Felix Galimir

[Sandra Layman <sandl...>]

I just got this piece of news, about a famous violinist, chamber musician,
and teacher who has just passed away.
Maybe this article will interest some people on the list.

I hadn't realized that Galimir's father was from a family of
Ladino-speaking Sephardim from Romania.
Galimir himself was Viennese-born.

Sandra Layman
sandL (at) compuserve(dot)com


---------- Forwarded Message ----------

[posted to: American String Teachers Association - Discussion List -
ASTA-L]

From:   Bruce Berg, INTERNET:Bruce_Berg (at) baylor(dot)edu
TO:     Asta asta, INTERNET:asta-l (at) listsrv(dot)cmsu(dot)edu
DATE:   18-11-99 17:26
RE:     Felix Galimir

In case you hadn't heard: 


        Felix Galimir, 89, a Violinist Who Taught Generations

        By ALLAN KOZINN
        New York Times

 NEW YORK -- Felix Galimir, a violinist who was one of the last
 links to the vital musical world of prewar Vienna, and a chamber
 music player who was revered by several generations of
 instrumentalists as a demanding and inspiring coach, died on
 Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 89 and had continued to
 teach and advise young musicians until his health began to fail in recent
weeks.

 It would be difficult to overstate Galimir's centrality in
 American chamber music life, but perhaps the best measure of his
 influence is that at virtually any chamber concert today, at least
 one musician on the stage is likely to have studied with, been
 coached by or performed in an ensemble with him. He was, with the
 pianist Rudolf Serkin, a guiding spirit at the Marlboro Festival
 in Vermont, where for 50 years young musicians and experienced
 colleagues have spent summers exploring the chamber literature.

 In addition to his work at Marlboro, a typical concert season for
 Galimir included teaching commitments at Juilliard School and the
 Mannes College of Music, both in New York, and the Curtis
 Institute in Philadelphia -- he was on the faculty of all three --
 as well as at the New York String Orchestra seminar, a program for
 young musicians. He was also a coach at the chamber workshops that
 Isaac Stern conducts periodically at Carnegie Hall. He performed
 as a member of New York Philomusica and appeared regularly with
 Musicians From Marlboro, the touring ensembles that keep the
 festival's name and work alive between summer sessions.

 One reason Galimir was such a compelling and authoritative teacher
 is that in addition to his long experience as a quartet player --
 he formed the Galimir String Quartet when he was still a teenager,
 in 1929, and kept it going with younger musicians until 1993 -- he
 knew and worked with many of this century's great composers. The
 circle in which Galimir traveled early in his career included the
 composers Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern -- the
 founders of Serialism -- as well as Ernst Krenek, Alexander von
 Zemlinksy and other members of Schoenberg's Society for Contemporary
Music.

 Berg coached the Galimir Quartet in his Lyric Suite in 1931 and
 inscribed the score of the 20-year old violinist, "To Felix
 Galimir, outstanding quartet leader, excellent violinist, splendid
 musician, in remembrance." In 1936, when the Galimir Quartet
 recorded the Lyric Suite and Ravel's String Quartet, both
 composers were on hand to oversee the ensemble's rehearsals and
 recording sessions. The recordings were awarded the Grand Prix du Disques.

 For his entire life, Galimir was an eloquent and passionate
 champion of the composers he knew in his youth, and in discussing
 Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, he always emphasized the soulfulness
 he found in their works, rather than the austerity that many
 listeners hear in the music.

"Berg asked for enormous correctness in the performance of his
 music," Galimir told The New York Times in 1981. "But the moment
 this was achieved, he asked for a very Romanticized treatment.
 Webern, you know, was also terribly Romantic -- as a person and
 when he conducted. Everything was almost oversentimentalized. It
 was entirely different from what we have been led to believe
 today. His music should be played very freely, very emotionally."

 As a teacher, he sought to instill a love for new music in
 students, and he spoke wistfully of a time when that did not require such
an effort.

"When I was a student, it was understood that young people played
 new music," he said in the 1981 interview. "Now, unfortunately,
 this is no longer so. I have difficulty asking my students to play
 even the Bartok violin and piano sonatas. The students want the
 best sellers. I would like to see that any young group that plays
 Beethoven quartets plays something new also. Somebody who is at
 the end of his life and plays only Beethoven and Brahms, that's a
 different story. But a youngster, he should try everything."

 Galimir was born in Vienna on May 12, 1910, and said in interviews
 that he felt like an outsider from an early age. Although his
 mother was an Austrian, his father was from Romania and was
 considered an enemy alien during World War I. The fact that the
 Galimirs were Sephardic Jews and spoke Ladino, a hybrid of
 medieval Spanish and Hebrew, raised similar suspicions because it
 sounded vaguely like Italian, and Austria and Italy were at war.
"I had to learn German very quickly," Galimir said later.

 He also learned the violin quickly. At 12, he entered the New
 Vienna Conservatory, where he studied the violin with Adolf Bak
 and chamber music with Simon Pullman. In the early 1930's, he
 continued his studies with Carl Flesch. But by then he had already
 made his public debut as a soloist in the Beethoven Violin
 Concerto and formed the Galimir String Quartet, in which his
 sisters were the other players.

 In 1936, Galimir was hired by the Vienna Philharmonic. In "Felix
 Galimir in Conversation," a film by Ken Kobland that was produced
 for the Bard Festival this year, he remembered himself as an
 inexperienced musician at the time. "I had never heard a Brahms
 symphony until I played one," he said. It was also an increasingly
 uncomfortable time for him as a young Jewish musician in a society
 where anti-Semitism was increasingly open. In the film, Galimir
 spoke about one performance at which, just as the lights went
 down, the principal clarinetist called out, in a voice audible
 throughout the theater, "Galimir -- have you eaten your matzos today?"

 The following season he was barred from playing in a performance
 at a resort outside Vienna, and then dismissed from the orchestra.
 By then, his father and his older sister had left for Paris and
 were urging him to follow. Instead, he and two of his sisters
 accepted the invitation of Bronislaw Huberman to come to
 Palestine, where Huberman was starting the orchestra that became
 the Israel Philharmonic.

 In 1938, Galimir emigrated to New York. He immediately played a
 recital at Town Hall, formed a new version of the Galimir String
 Quartet and had some freelance performing jobs at WQXR, the radio
 station owned by The New York Times. He also played for several
 years with Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony.

 By the early 1950s, though, Galimir had become increasingly
 involved in chamber music, both with his own quartet, with the New
 York Philomusica ensemble and at Marlboro, to which he was invited
 by Serkin in 1952 after the death of one of the festival's
 founders, the violinist Adolf Busch. And after 1954, when he
 joined the faculty of the City College of New York, he devoted
 himself increasingly to teaching.

 His affiliation with the Juilliard School began in 1962, and he
 was appointed head of the chamber music department at the Curtis
 Institute in 1972. In 1976 he began teaching at the Mannes College  of
Music.

 Galimir was a short, genial man who held strong opinions and
 delivered them in a Viennese accent that underscored both their
 vehemence and the current of humor that sometimes ran through
 them. Expressing his distrust of politics mixed into music, for
 example, he remarked in "Felix Galimir in Conversation" that he
 had heard the Shostakovich 11th Symphony a couple of days before
 the interview. "It was a disgrace," he said. "Such noise. Stalin
 decides who writes good music. Who was Stalin?"

 Although he said music was both his profession and his hobby, he
 also enjoyed watching football, and he had a large collection of
 clocks. His wife, Suzanne, died last year; there are no immediate 
survivors.

 Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+