A house painter’s son from Veszprém
Leopold Auer was born on 7 June 1845 in Veszprém, a small town in western Hungary, into a poor Jewish family. His father was a house painter who decorated the walls of local chateaux and churches, a trade that brought him into contact with the nobility and clergy of the region, as Auer later recalled in his memoirs. The violin, he wrote, was the natural instrument for a musical Hungarian boy of modest means because it did not cost much.
He began lessons with a local concertmaster and at about eight went to study at the conservatory in Pest with Dávid Ridley-Kohne, concertmaster of the National Opera orchestra. A performance of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto as a child attracted wealthy music lovers who paid for him to continue his studies in Vienna, where he lived in the home of his teacher Jakob Dont, who gave him the foundations of his technique, and attended the quartet classes of Joseph Hellmesberger.
Poverty, and the lesson of Joachim
By the time Auer was thirteen the scholarship money had run out, and his father took him on the road, giving concerts in provincial towns that barely kept father, son and an accompanist out of poverty. An audition with the great Belgian violinist Henri Vieuxtemps went badly, and a trip to Paris brought no breakthrough. Then he went to Hanover to seek out Joseph Joachim, the most respected violinist in Germany, and spent about two years in his circle in the early 1860s.
It was, Auer wrote, a revelation. Joachim taught him that music mattered more than virtuoso display. He was an inspiration, Auer recalled, who opened horizons of a greater art: with him Auer worked not only with his hands but with his head, studying the scores of the masters, playing chamber music with fellow students and trying to reach the heart of the works. That conviction, that technique exists to serve the music, would become the core of his own teaching half a century later.
Concertmaster and court soloist
His career moved quickly. He met Anton Rubinstein and Henryk Wieniawski at the spa of Wiesbaden in 1864 and appeared as soloist with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. At 19 he became concertmaster in Düsseldorf, and in 1866 in Hamburg, where he also led a string quartet. In 1868 he played in London, performing Beethoven’s Archduke Trio with Rubinstein and the cellist Alfredo Piatti.
Rubinstein, who had founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1862, was looking for a violin professor to succeed Wieniawski, and he proposed Auer. In 1868 Auer signed a three-year contract as professor at the conservatory and soloist to the imperial court. He stayed for 49 years. For decades he was solo violinist of the Imperial Theatres, playing nearly every violin solo in the ballets of the Imperial Ballet, most of them choreographed by Marius Petipa, until 1906. He led the quartet of the Russian Musical Society, conducted orchestral concerts, and performed sonata cycles with leading pianists, above all Anna Yesipova. Tchaikovsky, reviewing him in 1874, praised the expressiveness, finesse and poetry of his playing. Auer became a Russian subject, and in 1895 the tsar raised him to the hereditary nobility.
The quartet he led was as central to St. Petersburg’s musical life as Joachim’s was to Berlin’s. Alongside Brahms and Schumann it played the quartets of Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Glazunov and Rimsky-Korsakov, helping a young Russian chamber-music tradition find its audience, although critics later complained that it gave too little attention to new Russian works. Auer also championed the classics: he performed cycles of all ten Beethoven violin sonatas in the 1890s, and in his writing on Bach’s works for solo violin he placed special emphasis on the great Chaconne.
Conversion, and the Jewish question in St. Petersburg
Imperial Russia severely restricted where Jews could live. Outside the Pale of Settlement, in cities such as St. Petersburg, they needed special permission, and the Imperial Theatres, Auer later wrote, generally excluded musicians of Jewish origin. Auer converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity early in his Russian career; the Encyclopaedia Judaica suggests he was probably baptised shortly before his appointment, while other accounts place it around 1870. As a Christian he was no longer subject to the restrictions that applied to Jews.
Yet his Jewish origins and his loyalty to Jewish students remained part of his life. A large share of his most gifted pupils came from Jewish families in the Pale, many of them prepared by teachers such as Pyotr Stolyarsky in Odessa and sent on to him. A conservatory diploma gave Jewish students the right to live in the capital, but their parents did not share it. Auer used his influence with officials to obtain residence permits, and in his memoirs he described how, when the ten- or eleven-year-old Jascha Heifetz was admitted, he enrolled the boy’s forty-year-old father as a student in his own class so that the family would not be separated, then fought the management for years on his behalf. Toscha Seidel’s mother, he recalled, had to live in Finland and make two exhausting journeys a week to bring her son to his lessons.
Only when Alexander Glazunov became director of the conservatory, Auer wrote, did the battles over the Heifetz family end, and the boy was able to stay with his parents until the summer of 1917, when they left for America. Auer’s own account makes plain that he understood the laws he was working around: the conservatory, he noted, could admit any number of Jews, but the law treated their parents as strangers in the capital, leaving gifted children in what he called poignantly dramatic situations.
The teacher of a golden age
Auer is remembered above all as one of the greatest violin teachers who ever lived. From around 1900 his class at St. Petersburg produced a stream of violinists who would dominate the concert stage of the 20th century: Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, Jascha Heifetz, Toscha Seidel, Nathan Milstein and many others, including Kathleen Parlow from Canada, Joseph Achron, Miron Polyakin and Clara Rockmore, who later became the great virtuoso of the theremin. His pupils carried his approach to the conservatories and concert halls of Europe and America, and through their own students it reaches violinists today.
He did not teach technique so much as musicianship. He rarely demonstrated or solved technical problems for students, who often helped one another, but he demanded accuracy, preparation and discipline. Students had to bring a complete movement of a major work, ready for performance and properly dressed, before an audience that might include distinguished guests. He could be stern and harsh, and he hated lifeless playing, demanding more blood and fire. But he also shaped his students as people: he made them read books, learn languages and polish their manners, helped them find scholarships, patrons and better instruments, wrote countless letters to conductors and agents, and continued to coach them after their debuts. He travelled to London to prepare Mischa Elman for his debut there.
Tchaikovsky’s concerto
Auer is also linked to one of the best-loved works in the violin repertoire. Tchaikovsky originally intended his Violin Concerto for him, but Auer declined to perform it at first. He later explained that he had not thought it unplayable, as legend claims, but felt that some passages did not suit the character of the instrument. The dedication went instead to Adolph Brodsky, who gave the premiere. Auer later took the concerto into his repertoire with his own alterations, and for decades his pupils played it in his edition, helping to make it one of the most performed concertos of all.
He also composed a little, including a Rhapsodie hongroise and cadenzas for the concertos of Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart, and edited a large part of the standard repertoire. In America he wrote three books: Violin Playing as I Teach It (1921), the memoir My Long Life in Music (1923) and Violin Master Works and Their Interpretation (1925).
Revolution and a new life in America
The Russian Revolution of 1917 ended his world in St. Petersburg. In early 1918, aged 73, he sailed for New York, where many of his former students were already stars. He gave a recital at Carnegie Hall on 23 March 1918 and played in Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia, but devoted himself mainly to teaching, first privately at his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, then from 1926 at the Institute of Musical Art (later the Juilliard School) and from 1928 at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Among his American students were Oscar Shumsky and Benno Rabinof. He became an American citizen in 1926.
Auer was a refined, conservative musician whose own playing was elegant and noble rather than fiery. He suffered from weak, poorly formed hands and had to practise relentlessly just to stay in form. His first wife, Nadine Pelikan, was Russian; his second, Wanda Bogutska Stein, was his accompanist. The actor Mischa Auer was his grandson, and the composer György Ligeti was a great-grandnephew.
Death and legacy
Leopold Auer died on 15 July 1930 in Loschwitz, near Dresden, while in Germany, and was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York. Few teachers in any art have had such reach. The so-called Russian school of violin playing, with its singing tone, expressive freedom and brilliance, owes much to his class, and the recordings of Heifetz, Milstein, Elman and Zimbalist carried that sound around the world. His story is also a record of the barriers that Russia placed in front of Jewish talent, and of how one teacher, himself a convert, quietly used his position to get gifted Jewish children through the door.
Sources & further reading
Leopold Auer, Wikipedia · Leopold Auer, My Long Life in Music (1923), Internet Archive · Auer, Leopold, Encyclopedia.com (Baker’s, Gale, Encyclopaedia Judaica) · Leopold Auer biography, Leopold Auer Society · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.