Background
Huberman was born in Czestochowa, Poland on Dececmber 19, 1882.
Huberman was born in Czestochowa, Poland on Dececmber 19, 1882.
he began studying the violin at a very early age at the Warsaw Conservatory, as a result of an unusual ocurrence. In 1887 the shah of Persia came to Warsaw and heard a pianist prodigy. The enthusiastic shah awarded the young musician many prizes and a lifetime allowance. This incident ignited the imagination of many Jewish families and children were at once sent to study the piano.
In 1892 Hubcrman’s father took him to Berlin to study with Joseph Joachim, but as the eminent violinist would not teach child prodigies he referred Huberman to his assistant. In Berlin the young violinist also studied, secretly, with Charles Grigorovich. Later in life Huberman confessed that Grigorovich “taught me everything that could be learned from a teacher.” However, Huberman never graduated from any musical institution. He used to say that the audience is the best teacher and that the concert stage the best school.
By the age of eleven Huberman had already performed in Amsterdam, Brussels, and a year later in London and Paris. When he was fourteen, he played Brahms’s Violin Concerto in Vienna. The composer was in the audience and was very satisfied with the performance, giving Huberman a photograph signed, “from your grateful listener.” Huberman toured the United States in 1896-1897, retired for four years from the concert stage, and then reappeared with many more successful concerts all over the world. He gave a series of fourteen concerts in Paris (1920), ten in Vienna (1924-1925), eight in Berlin (1926), and toured the United States again in 1937.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933 Huberman canceled all his engagements in Germany. Huberman was a consistant anticommunist and an avid socialist. One of his Vienna concerts took place after the Austrian chancellor. Engelbert DolIfuss established a fascist government and gave orders to shoot those who would resisted the new regime. Huberman declared that all receipts from one of his recitals would be given to families of the dead working-class victims. The press did not carry the announcement, but Huberman repeated it during the performance.
Huberman himself did not perform with a new Palestine Symphony Orchestra orchestra in its first season. He planned to do so in its second season but suffered a hand injury in a plane crash. His doctors decreed that he would never perform again, but the violinist persisted and returned to the platform. At the age of sixty-three, Huberman performed Brahms’s concerto tor the last time in Lucerne in a concert that was broadcast throughout Europe.If you love the things you do you don’t age, you always remain young. Age is for the calendar. I hope to live to see the day when we have music on the moon.
After his death his library and papers were transferred to the Central Music Library in Tel Aviv, where the street on which the home of the Israel Philharmonic is located is named after him. On the centenary of his birth, the greatest violinists of the generation — Isaac Stern, Ida Handel, Ivri Gitlis, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, Henryk Szeryng, and Shlomo Mintz — went to Huberman Street and celebrated a Huberman Festival with the Israel Philharmonic, under its conductor, Zubin Mehta.
It was on Huberman’s initiative that a new Palestine Symphony Orchestra was established, composed of Jewish musicians who had lost their positions in Europe after the rise of the Nazis. He started organizing the new orchestra in 1934, when he informed Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv, that the receipts from his most recent recital would be dedicated to the new' orchestra. Huber¬man did not wish to organize a mere musical ensemble in Palestine. He wanted to inaugurate one of the best orchestras of the time.
Huberman auditioned potential members for the Palestine Symphony in Zurich and Vienna, Budapest and Warsaw. He gave fundraising speeches wherever he performed and slowly but surely the dream became a reality. Under the baton of Arturo Toscanini, the Palestine Symphony, which later became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, gave its first concert on December 26, 1936 in Tel Aviv. The excitement in the country was so great that one woman who gave birth to twins on that day named them Tosca and Nini.
Huberman’s violin playing was always controversial. While some musicians, like Toscanini, Bruno Walter, and Artur Schnabel for example, admired his work, others, especially violinists, were far from admiring his playing.
Carl Flesch criticized Huberman as “the most remarkable representative of unbridled individualism.”
