Abram Shtern's magic violin
The Russian émigré can trace his musical lineage to the man who taught Jascha Heifetz and keeps it going through his adoring students.
Reporting from Montecito, Calif. — Apart from a select group of musicians, few people have heard of the violinist Abram Shtern. Unlike the late Jascha Heifetz, say, he has never felt obliged to travel incognito to avoid being recognized. Yet in July, "Abram Shtern Day" was declared during the first Montecito Summer Music Festival, and 112 students from 11 countries, along with an impressive faculty lineup, were on hand to help celebrate it. The reason is that Shtern, who will turn 90 in March, is not simply a musician. He is a revered teacher, a direct pedagogical descendant of Leopold Auer, the same man who taught Heifetz.
The world is jampacked with violin teachers. But there was only one Auer, a Hungarian who in 1868 signed a three-year contract at Russia's St. Petersburg Conservatory and then went on to exceed that contract by 46 years before coming to the U.S. in 1917. Besides Heifetz, a partial list of the astonishing roster of his protégés, sometimes known as the "Auer Gang," includes Mischa Elman, Tosha Seidel, Efrem Zimbalist and Nathan Milstein. So influential was Auer that in the 1920s, George and Ira Gershwin wrote a song, "Mischa, Yascha, Toscha, Sascha," that contains the lines
When we began our notes were very sour --
Until a man, Professor Auer,
Set out to show us, one and all,
How we could pack them in, in Carnegie Hall.
Great violin teachers, like great racehorses, frequently boast a distinguished lineage, and Auer was no exception. He had been a student of the Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, a mentor and muse of Brahms, Dvorák, Bruch and Schumann.
Which brings us back to Shtern: Born in 1918 in Kiev, in what is now Ukraine, and an L.A. resident since 1990, he studied with David Berthier, who in turn had studied with Auer. Shtern is a frail man today. He speaks little English. But the portrait of him that emerges from conversations with violinists he has coached is of the ideal teacher: not only a professional instructor but a life inspiration.
'Last of Mohicans'
Reminiscing via his daughter, Ludmila Shtern, Shtern said recently that his inauspicious violin roots began with his pummeling a klezmer player, a Jewish folk violinist who had come to the Shtern household to instruct little Abram. Shtern, it was observed, had a very fine ear and a sensibility to match. Luckily, the klezmer player took a hint. But on his way out, he noted that Shtern had talent and recommended violin lessons.
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