A man who taught people who to play the violin for more than eighty years has passed away and he apparently was seeing students for lessons until the day before his death when he died at the age of 101 in Newton, Massachusetts. The reason he passed away was cited as being renal failure, according to his daughter who told National Public Radio about her father’s passing. Roman Totenberg was originally a child prodigy with the violin and made a concert debut in his native Warsaw, Poland when he was only eleven years old. He eventually grew into an accomplished performer who gave concerts well into his nineties.
His century of life encompassed some amazing times and from the years when he performed in Moscow on the streets during the Russian Revolution to the time he spent in Berlin before fleeing to Paris as Adolf Hitler came to power his early years were filled with drama. His fist concert in the United States was in 1935 and the music promotion for the concert suggested that he was put on the same stage with some amazing contemporaries including people like Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Rubenstein and Gregor Piatigorsky.
Not only was Totenberg an accomplished performer who recorded hundreds of performances on the violin, but he also taught violin at Boston University for an astonishing fifty years. He was only six years old when he first started playing the violin and actually performed at early parties during the Russian Revolution for members of the Bolshoi Opera Orchestra.