Henry Schradieck

Henry Schradieck was a German violinist, teacher, conductor, and composer born (in Hamburg) on April 29, 1846.  Johannes Brahms had been born there 13 years earlier.  Schradieck is best known for his many study books for violin (and viola) and for several editions of various works for violin, including the Mendelssohn violin concerto in e minor.  It has been said that he moved frequently and preferred not to remain in one place too long.  Among other violinists, Willy Hess, Mischa Mischakoff, and Steven Staryk did the same thing.  Schradieck received his first lessons from his father, who was a violinist, and first played in public at age 6, possibly age 5.  One source states that in 1854, at age 8, he entered the Brussels Conservatory and graduated in 1858.  He was 12 years old.  It has been stated that Teresa Milanollo paid for his tuition at the conservatory.  His teacher there was Hubert Leonard.  He then went to Leipzig to study with Ferdinand David.  In 1864, he was hired as professor of violin at the Moscow Conservatory.  He remained there for three years and then returned to Hamburg to lead the Hamburg Philharmonic Society Orchestra.  After 6 years, he joined (in 1874) the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig as concertmaster.  Felix Mendelssohn and Ferdinand David had already left the scene – in fact, David had died the previous year.  Schradieck also taught at the Leipzig Conservatory and conducted the theatre orchestra.  He was 28 years old.  In 1883, he came to the U.S and settled in Cincinnati, Ohio.  There, he organized an orchestra and taught at the College of Music.  He returned to Hamburg in 1889 to teach at the Hamburg Conservatory.  Nine years later, in 1898, he returned to the U.S.  He devoted most of his time to teaching in Philadelphia and New York.  Among the oddly interesting things about his career are that he could play all the Beethoven quartets (presumably the first violin part) from memory and he seriously studied the art of violin making.  Among Schradieck’s pupils are Maud Powell, Theodore Spiering, Ottokar Novacek, and Carl Tollefsen.  Schradieck died (in Brooklyn, New York) on March 25, 1918, at age 71.  

Tossy Spivakovsky

Tossy Spivakovsky (Nathan Spivakovsky) was a Russian (Ukrainian) violinist and teacher born (in Odessa) on December 23, 1906.  He belongs squarely in the era of individualistic virtuosos born (mostly) in the first half of the Twentieth Century – the era of Kreisler, Kogan, Elman, Milstein, Thibaud, Grumiaux, Spalding, Zimbalist, Suk, Brown, Gitlis, Huberman, Hartmann, Haendel, Heifetz, Oistrakh, Ricci, Rabin, Ferras, Francescatti, and a few others.  By 1990, most of these players were dead.  It has been said that Spivakovsky was a “highly eccentric violinist with an unconventional bow and violin hold.”  For many years, Spivakovsky had a very successful solo career, though he was not among the virtuosos who studied with Leopold Auer, Peter Stolyarsky, Abram Yampolsky, or Carl Flesch.  He studied in Berlin with Willy Hess at the Royal Academy (Advanced School for Music) and gave his first public performance at age 10.  At age 13, as soon as World War I ended, he toured Europe for the first time.  At age 18 (1925), he became concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic.  He spent a year there (one usually-reliable source says it was two years) then left to pursue a career as a soloist.  Also in the 1920s, he – with his older pianist brother Jascha – formed the Spivakovsky Duo.  In 1930, he played and toured with the Spivakovsky-Kurtz Trio.  In 1933, the trio found itself in Australia where it (rather spontaneously) decided to stay because of the political changes then taking place in Germany.  Spivakovsky took a teaching position at the University of Melbourne, as did the other two members of the trio – Jascha Spivakovsky, pianist, and Edmund Kurtz, cellist.  In 1940, Spivakovsky came to the U.S.  He was 34 years old.  Interestingly, Spivakovsky had two other (older) brothers who were accomplished musicians – Isaac and Adolf – who had joined him in Australia in 1934.  They (and Jascha) remained in Australia when Spivakovsky emigrated to the U.S.  That same year (1940), Spivakovsky made his debut in Town Hall (New York.)  After some concertizing activity, in 1942, he was appointed concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra.  While serving as concertmaster in Cleveland, he gave the U.S. premiere of Bartok’s second concerto (1943) in one of its programs.  On October 14, 1943, he gave the first New York performance of the same work with the New York Philharmonic, an orchestra with which he appeared more than 20 times.  Bartok himself said his playing of the concerto was first rate.  Wherever he played, he received extremely favorable reviews.  With the New York Philharmonic, he performed four concertos which never became part of the standard repertoire – those by Gian Carlo Menotti, Roger Sessions, Carl Nielsen, and Frank Martin.  Spivakovsky stepped down from his Cleveland post in 1945.  His interpretations have been described as highly personalized, meaning that he put his temperamental (some would say idiosyncratic) stamp on everything he played.  A few YouTube audio files bear witness to this.  One of them is here.  His playing of the Tchaikovsky concerto is done in a manner unlike anything I have heard before.  As an added bonus, in the C major passage which immediately follows the re-statement of the main theme by the orchestra (about 8 minutes into the first movement), Spivakovsky plays the repeat of the variation-like section an octave higher.  I know of only eight other violinists who do this – Jascha Heifetz, Erick Friedman, Nathan Milstein, Konstanty Kulka, Jane Peters, Andras Agoston, Leonid Kogan, and Leila Josefowicz.  You can listen for yourself here.  Spivakovsky concertized extensively in Europe, the U.S., and South America for about four decades.  Most of his recordings were done between 1925 and 1960 but they are few and far between - most are still available.  He taught at Juilliard (New York) between 1974 and 1989.  He was 68 years old when he began teaching there and 83 when he retired.  As far as I know, he had no famous students.  An explanation of his unorthodox bow hold was published in a book in 1949.  Spivakovsky was known to conduct extensive research into original editions of music to get as accurate a picture of composers’ intentions as possible.  His violin was a 1769 G.B. Guadagnini.  I don't know what became of it.  He also published an essay on Bach’s unaccompanied violin Partitas in 1967.  His ideas were not widely adopted, but that’s putting it mildly.  Spivakovsky died (in Westport, Connecticut) on July 20, 1998, at age 91.  

Adolf Busch

Adolf Busch (Adolf Georg Wilhelm Busch) was a German violinist, composer, and teacher born on August 8, 1891 (Stravinsky was 9 years old.) He began violin lessons at age 3 and studied – from age 11 - with Willy Hess at the Cologne Conservatory. Busch also studied composition with his future father-in-law (Hugo Gruters) in Bonn, where he used to sit in on the Joachim Quartet’s rehearsals. In 1912, Busch founded his first quartet, which floundered when the First World War overtook it. After the war, in 1918, he founded the famous Busch Quartet, which played almost continuously until 1951. Apart from this, Busch is remembered for having been one of Yehudi Menuhin’s teachers, though he also taught Erica Morini, among others. In 1927, he moved to Switzerland and from there, in 1939, he moved to Vermont. In the middle of all this, the Busch Quartet had become the core of the Busch Chamber Players, another group Busch founded, and the forerunner of today’s ubiquitous chamber orchestras. In Vermont, he eventually founded (with his son-in-law, Rudolf Serkin, and Marcel Moyse) the Marlboro Music School and Marlboro Music Festival (1951.) During his career, Busch kept concertizing as a soloist, solidifying his reputation as a great Beethoven and Brahms interpreter. Rudolf Serkin often served as his recital accompanist. Though Busch recorded extensively with the quartet, few studio recordings exist of him as a solo player. Live recordings of his performances can be found on YouTube – sound only. It is said that Max Reger (whom he knew since 1907) greatly influenced his composition style. Among his many compositions are a violin concerto, a Quintet for saxophone and string quartet, and a Concerto for Orchestra (1929, fourteen years before Bela Bartok wrote his concerto for orchestra in 1943.)  Adolf Busch died on June 9, 1952, at age 61.

Willy Hess

Willy Hess was a German violinist and teacher born on July 14, 1859 (Brahms was 26 years old.) He first studied with his father, who was a student of Louis Spohr, and later with Joseph Joachim. He was the concertmaster of the opera orchestra in Frankfurt from 1878 to 1886. Thereafter he taught violin at the Rotterdam Conservatory from 1886 to 1888. He then left to sit first chair in the Halle Orchestra (1888-1895.) From there, he went to the Cologne Conservatory (1895-1903.) For six years he was the concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1904-1910.) While there, he also taught at Harvard University. In 1910, he moved back to Berlin to teach violin at the Hochschule (Academy for Music) after receiving an invitation some time in March of that year. Hess worked closely with composer Max Bruch for a time and even premiered some of his violin works. Adolf Busch, Henri Temianka, and Arthur Fiedler were among his many students. It has been said that Hess was a tall and slender man, in the style of Paganini. He also sometimes sported a beard. I have no photos of him, only his autograph, with a quote from the Beethoven violin concerto. Hess died in Berlin on the eve of World War Two - February 17, 1939.