16 Facts About Walter Levin

Walter Levin was the founder, first violinist, and guiding spirit of the LaSalle Quartet, which was known for its championing of contemporary composers, for its recordings of the Second Viennese School, as well as for its intellectually penetrating interpretations of the classical and romantic quartet repertory, in particular the late quartets of Beethoven.

Walter Levin was born in Berlin, the son of Alfred Levin, a men's clothing manufacturer and a passionate music lover, and Erna Levin, nee Zivi, a professionally trained pianist.

The youngest of three children, Walter Levin grew up in a household in which chamber music was played regularly.

Walter Levin's playing progressed rapidly under Ronis; he studied piano with his sisters' teacher, Marie Zweig.

Walter Levin's parents joined the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden, the Nazi organization for segregating Jewish musicians and performing artists, when it was founded in 1933, which was able to maintain a high level of concert life in Berlin despite the increasingly vigorous ban on Jewish performers.

Walter Levin met the conductor Hermann Scherchen, who introduced him to the music of Arnold Schonberg.

In Tel Aviv, Walter Levin founded a string quartet that toured the kibbutzim; he founded a student orchestra that gave concerts in Tel Aviv.

Somewhat later, Walter Levin occasionally substituted as a violinist in the Palestine Symphony Orchestra.

In Palestine, Walter Levin reconnected with a childhood friend from Berlin, the pianist and composer Herbert Brun, who had emigrated in 1936 with a scholarship to attend the Jerusalem Conservatory.

Immediately after the war, Walter Levin applied to the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where he began his academic studies in February, 1946.

Juilliard's innovative president, the composer William Schuman, approved a major in string quartet for Walter Levin, who founded a student quartet in 1946 that studied with the newly founded Juilliard String Quartet, and subsequently became known as the LaSalle Quartet.

In New York, Walter Levin was able to get permission to attend Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra rehearsals, and to get tickets to Toscanini's broadcast concerts; he made the acquaintance of violin dealer Rembert Wurlitzer, who later played a significant role in providing the LaSalle Quartet with a set of Stradivarius instruments, and then with a set of Amatis.

In September 1948, while still at Juilliard, Walter Levin met the violinist Henry Meyer, who had recently arrived in America from Paris following years of imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps.

Walter Levin was the prime mover in the LaSalle Quartet's ongoing series of children's concerts, in which he and the quartet introduced even elementary school children to the string quartet repertory and gave them a basic exposure to the give and take of chamber music.

Walter Levin's philosophy of interpretation can be summarized as a search to know, by a combination of historical research and structural analysis, a composer's exact intentions, and to realize those intentions in the performance of works that have influenced the subsequent course of musical history and that can reveal new aspects for the present when considered from the standpoint of the most advanced contemporary music.

Walter Levin insisted that the details of interpretation of any given work can only be understood in relation to a larger grasp of the work as a whole, while the work as a whole can only be understood via a sustained grappling with its details.