewish capital of America: New York’s Lower East Side, a crowded and extraordinary community of mostly Eastern European and Russian Jews – teaming, thriving, industrious, inventive, but a life not without tribulations, deprivations and real peril – half of the 146 workers who perished in the infamous Triangle Fire of 1911 were Jewish girls.
Theirs was a musical family and though his father was an aspiring French horn player, the meager financial prospects of a musician’s life was a bridge too far and an apprenticeship to a tailor was ultimately secured – eventually Adrian’s father rose to become a sought-after designer of women’s coats and suits. One day a newspaper article caught his eye – apparently there was a shortage of cellists in the United States – this prompted him to buy 6-year-old Adrian a cello; an oboe would soon follow. Although he made rapid progress, it was not necessarily the proverbial duck to water, Siegel recalling in a 1955 interview: “I can’t say that those early years learning music were all extremely happy for my parents or myself. There were times when I regarded music as my personal enemy to be scraped away with a bow or forcibly blow right through the oboe.”