Martin Marsick

Martin Marsick (Martin Pierre Joseph Marsick) was a Belgian violinist, teacher, and composer born on March 9, 1847.  He created a scandal toward the latter part of his life as did Jean Marie Leclair at the very end of his.  Thanks to a few of his students, he will forever remain in the history books, even if his name is not exactly the most remembered among violinists.  These students included Bronislaw Huberman, Carl Flesch, George Enesco, and Jacques Thibaud.  He is also identified with the violin David Oistrakh played from 1966 until the day he died – the Marsick Stradivarius of 1705.  That violin ended up in the hands of Igor Oistrakh, but its present whereabouts are unknown to me.  In 1854, seven-year old Marsick was admitted to the Royal Conservatory of Music in Liege (in other words, the Liege Conservatory.)  He studied violin with a very obscure teacher named Desire Heynberg and graduated in 1864.  Brahms was about 31 years old at the time.  Marsick then continued his studies in Brussels with Hubert Leonard.  Later still (1868) he went to Paris – which he made his home from that time forward - to study with Joseph Lambert Massart at the Paris Conservatory.  He was 21 years old.  Sponsored by the Belgian government, he went to Berlin in 1870 to study privately with Joseph Joachim.  In 1871, he founded a string quartet – not an unusual thing to do for recently-graduated violinists.  His debut took place in Paris in 1873.  He then concertized in Europe and the United States for about 20 years.  He was by then playing a Nicolo Amati violin from 1652, given to him by a member of the French nobility.  Conductors with whom he frequently worked in Paris included Edouard Colonne, Jules Pasdeloup, and Charles Lamoureux.  He also gave concerts with a piano trio which included Anatolyi Brandukov (teacher of Gregor Piatigorsky), and Vladimir de Pachmann (pupil of Anton Bruckner.)  In 1892, Marsick was appointed professor of violin at the Paris conservatory.  He was 45 years old.  He stayed until 1900.  In that year, he left his job, his students, and his wife and did not return until 1903.  The woman he lived with during this brief time was married and the situation, which was widely known, created a scandal.  It has been said that this incident ruined his career.  In 1906, he published a study book for violinists entitled Eureka (Opus 34, 18 pages long) and another book (Violin Grammar) published in 1924.  Perhaps these books are available in France.  Thibaud did record at least one of his pieces (Opus 6, number 2, Scherzando) about one hundred years ago and that recording is still available.  Among many other things, Marsick also composed three violin concertos, a quintet, a piano quartet, and a music drama.  Whether these works are nowadays performed is unknown – I would guess probably not, except perhaps in France.  According to some sources, Marsick died in poverty (in Paris) on October 21, 1924, at age 77.

Russian Violinists

These Russian violinists (and a few more) are included among those about whom I have written micro biographies:  Joseph Achron, Iso Briselli, Zakhar Bron, Mischa Elman, Leonard Friedman, Elizabeth Gilels, Ivry Gitlis, Boris Goldstein, Alexei Gorokhov, Eduard Grach, Jascha Heifetz, Julia Igonina, Iliana Isakadze, Ilya Kaler, Leonid Kogan, Andrei Korsakov, Natasha Korsakova, Louis Krasner, Albert Markov, Nathan Milstein, Viktoria Mullova, David Oistrakh, Anna Rabinova, Vadim Repin, Alexander Schneider, Abram Shtern, Toscha Seidel, Vladimir Spivakov, Steven Staryk, Peter Stolyarsky, Maxim Vengerov, Abram Yampolsky, Zvi Zeitlin, Efrem Zimbalist,....  Even among avid and knowledgeable concert goers, only three or four are known.  I asked a violinist colleague the other day whether he had heard a certain recording by Ivry Gitlis.  He did not even know who Gitlis was.  It is generally agreed that Heifetz, Gitlis, Kogan, Milstein, and Oistrakh, are at the very top.  The others are superlative players who for reasons known only to a few, have never achieved that rank which bequeaths an aura of violinistic sainthood of sorts – more than mere historic immortality.  Nevertheless, they form the superstructure on which the others stand, the ones against whom we identify the greatest.  It is also interesting that some of the greatest Russian players were students of a Hungarian, not Russian, violinist: Leopold Auer.

Felix Galimir

Felix Galimir was an Austrian violinist and teacher born (in Vienna) on May 12, 1910.  Although he was one of the early members of the Israel Philharmonic (the Palestine Symphony Orchestra) he did not stay there long.  Today, he is mostly remembered for having taught at the Juilliard School of Music for some time and his long tenure (more than four decades) at the Marlboro Music Festival.  He also enjoyed a very successful career as an orchestral player and chamber music player.  Galimir entered the Vienna Conservatory at age 12 (some sources say age 14.)  He studied with Adolf Bak and Simon Pullman and graduated in 1928.  He played the Beethoven concerto in his public debut performance.  He studied further with Carl Flesch in Berlin in 1929 and 1930.  He had by then already founded the Galimir String Quartet with three of his sisters (1927 – the sisters were Adrienne on second violin, Renee on viola, and Marguerite on cello.)  Between 1930 and 1936, he must have had numerous engagements in Europe both with the quartet and as a soloist, though I am simply assuming that to be the case.  In 1936 (one source says 1934), he recorded Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite and Ravel’s string quartet with the Galimir Quartet.  It may have been the first recording of the Berg Suite.  Some sources claim it was the first recording of the Ravel quartet though it was not, it was the second recording of that work – the first recording of the Ravel was by the International Quartet in 1927.  The Galimir recording won the Grand Prix du Disque in 1937.  Also in 1936, he was accepted into the violin ranks of the Vienna Philharmonic although he was forced out in 1937.  He had until then only been a regular substitute player at the Vienna State Opera.  He (and two of his sisters – one of them being Renee, the violist in the quartet) then went to Palestine, having been urged to do so by violinist Bronislaw Huberman.  His father and his other sister left for Paris.  In 1938, he came to the U.S from Palestine and played a solo recital at Town Hall the same year.  He was 28 years old.  He founded another Galimir String Quartet (which played for radio broadcasts at WQXR) and joined the NBC Symphony in 1939, then being led by the ill-tempered conductor, Arturo Toscanini.  Mischa Mischakoff was the concertmaster at the time (and remained so until 1952.)  Galimir stayed until 1954, when the orchestra was disbanded.  Galimir then served as concertmaster of the NBC Symphony of the Air from 1954 until 1956.  Also in 1954, he began teaching at the City College of New York.  He finally joined the Juilliard faculty in 1962.  The Curtis Institute (Philadelphia) appointed him to its faculty in 1972 (some sources give an earlier date.)  In 1976, he began teaching at the Mannes College of Music.  Galimir recorded many times (on the Vanguard, Period, Decca, and Columbia labels) as a member of chamber groups, orchestras, or as soloist.  A rare live performance of a rarely heard Beethoven piece (on YouTube) is available here.  He remained active until just a few weeks before he died, on November 10, 1999, in New York City, at age 89.  The quartet with the Galimir name had finally disbanded in 1993, after 65 years.  Among Galimir’s students are Mark Kaplan, Hilary Hahn, Jennifer Koh, Miranda Cuckson, Leila Josefowicz, and Ani Kavafian.

Edouard Dethier

Edouard Dethier (Edouard Charles Louis Dethier) was a Belgian violinist and teacher born (in Liege) on August 25, 1885.  Though he was a well-known recitalist and concert violinist for a time, he is now best remembered as a teacher at the Juilliard School of Music, since before it became the Juilliard School of Music.  He began his violin studies with his brother Gaston while still a child.  At the age of eight, he enrolled in the conservatory of his hometown (Liege), from which he graduated with a First Prize – Eugene Ysaye had studied there also (1865) as a seven-year-old child.  Dethier entered the Brussels Conservatory at age 15, winning a first prize one year later (at age sixteen) after entering the Brussels violin competition.  One year after that, he was already teaching at the Brussels Conservatory.  He was 17 years old.  He was then also appointed concertmaster of the opera orchestra of Brussels.  During his student days and early career, he was a close friend of Polish violinist, Paul Kochanski.  Dethier came to the U.S. (New York City) in 1905, establishing himself as a recitalist and teacher, although he toured for a few years.  He played the Vieuxtemps concerto in d minor (number 4) with the New York Symphony on June 6, 1905.  On November 29, 1907, he debuted with the New York Philharmonic, playing Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy.  He again soloed with this orchestra on December 18, 1910, playing the Tchaikovsky concerto.  Gustav Mahler conducted on that occasion.  By then, he had already been appointed (in 1906 or 1907 – sources vary) to the faculty of Juilliard – he was 21 years old.  As did Ivan Galamian after him, Dethier taught there until the day he died.  As far as I know, there are no commercial recordings by him and I also have no idea what violins he played.  After 1911, Dethier must have had no financial worries as he had that year married Avis Putnam, the daughter of a famous publisher.  Among his many pupils were Julius Hegyi, Robert Mann, Louis Lanza, Emanuel Vardi, Sally Thomas, Genevieve Greene, Julius Schulman, Anna Tringas, Joan Milkson, and Paul Zukofsky.  Dethier died (in New York City) on February 19, 1962, at age 76. 

Arabella Steinbacher

Arabella Steinbacher is a German violinist (and pianist, as were Fritz Kreisler, Arthur Grumiaux, Louis Persinger, and as is Julia Fischer) born (in Munich) on November 14, 1981.  She is now in the forefront of concert violinists performing all over the world.  She began studying the violin with Helge Thelen at the age of three.  He was her teacher for six years.  At age nine, she became the youngest violin student of Ana Chumachenko at the Munich Academy of Music. She received further musical inspiration and guidance from Ivry Gitlis, one of the oldest living concert violinists (among whom are also Zvi Zeitlin, Camilla Wicks, Ida Haendel, Robert Mann, David Nadien, Albert Markov, Abram Shtern, and Ruggiero Ricci.)  In 2001, she was awarded a scholarship by the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation.  She made her debut in March, 2004, in Paris, playing the Beethoven violin concerto, actually stepping in at the last moment for an indisposed violinist.  She was 22 years old.  Many other artists have begun their careers in similar fashion – Leonard Bernstein and Shlomo Mintz come to mind.  Steinbacher made her New York recital debut in June, 2006.  She has also already appeared with most major orchestras in the world – the New York Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic are the exceptions.  Steinbacher has recorded extensively and many videos of her playing can be found on YouTube.  One such can be found here. She received the German Record Critics Award in 2005 for her recording of both of Darius Milhaud’s rarely-heard Violin Concertos.  She now records exclusively for PentaTone Classics.  Arabella Steinbacher plays the Booth Stradivarius (1716) provided by the Nippon Music Foundation and uses a bow from luthier Benoit Rolland.

Orchestra musicians

I often wonder what orchestra musicians in the times of Corelli, Vivaldi, Bach, Zelenka, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bizet, Verdi, Berlioz, Paganini, Rossini, Puccini, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Poulenc, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev thought about their music when it was being played for the first time.  Orchestral music is an art that requires many collaborators.  It’s not just one man and his piano.  What thoughts passed through their minds as they labored to understand and decipher, and practiced and rehearsed what the composers had just written?  Did the manuscripts contain a lot of misprints?  Was the music illegible?  Did they even have enough light to see the notes?  Did they have enough rehearsal time to learn the music?  Composers frequently finished their work at the last minute.  Was the conductor clueless?  Was the music any good?  Did they hesitate to speak out?  Were they just there to do a job and go home?  Were they all free-lancers?  Organized, standing (civic) orchestras did not come into existence until about 1800.  Did they take on other work to make ends meet?  Did they ever praise or encourage a composer?  Did they think they got paid enough for their services?  What did they think about the aristocracy?  Did they ever think they were making history?  Did they drink on the job?  Was the music even well-played?  Did they care about that?  What did they think of Bach’s Mass in B minor or Handel’s Messiah?  What did they think of Mozart’s Haffner Symphony or his Don Giovanni?  When Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was premiered, who played in the orchestra?  What did they think of Brahms’ Second Symphony?  What did they say about Bizet’s Carmen?  What did they think of Paganini and his impossible concertos?  What did they say about Tchaikovsky when he conducted?  Who was playing in the orchestra when the riot took place during Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring premiere?  Did orchestral musicians think about their audiences at all?  Did the audiences think about them at all?  Only God knows.  Even among the very best-known orchestras in the world – the New York Philharmonic, for instance - the rank and file musician is invisible.  With some luck, the concertmaster’s identity and abilities might be known, but only to a few.  The rest of the players are anonymous.  They don’t even talk to the conductor, except perhaps about innocuous topics (and only now and then), but certainly not about the music at hand.  Perhaps it’s no different than it is in other enterprises or industries which hire dozens or hundreds or even thousands of people.  We know Mozart and Schumann and Wagner and Berlioz wrote quite a bit about their work and their lives.  Many other more contemporary musicians have also written books about their experiences – Arnold Steinhardt, Leopold Auer, Louis Kaufman, Albert Spalding, Isaac Stern, Joseph Szigeti, Ivry Gitlis, Ned Rorem, Henri Temianka, Carl Flesch, Yehudi Menuhin, Nathan Milstein, Steven Staryk, Ida Haendel, Charles Munch, Riccardo Muti, Igor Stravinsky, Mischa Mischakoff, Leonard Bernstein, Michael Charry, and Gunther Schuller, to name a few.  They are all higher-profile musicians.  What about the guy in the third stand of the cello section, or the third trumpet player, or the woman in the fourth stand of the first violin section, or the assistant principal in the viola section, or the second horn player?  Except for when they play, they keep quiet.

Edith Lorand

Edith Lorand was a Hungarian violinist, singer, and conductor born (in Budapest) on December 17, 1898.  She is remembered for the great number of recordings she produced for German labels of the 1920s and 30s – Odeon, Parlophone, and Beka.  Her specialty was salon music of that era – it included opera music arrangements, dance music, popular songs, and light classical pieces.  That was during a time when live music was played at the more elegant hotels and restaurants all over Europe.  Up to a point, her biography reads somewhat like Alma Rose’s.  She studied to be a concert violinist but her ambition (and abilities) took her in a different direction.  Though her mother was an accomplished pianist, her father was not a musician.  Her first public performance was at a charity concert in Budapest at age six.  Lorand graduated from the Royal Music Academy in Budapest where she studied with Jeno Hubay.  She also later studied with Carl Flesch – either in Berlin or Vienna.  She made her debut in Vienna and Berlin in 1920.  She was 22 years old.  One source states that critics of the day compared her to Fritz Kreisler and Pablo Sarasate.  Lorand also became fluent in French, Italian, and English.  She made Berlin her home and base of operations until 1934.  After her debut, Lorand played as a concert soloist a few times and founded and recorded with a quartet and a trio (which included Gregor Piatigorsky, the cello player) but soon found her calling as conductor of a 15-piece all-male orchestra called the Edith Lorand Orchestra.  The orchestra, but especially Lorand, enjoyed great success throughout Europe.  They made regular radio broadcasts in Holland, Austria, Sweden, Germany, and England, and even appeared in movies.  The orchestra performed in the most important theatres as well, not just hotels.  It has been said that she became a symbol of female emancipation.  By the late 1920s, she was one of the top stars of the record industry.  In France, she was known as the Queen of the Waltz and in England as the Female Johann Strauss.  On April 1, 1930, she signed a three year recording contract with Lindstrom AG, which called for her to produce at least 144 tunes per year, averaging six two-sided records per month, with a fee of at least 36,000 Marks per year (about $107,000 in today’s dollars.)  Despite her great popularity and success, she had to flee Germany for Hungary in 1934.  In Hungary, she organized her All-Gypsy Orchestra which toured as far as the U.S.in 1935, where one of her concerts took place in Carnegie Hall.  In December 1937, she had to flee Hungary for the U.S., where she established herself in Woodstock, New York.  She was 39 years old.  Her orchestra in the U.S. (with different musicians, of course) was called the Viennese Orchestra.  Her success here did not come close to what she had in Europe but she managed, playing as far afield, in September of 1939, as the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, where composer Ingolf Dahl became her pianist for a short while.  She had a reputation for being demanding and autocratic.  In 1945, she was engaged to play in Vienna for an extended time but returned to the U.S. afterward.   In May 1960, she returned to Berlin, intending to resettle and restart her career.  However, on November 23, 1960, she died in New York, at age 61.  Many of her recordings are easily found on the internet and a very old video of her conducting a fast rendition of a famous waltz is available here.  Lorand played a 1744 Guarneri Del Gesu which later ended up (for 15 years) in the hands of Richard Burgin (of the Boston Symphony) and is now in Europe.  She must have taken very good care of that violin because it has been described as being in stunning condition and appearance.  A 1775 Guadagnini was also hers for a while.  That violin is now being played (though not owned) by Seattle violinist Maria Larionoff.