Walter Levin

Walter Levin was born in Berlin, the son of Alfred Levin, a men's clothing manufacturer and a passionate music lover, and Erna Levin, née Zivi, a professionally trained pianist. The youngest of three children, Levin grew up in a household in which chamber music was played regularly. At the age of four he was given a violin, and began lessons with Jürgin Ronis, a student Carl Flesch, at the age of five. Levin's playing progressed rapidly under Ronis; he also studied piano with his sisters’ teacher, Marie Zweig. For his bar mitzvah at 13 Levin was given a complete library of string quartet music, ranging from Henry Purcell to Arnold Schönberg, and at least from that time on it was his ambition to make the string quartet his life's work.

As a child Levin experienced the golden age of musical culture that was Berlin in the Weimar Republic, hearing recitals by many of the greatest musicians of that era, including Yehudi Menuhin, Artur Schnabel, Edwin Fischer, Alexander Kipnis, and Erna Berger, and the Calvet Quartet, concerts by the Berlin Philharmonic, and opera productions at the Staatsoper, the Deutsches Oper, and the Kroll Oper, conducted, among others, by Leo Blech and Otto Klemperer. Opera and lieder recitals were decisive in impressing upon him early on the importance of singing and of the vocal literature for understanding the rhetoric of music and the technical means for its expression on the violin. Of particular importance were recordings by Yehudi Menuhin, Jascha Heifetz, and Arturo Toscanini, whose rhythmic elan, precision, and unsentimental verve were to remain models of the interpreter's art throughout his professional career.

After being harassed as a Jew by classmates following the Nazi take-over in 1933, Levin's parents enrolled him in the Zionist Theodor Herzl School, where the musicologist Willi Apel was among his teachers, an experience that he later recalled as akin to Thomas Mann's portrayal of the piano teacher Wendell Kretschmar in his novel Doktor Faustus. 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. Levin's parents were slow to recognize the mortal threat that the Nazis represented: only in the aftermath of the Kristallnacht of 9–10 November 1938, did they undertake to emigrate, departing Berlin for Palestine in December, 1938, having forfeited most of their fortune to the infamous Reichsfluchtsteuer, the exit tax imposed on emigrating Jews by the Nazis.

The Levins settled in Tel Aviv, where Levin's uncle had established a men's clothing business. Through the efforts principally of the violinist Bronislaw Huberman, Palestine — and in particular, Tel Aviv — had become a place of refuge for many of the leading German and Eastern European Jewish musicians of the day. In Tel Aviv, Levin, now 14, played for Huberman, who arranged for him to study violin with Rudolf Bergmann (one of the four concertmasters of the recently established Palestine Symphony Orchestra); piano with Frank Pelleg (originally Pollack); and music theory with Paul Ben-Haim (originally Frankenburger). Levin also met the conductor Hermann Scherchen, who introduced him to the music of Arnold Schönberg. In Tel Aviv, Levin founded a string quartet that toured the kibbutzim; he also founded a student orchestra that gave concerts in Tel Aviv. Somewhat later, Levin occasionally substituted as a violinist in the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. In Palestine, Levin also reconnected with a childhood friend from Berlin, the pianist and composer Herbert Brün, who had emigrated in 1936 with a scholarship to attend the Jerusalem Conservatory. Through Brün, he met the composer Wolf Rosenberg and the writer Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who were to remain lifelong friends.

Immediately after the war, Levin applied to the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where he began his academic studies in February, 1946. At Juilliard, he studied with the violinist Hans Letz, and then with Ivan Galamian, with whom he continued to study at Meadowmount, Galamian's summer school in upstate New York, until 1953. Juilliard's innovative president, the composer William Schuman, approved a major in string quartet for 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, Levin was able to get permission to attend Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra rehearsals, and to get tickets to Toscanini's broadcast concerts; he also 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, Levin met the violinist Henry Meyer, who had recently arrived in America from Paris following years of imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps. Meyer joined Levin's quartet, and remained its second violin throughout the quartet's forty-year career. Through Herbert Brün, who had come to Tanglewood on scholarship to study composition with Aaron Copland in the summer of 1948, Levin met the pianist Evi Markov, whose family had emigrated to America in November 1940. The two were married a year later in Colorado Springs, and Evi, who had also gone to business school, became the business manager of the LaSalle Quartet.

Levin and his LaSalle Quartet graduated from Juilliard in 1949, and obtained an appointment as quartet in residence at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. In the summer preceding the start of that appointment, they were joined by violist Peter Kamnitzer, whom they had known from Juilliard, and who remained with the quartet until its retirement in 1987. At Colorado College, the quartet taught, gave concerts, and undertook a series of children's concerts which was to continue throughout their career. It was Levin's lifelong conviction that classical musicians have a responsibility to develop the next generation of classical music lovers, as well as the younger generation of performers.

After four years at Colorado College, the quartet was invited to Cincinnati to become quartet in residence at the Cincinnati College of Music, which soon thereafter merged with the Cincinnati Conservatory, and subsequently became a unit of the University of Cincinnati. In Cincinnati, Levin, Meyer, and Kamnitzer were joined by cellist Jack Kirstein, who stayed with the quartet for twenty years before retiring in 1975, after which they were joined by Lee Fiser, a student of Lynn Harrell. Fiser remained the cellist of the LaSalle Quartet until their retirement in 1987.

The quartet toured internationally, beginning with a tour of Europe in 1954. Its participation in the famous Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in the 1950s led to a series of commissions to contemporary composers, most notably György Ligeti and Luigi Nono, and also to many world premieres, including the quartets by Krzysztof Penderecki and Witold Lutosławski.

In 1971, the quartet became famous, especially in the United States, as a result of the unexpected success of its recording for Deutsche Grammophon of the complete string quartet music of the chief representatives of the Second Viennese School: Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. This set, and the LaSalle's subsequent recordings of the late quartets of Beethoven, have been continuously in print since their first release.

The quartet also recorded a significant part of its contemporary music repertory for Deutsche Grammophon, and its recordings of the quartets by Alexander Zemlinksky contributed significantly to the renaissance of interest in his operatic, symphonic, and chamber music.