Isaac Stern of the Stern Brothers Company and His Family History
July 21 is the centennial of the nascency of Isaac Stern. The violinist worked with his contemporaries, like Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein, and went on to mentor the next generation of musicians. Keystone/Getty Images hide explanation
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July 21 is the centennial of the nativity of Isaac Stern. The violinist worked with his contemporaries, like Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein, and went on to mentor the adjacent generation of musicians.
Keystone/Getty Images
The tombstone on Isaac Stern's grave reads simply "Isaac Stern, Fiddler," simply the violinist was much more than than that: He was an educator who mentored generations of musicians, including Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, and he was an activist who helped save Carnegie Hall from the wrecker's brawl.
Isaac Stern was born on the shifting border between Poland and Ukraine 100 years ago on July 21, 1920. As an infant, his parents brought him to the U.Southward., where they settled in San Francisco.
"He had no aspirations to play music at all until, equally he tells information technology, some child across the street was playing and he wanted to play," says his son, Michael Stern. His father was viii years quondam at the time.
Recognizing his talent, Stern'due south female parent pulled him out of schoolhouse. He fabricated his public debut with the San Francisco Symphony when he was xv and 2 years later, he was performing in New York.
"I went out early the next morning. I bought the papers and read the reviews with my mother," Stern wrote in his autobiography, My First 79 Years. "Nosotros were bitterly disappointed. I was beingness patted on the head past some of New York'due south virtually eminent critics. My playing was erratic. That I oughta become dorsum to San Francisco and practice some more."
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"And that's what he did," says Carnegie Hall archivist Gino Francesconi.
Stern returned to acclaim a few years afterwards and launched a remarkable career performing recitals and chamber music, playing with major symphony orchestras. He played the classics, merely also worked with contemporary composers including Igor Stravinsky and Leonard Bernstein.
"Isaac, my Isaac, whatever happens this evening, fair or foul or flop, I want you to know how much I will e'er cherish your work on our Serenade," reads a notation Bernstein wrote to Stern on a slice of hotel stationary earlier the premiere of his piece, Serenade (after Plato'southward Symposium). "Nobody can play like you and nobody tin play the piece as you tin."
Throughout his career, Stern expert relentlessly – even while watching football game games on TV. Just his musicianship wasn't simply nigh technique. In the procedure of learning how to be a peachy musician, he says, the real question that needs to be answered is not how to play well, simply why i chooses to play at all.
"Why do you play? Why do you lot want to be a musician? What do you want to say?" he said in chat with NPR's Diane Rehm in 1999. "Merely a human existence tin can speak with a certain individual voice. And that'south what every musician has to learn."
Stern wanted to impart what he'd learned to the next generation.
"He wasn't somebody who was just playing the violin, he took interest in the world," says the violinist Midori, who was mentored by Stern. "He took interest in his community. He took interest in people similar us, the younger generation. And he was then committed to giving himself and becoming involved, taking activity where he felt that it was necessary."
When he wasn't able to join the army considering of flat feet during World War II, Stern joined the United Service Organizations and played for the troops. And when Carnegie Hall was scheduled to be demolished in 1960, he was instrumental in saving it, says his son, Michael.
"I think it gave him an enormous sense of pride that he could give back both to the urban center and to the state, something which he felt was so important and that was so important to him," Michael Stern says.
Isaac Stern went on to serve as president of Carnegie Hall for 40 years, and he was very much an American musician, says his other son, David — who, like his blood brother, became a conductor.
"The Americans who managed to come through and start on their ain — in their own way, like my father — could invent everything," David Stern says. "They didn't have this brunt of having to go along a tradition. And this was really the gamble to say, I am an American artist. And that freedom you hear in his playing."
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As someone who started with nothing and devoted his life to giving back to the country he called dwelling house, Isaac Stern said he never stopped learning.
"In eight decades, I feel that I am even so a student. And that'due south what'southward wonderful. The wonderful thing is to search and sometimes find."
Isaac Stern died of heart failure in 2001 at the age of 81.
Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2020/07/19/892757782/legendary-violinist-isaac-sterns-legacy-lives-on-after-100-years
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