Legacy of Violin

More than a third of Curtis’s graduates throughout its history have been violinists, and over the decades they have fanned out across the globe as soloists, orchestral players, chamber musicians, and teachers. Along the way they have eagerly collaborated with composers to commission and premiere new repertoire and to expand the expressive possibilities of the instrument.

Curtis was fortunate to recruit Carl Flesch as the first head of the violin department in 1924. Born in Hungary and educated at the Paris Conservatoire, Flesch was a highly regarded soloist and chamber musician. He arrived in Philadelphia the year after he published The Art of Violin Playing, still an essential resource for violinists today. In 1927 the director of Curtis, Josef Hofmann, appointed the Russian virtuoso Lea Luboshutz to the violin faculty as Flesch departed, a development that coincided with the department’s turn to more pronounced Russian influences.

The great Hungarian violinist and teacher Leopold Auer is a key figure in Curtis’s Russian connection. Auer’s most influential tutor, Joseph Joachim, collaborated regularly with Johannes Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, and Robert Schumann. After his early studies in Germany, Auer taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatory for 49 years and actively collaborated with Russian composers. He was among the musicians who premiered the definitive version of Tchaikovsky’s Sextet in D minor “Souvenir de Florence” in 1892. Among the students in his St. Petersburg studio were the eventual violin superstars Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz, Lea Luboshutz, Nathan Milstein, and Efrem Zimbalist, all of whom moved to the United States between 1912 and 1929. Auer himself immigrated to the U.S. in 1918 and eventually taught at Curtis during the last two years of his life (1928–30).

If Auer bound Curtis to Russian violin traditions, then Efrem Zimbalist was largely responsible for their broad proliferation. Arriving in the United States in 1911, Zimbalist embraced phonograph technology and recorded hundreds of popular songs and classical works, including the first recording of Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor with Fritz Kreisler in 1915. He joined the Curtis violin faculty in 1928, served as the school’s director from 1941 to 1968, and married Curtis founder Mary Louise Curtis Bok in 1943. Zimbalist’s students included Oscar Shumsky (’36), Aaron Rosand (’48), Joseph Silverstein (’50), and Shmuel Ashkenasi (’63), all of whom eventually returned to their alma mater as faculty members. The tenures of Ivan Galamian, his student Arnold Steinhardt (’59), Szymon Goldberg, and Felix Galimir at Curtis amplified the breadth of approaches to violin pedagogy at the school. Even Jascha Heifetz’s father, Ruvin Heifetz, taught at Curtis for a period of time!

Violinists from Curtis have expanded the boundaries of the instrument by commissioning, premiering, and championing repertoire of the modern canon. Lea Luboshutz gave the American premiere of Sergei Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in New York in 1925. Alumni Rolf Schulte (’71), Leila Josefowicz (’97), Hilary Hahn (’99), and Jennifer Koh (’02) and faculty Ida Kavafian stand out especially for their collaborations with composers as broad-ranging as John Adams, Thomas Adès, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Richard Danielpour, Mario Davidovsky, John Harbison, Jennifer Higdon (’88), Oliver Knussen, David Ludwig (’01), Steven Mackey, Missy Mazzoli, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kaija Saariaho, and Toru Takemitsu.

The violin legacy of Curtis also extends to the instruments that faculty and alumni owned and used. Veda Reynolds (’42) bequeathed her 1767 Guadagnini “ex-Hottinger” violin to Curtis, where it is currently maintained for use by students. The violin of Szymon Goldberg, the ca. 1730 Guarneri del Gesù “Goldberg-Baron Vitta,” is on permanent loan from the Library of Congress to Nicholas Kitchen (’90). Pamela Frank (’89) performs on the Guarneri “ex-Wieniawski,” donated to Curtis by the late Herbert Axelrod.

The current violin faculty at Curtis—Shmuel Ashkenasi, Pamela Frank, Ida Kavafian, Midori, and Arnold Steinhardt—provide a staggering breadth of experience to share with the 31 violin students enrolled at the school. Drawing from teaching traditions reaching back to Leopold Auer and Efrem Zimbalist and from their artistic pursuits as chamber musicians, soloists, new music advocates, and leaders of festivals, the violin faculty shapes the individual artistic personality of every student, preparing each for a dynamic career.