The Galimir Files: moments with Felix

There have been so many times in my life where a friend or mentor told me, “Make sure you write down those stories about [musician X] before it’s too late!” And every time, I meant to take their advice… until it was too late. Memory fades.

But my time with Felix Galimir at the Curtis Institute of Music from 1996-1998 was so puzzling, and at the same time transformational, that I knew I had to keep a running diary.

Some kids in school would hurry from each lesson to the practice room, as though their teacher’s wisdom would start leaking from their brain unless they put their hands on the violin. I would instead run straight across Rittenhouse Square to my apartment, where I’d add to “galimir.txt” on my computer.

Maybe that helps explain why I spent all four years at Curtis in the second violin section of the orchestra!

I’ve already shared with you my introduction to Mr. Galimir (of course I never called him “Felix”), and our first lesson, which deserves its own post.

So what I share with you now is the remainder of The Galimir Files, a collection of moments with the kind of teacher I doubt exists these days. But even in those days, Mr. Galimir was one of a kind.

The Curtis Institute opened its doors on October 1, 1924, a date that we were all encouraged to memorize, not as part of any catechism but because it revealed the code to the faculty Xerox machine: 10124! And most of the rooms inside Curtis looked as though they hadn’t been disturbed since that day.

My lessons with Mr. Galimir always took place in Room IA, named the Zimbalist Room after the school’s first Director, the great violinist Efram Zimbalist. His stern visage glared down at me from a large oil painting above the grand piano.

Nevertheless, IA was a favorite of student chamber groups because of its private bathroom. We could avail ourselves of its original porcelain tub, washbasin and toilet, without mixing with the general population in the third-floor restrooms.

I had never considered taking advantage of the facilities during a lesson, however, until one occasion midway through my first semester at Curtis. Nature called so strongly that I put down my instrument and excused myself, intending to escape to the third floor, far away from my nearly 90-year-old teacher. I was almost out the door and onto the landing when a high-pitched Viennese accent stopped me cold.

“No, no, where are you going? There is a bathroom right here!”

At a different moment I might have been able to mount a cogent argument, but under duress I walked back past my teacher to enter Mr. Zimbalist’s private washroom. As quickly as I could I emerged, walked over to the desk where I had placed my violin, picked up my instrument and turned to face Mr. Galimir. He was staring at me openmouthed, with an expression of horror.

I froze, my mind racing: my zipper was up, I had washed my hands, I hadn’t made any particularly strange sounds. Then he spoke, his voice quiet at first but rising alarmingly: “Young man, in this country… we close the door all the way!”

I looked at the door, and indeed it was slightly ajar. Mr. Galimir got up from his chair, shuffled over to the door, and inched it further open, peering inside the bathroom as he did so. “Unless,” he turned, with a look of wonder on his face, “you want to show me what you did.”

My lessons with Mr. Galimir consisted mostly of playing, and all of it mine. I would perform, endure his criticism, then perform again with more frequent, and animated, interruptions. When the repertoire for the lesson was of a virtuosic nature, which was his preference, it made for an exhausting hour!

Therefore, at the start of one lesson on Paganini, I thought I would head off fatigue and possible injury. As we were exchanging pleasantries, I put down my violin and began stretching my forearms, hands and fingers. Mr. Galimir’s side of the conversation trailed off as he watched my demonstration, and finally he fell silent.

I froze with my arms over my head, and he stammered, “What–is–is this a modern dance?”

I laughed, “No, I’m just stretching.” Seeing that his expression hadn’t changed, I panicked. “You know, it’s like athletes. I’m about to play Paganini, and my muscles have to be warmed up just like an athlete’s. I’m trying to stay healthy.”

“Are you going to the Olympics?”

“Well, I–“

Mr. Galimir simply shook his head, and I heard him mutter, “I just don’t understand you.”

Before we started work on Prokofiev’s first violin concerto, I told Mr. Galimir that I didn’t know the piece at all, and had in fact never heard it. I immediately wished I had kept my mouth shut, but incredibly, he seemed pleased.

“Good!” he exclaimed. “No recordings for you, and don’t buy the music and put in any bad fingerings. You will use my music!”

“So next week, you’ll bring the music and take me through it?” I asked.

“Yes, of course.”

All that week, I took his warning not to begin my work on the Prokofiev quite seriously; in fact, I didn’t work on any solo pieces! I figured I was busy enough with chamber music rehearsals and the usual orchestral duties.

But when I walked into the Zimbalist Room next week, I heard the dreaded (and by now familiar) words, “So, what do you play?”

“Prokofiev First Concerto!” I answered excitedly.

“Very good. Go.”

I began to sweat. “But I don’t have the music. Did you bring your music, with your bowings and fingerings?”

He smiled and tapped his forehead. “You know… I completely forgot! It is in New York.”

My face fell.

He drew his eyebrows down and repeated, “So, what do you play?”

Rather than admitting my slothfulness that week, I rooted through my mental attic for any buried treasure. I found some!

I remembered that I had practiced, just a little, for a gig the following week. Part of the repertoire was Bartok’s Rumanian Dances, six short folk pieces with piano accompaniment. I didn’t have a pianist with me, and the whole piece was less than ten minutes long, but at least it was something!

Not only that, but from what I had heard from some older students, the music of Bartok was near and dear to Mr. Galimir’s heart. It was perfect. I offered the Rumanian Dances, and he agreed. I only hoped that none of my friends wandered by and heard me playing what is often considered a “student” piece.

“OK, go.”

I played the first dance, for once hoping that he would stop me and pick it apart.  He simply waved his hand for me to go on to the next one. I played the second, only half a minute long, and he did the same. I began to sweat again, already wondering what would happen eight minutes later.

The third dance is composed entirely of tricky artificial harmonics, which I thought I dispatched rather well. No reaction. I poured my heart into the fourth, a sensual gypsy lament. I dashed through the fifth and sixth, the last dance spiraling toward a climax of wild abandon. My bow flew off the string, and to my astonishment Mr. Galimir leaped out of his chair, a triumphant look on his face.

“Terrific!” he shouted, raising two clenched fists above his head.

He had never before reacted so to my playing, and I puffed up with pride.

Mr. Galimir froze in that pose for an unnaturally long moment, then gradually melted back into his chair and put on an ironic smile.

“It was not very good.”

I instantly deflated.

His voice rose to that pitch we so often heard all the way downstairs in the Common Room, “It’s dirty music and dirty playing!”

He regained his composure. “What else do you have?”

With no other hidden treasures turning up, I admitted the truth about the past week and asked if he might help me with my chamber music parts.

I dutifully practiced Paganini Caprices the following week, but of course Mr. Galimir remembered his Prokofiev, turning my week’s work into the sort that you hope will serve you in some future endeavor.

When Mr. Galimir did hand me his music, it nearly crumbled in my hands. It looked as though it should have been kept under glass! There were all of his valuable bowings and fingerings, collected and preserved over 70 years.

Before he let the music go, he sounded a warning: “You must bring this back to me next week. If you lose it… I kill you!”

Every Wednesday at 3 PM, musical activities at Curtis came to a halt and the entire school observed a curious tradition: the Common Room transformed into a tea parlor. Within a few minutes, the room would fill with students, faculty, and some invited guests. For four years, the Curtis tea was my only source of fresh fruit, along with all the other students who were too poor (or lazy) to buy groceries.

Tradition also dictated that the wife of the Director should serve the tea, to one supplicant at a time. Mrs. Graffman’s question was always the same: “Strong, weak, or medium?” Most weeks, my friends and I would sip tea and graze on fruit and cookies until a crew of our fellows (who received work-study wages) would collect the cups and saucers an hour later. It was a welcome respite from the rigors of the week.

During peak tea time in the overstuffed Common Room, some jostling was inevitable. But one Wednesday just after 3, I felt a poke in my lower back which had to have been intentional.

I whipped my head around, and at first saw no one at all. Then I realized that Mr. Galimir was directly behind me with his index finger extended, his four-foot-ten-inch frame shrunk even further into a wicked crouch.

He looked up with an evil grin, hissing, “Knife… in your back!”

Mr. Galimir may not have been an expert in American geography, but he was savvy enough to know that my hometown lay somewhere in that vast expanse of the continent from where few great violinists emerge. Specifically, he knew that I was from the South, which to a New Yorker may as well have been a different country. 

Of course, as someone who had fled the Nazis, New York had once been a foreign country to him. But as a proud citizen of the nation’s cultural capital, it was inconvenient for him to remember that I was from Lexington, Kentucky. And he never tired of the subject.

Once I came into a lesson wearing a T-shirt bearing the logo and inscription of “Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Lexington, Kentucky”. Perhaps my slovenly dress invited Mr. Galimir’s reaction: he took a long look, squinting and reading out loud, finally repeating, “Lexington… Kentucky. Must not be a very good bookseller.”

Near the end of my second year with Mr. Galimir, we worked on Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy. It is shot through with technical challenges, and the least uncertainty shows itself instantly. I was far from certain about the intonation of a great many notes, and my teacher turned our lesson into a game: intonation “Whack-a Mole!”

For those violinists who have never played this game with a cranky listener, I highly recommend it. My wife Akiko has described several sessions with her teacher Masao Kawasaki, and the rules sound the same. You simply play a note out of tune, get yelled at, then repeat the passage. You will leave the game never wanting to play another out-of-tune note again!

During one brutal stretch near the end, my lack of preparation required Mr. Galimir to stop me after nearly every note. Finally he threw up his hands, laughed, and sighed, “You know, Mr. Nathan. You could go back to Alabama…”

Here he threw a clenched fist into the air, and yelled as though he were a carnival barker, “and you would be a big success!”

Then he dropped his hand back into his lap and shook his head. “But not in New York.”

Finishing a piece was always a gratifying moment for me, because I so rarely received Mr. Galimir’s stamp of approval. But once in a while, as I played the final measure of a work, he would slap his thighs and proclaim, “Good!” The remainder of the lesson would then be a discussion of our next project.

On one such occasion, Mr. Galimir decided I should play Paganini’s first Concerto. I got a hot, prickly feeling all over, wondering if I was up to the monumental task. For years, Zino Francescatti’s estimable disc of the piece had occupied a regular place in my 5-CD changer, and I never stopped marveling at how mortal man could light all those violinistic fireworks at once!

But Mr. Galimir turned up the temperature further with this pronouncement: “Next week, the first movement, with the Sauret cadenza!”

This was an unusually specific assignment, as he would customarily leave it for me to prepare as much of a new piece as I felt comfortable. But students in other studios at Curtis were often asked to prepare a movement of a concerto each week, so perhaps he was trying to move me in that direction.

But the entire first movement of Paganini? I had never worked on the concerto before, and the first movement is by far the longest of the three. In fact, violinists of previous generations would often present the first movement as a stand-alone piece.

In addition, Mr. Galimir wanted not just any cadenza, but the one composed by the violinist Emile Sauret. It’s a seven-minute stretch of unalleviated (some might say monotonous) virtuosity, the equivalent of several Caprices back-to-back.

But I gave the task my all, and by the end of the week, I was fairly impressed with myself. I had the first movement mostly in hand and had gotten at least a start on the cadenza.

The lesson unfolded as usual, with me playing and Mr. Galimir interjecting comments and criticisms. It seemed to me that there were more “goods!” or “very goods!” this week than usual, and began I let my guard down.

In fact, I was so comfortable that I thought I might stop and level with my teacher when I came to the end of the main part of the movement, where the cadenza would normally begin.

“And the cadenza?” he asked, confused.

“I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t prepare it as well as I wanted to,” I admitted. “It isn’t ready to be played.”

Mr. Galimir leaned forward, looked from side to side, and cupped a hand to the side of his mouth. He whispered as if revealing an embarrassing secret, “Truthfully… the rest of it wasn’t ready either.”

Most Curtis students who had the chance to interact with Felix Galimir did so only in chamber music coachings, not in private lessons. Small-ensemble playing was what Mr. Galimir was most famous for, despite the fact that he had played concertmaster for the NBC Sympony under Arturo Toscanini.

Mr. Galimir’s legacy as a giant of both the European and American chamber music worlds is secure, so I won’t go into too many details here. But he worked closely with the composers we students only read about, such as Ravel, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Zemlinsky, and so many others. You can read his New York Times obituary here.

I was fortunate enough to play with a fine quartet of older players as soon as I started at Curtis, and we played for Mr. Galimir nearly every week. But it was a special treat to play for him with a new group, which might include a student or two who had never had “The Galimir Experience!”

I once played third violin in the Mendelssohn Octet for a coaching with Mr. Galimir. The Mendelssohn was one of the first pieces I truly fell in love with, but so many teenage string players could say the same. Every measure breathes with youthful ardor, as the “other Felix” was, impossibly, only 16 years old when he composed it!

“The Octet” is also one of the most popular pieces to read whenever large groups of string players assemble for a reading party. However, it’s rarely studied as thoroughly as it deserves to be. It’s just too hard to get the right mix of players together, for enough rehearsals, to really work it into shape.

During my third year at Curtis, I didn’t yet know how rare an opportunity I had to immerse myself in the piece with six other students and one member of the faculty, cellist Peter Wiley.  It was a fun-loving group playing wonderful music, so spirits generally ran high.

We were in Room IB that day, named for pianist and former Curtis faculty member Mieczysław Horszowski, who had lived to be exactly 100 before passing away just a few years before this coaching with Mr. Galimir (who seemed to be well on his way to the century mark). He stopped us frequently to give comments, and with such a large group, many of these applied to only a subset of the octet.

As Mr. Galimir addressed the lower voices after one passage, he began fumbling for words, and when he did get going it was obvious that his observation would take a while. Our first and second violins welcomed the moment out of the spotlight and began talking quietly. When the second violinist laughed at a joke, she caught the attention of the coach, who never needed much prodding to embarrass his players.

“Hey, hey, HEY!” Mr. Galimir yelled. All were silent, even Mr. Wiley.

“No flirting!” continued our coach. “If you flirt, you must flirt with me!”

I had a noon lesson one winter’s day, and at the end, Mr. Galimir asked if I would like to go to lunch with him. I was taken aback, but excited at the chance to talk to him outside of our lessons and coachings.

“So, Mr. Nathan, where should we go?”

Again, his question surprised me. I had assumed he would have had his favorite lunch spots around Curtis, and frankly, my usual haunts were of the greasy spoon variety. The late, great, Little Pete’s, for example.

In fact, I had never enjoyed a respectable meal near school, so I just began listing the places I did know (aside from Little Pete’s, which was entirely out of the question). “Well, there’s McDonalds, there’s–”

“Yes, McDonalds. We will go to McDonald’s.”

I stared at him, waiting for the sardonic laugh at this obvious joke. But he just stood there, staring back at me.

“OK, let’s go to McDonald’s,” I said, wondering how far he would let us walk before skewering me for my gullibility.

This was a classic “Filthadelphia” weather day, with the precipitation hovering between rain and snow, and a hostile wind blowing down the “tree streets”: Locust, Walnut, Chestnut, etc. As I swung open the wrought-iron front doors of Curtis, the rain smacked me in the face. I took a look at Mr. Galimir’s patio-sized umbrella, easily taller than he was.

“Maybe I’d better hold the umbrella for us.”

It was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other, with the massive umbrella leaning into the wind. I wondered whether we’d ever make the three blocks to Mickey D’s.

The sleet started coming in sideways, and Mr. Galimir tried to hold onto his hat with one hand and my arm with the other. I put on an optimistic voice. “Just two and a half blocks to go!” I shouted.

“No!” I could barely hear his high voice through the gale. “This is no good. I will be blown away!”

I looked around quickly and saw Houlihan’s, which as it happened would have been the second restaurant on my undistinguished list. It was my “special occasion” eatery. I steered us in, and once we were out of the weather, he glared at me as though I had summoned the wind and the rain.

McDonalds would have had the advantage of being fast food, which was just what we needed now that Mr. Galimir’s lunch hour was down to 50 minutes. We’d have to settle for “good food, quickly”.

An exceptionally cheery server showed us to a table, and as soon as she seated us, Mr. Galimir opened with, “What do you have to eat? We are in a terrible hurry!”

I smiled uneasily at her, to reassure her that his bark was worse than his bite.  “Let me tell you about our specials,” she said soothingly. We have…”

By the time she was on her second special, Mr. Galimir was fidgeting and looking helpless. Finally he interrupted. “I understand, you have many things. But I want a salad.”

“Would you like a side salad or a dinner salad?”

Mr. Galimir, exasperated, replied, “A salad. With vegetables. No meat.”

“A dinner salad,” I contributed.

“Great!” said the waitress. “What kind of bread would you like with that?”

“Toast!”

“White, wheat or rye?”

“Rye!”

“And what kind of dressing for the salad?” she continued, still smiling beautifully. Mr. Galimir looked up at her with the pained expression of a man who had already endured more punishment than he could bear.

“We have house, French, Italian, ranch, Russian, thousand island and blue cheese.”

I worried that we might soon have a scene on our hands. But instead Mr. Galimir smiled and softened his voice.

“You know, young lady, I am sure that you know how to bring me a salad. I would like to eat a salad. Whatever bread, dressing, it doesn’t matter.”

Scene averted. Then our tireless server asked, “Would you like the dressing on the side?”

I stepped in with, “On the side. And a burger for me please, medium well, fries and two waters.”

“All right, fellows, I’ll have that out as soon as I can!” And she turned to go.

Mr. Galimir’s voice chased her into the kitchen. “And hurry!”

For one lesson, I served up Paganini’s 13th Caprice. It begins with a fingered octave passage in e minor, followed by a variation of broken chords, played in a very high register. Not only were fingered octaves relatively new to me, but I didn’t yet have the hand-frame training to reliably place my fingers for the broken chords.

Instead of playing violin chess, I was playing violin checkers. But I was still trying to play it fast.

After listening for a minute, Mr. Galimir stopped me and leaned back in his chair.  “You know… you learn the opposite of how I learn.”

“What do you mean?”

His pitch rose considerably. “I mean… that when I have a new piece, I first practice it slowly and carefully in tune. Then I play faster in tune. You… start fast and out of tune and then you play faster and more out of tune!”

When Mr. Galimir was right, he was right.

Speaking of intonation, the Beethoven concerto tied me in knots. And as the first concerto I worked on with Mr. Galimir, it set the tone for our two years of lessons together. At least now, in hindsight, I can take comfort in the fact that generations of violinists before me have also quaked during the Beethoven’s opening tutti, which introduces the solo entrance in broken octaves.

In fact, the entire piece combines the classical purity of a Mozart concerto with the kinds of violinistic gymnastics that I still wasn’t accustomed to performing cleanly or consistently. So the Beethoven lessons were frustrating for both for me and Mr. Galimir, as he impressed upon me the importance of playing each note in its right place.

“Play it again, it is not in tune,” he would groan. I wondered whether he would ever say anything else. I also wondered whether my poor pitch was preventing him from reaching for his own instrument, which always lay in its open case on a nearby sofa. That sofa, by the way, was riddled with cigarette burns, courtesy of Jascha Brodsky, who also taught in the Zimbalist Room.

During one Beethoven lesson, and after several of my botched attempts at a certain passage, Mr. Galimir tried a new motivational technique. He leaped to his feet, grabbed his violin for the first time, and played the passage cold. To my astonishment, though the sound was rough, the notes were pure!

“Now, look at my hands! Look at my fingers!” I nearly fell backward as he thrust them in my face. Each finger was twisted like an oak that had battled the elements for centuries. How was it possible that he had just played every note in its place?

“You see, even I can play this in tune, and I am… three thousand years old!”

To this day, I think of those fingers when I play the Beethoven.

As a few friends and I walked Mr. Galimir from his hotel to Curtis after lunch one day, we asked him what was on his schedule for the afternoon.

“A coaching, of course.”

“Who do you coach?”

“I coach… you know, it’s a funny thing,” and here his voice rose to its familiar pitch, “the names of the players now are so long, and I cannot remember a single one!”

We knew what he was getting at, but we were curious which names in particular were tripping him up.

“Well, who plays cello in the group? What do they look like?”

“It’s the girl… she is short, dark hair…” and he ran out of steam.

Of course that didn’t narrow things down much, but we ventured a guess at her last name: “Yamagami?”

“Ja! What happened to all the good Jewish names? Goldberg, Greenbaum… now the students, they come in with these names, and they have… five or six syllables, and it is impossible!”

Now any of us could have rattled off a few names from Curtis’ illustrious faculty, Jewish or otherwise, that rivaled or surpassed those “fearsome” Asian names in alphabetic trickery: Mieczysław Horszowski, Mstislav Rostropovich, or even Ivan Galamian, if number of syllables was the issue!

Instead we laughed, knowing that Mr. Galimir’s failure to remember many names was due to his habit of calling any female younger than himself “the girl.” And since most people were younger than him, just about every female received that title.

When asking about my lessons with Pamela Frank (who was like a grand-daughter to him) it was, “what did the girl tell you here?” Or when looking for his other student Tina Qu, “where is the girl?” Or sometimes, out of the blue, “How is she?”

“Who, Mr. Galimir?”

“The girl.”

“Which girl?”

“You know, the girl…”

The fall of 1998 was a difficult transition period for me at Curtis. I was beginning my third year, which meant that about half of the people I met when I started school had graduated.

At least my three closest friends and chamber music partners were still there: violinist Soovin Kim, violist Burchard Tang and cellist Margo Tatgenhorst. But our quartet, the one I had played in since my first week at Curtis, was no more. As the others had progressed in their careers, they had less and less time to devote to our group, so we decided to go our separate ways.

Worst of all, I had lost both of my teachers: Mr. Galimir and Pamela Frank. Mr. Galimir’s health had declined during his wife’s long illness and eventual passing, and Pam had moved closer to New York City, meaning that her down time would be spent there instead of her old home of Philadelphia. So I started the year with two new teachers, Ida Kavafian and Jaime Laredo.

I was just beginning to adjust to my new circumstances when I was told that Mr. Galimir would be coming down to Philadelphia the very next week! I was overjoyed, but also nervous. As I was just starting with my new teachers, most of my repertoire was in its early stages.

So I decided instead to play the Bach a minor solo sonata, which was the first piece we had worked on together. I spent a wonderful week rediscovering the piece, aiming to present Mr. Galimir with something completely different from what he had heard from me two years before.

When the lesson began, we talked about our summers for a few minutes, but he was eager to hear the Bach. I could tell that he didn’t have the same energy that he had brought to his first lessons with me, but I soon found out that his ears were the same as ever.

After the improvisatory first movement, he said, “You play very well,” a high compliment from him. “But I don’t know why it’s not very well in tune.” He asked me to go on anyway.

The second movement, a great fugue, felt much easier than when we had struggled through it two years before. Every so often my eyes wandered over to my teacher, sitting in that familiar chair, his eyes closed, his mouth articulating the rhythm. Was he going to fall asleep?

During one of these extended glances, I was sure that he had indeed nodded off. I faltered and suddenly forgot what came next. Instantly Mr. Galimir’s eyes flipped open, and he leaned forward. “Ja, ja, go on!”

He sang the next few notes with such conviction that my arms started moving as if on their own. I sheepishly finished the movement with my eyes closed. Only then did I chance a look at his face, which was wearing a mischievous grin.

“You know, you played it very well… until the end, where… I don’t know why,” and here he leaned forward conspiratorially, “you f****d it up.”

A few months after that Bach redux, I had the chance to play for Mr. Galimir with my newly-formed string quartet. My old group, the Montagnana Quartet, had been named for one venerable instrument maker, and my new group called ourselves the Grancino Quartet. I was borrowing a 1693 Grancino from Curtis at the time. Nowadays, string quartets have much more fanciful names!

By the fall of 1998, Mr. Galimir only rarely made the trip down to Philadelphia. So our group had never had a coaching with him, and we jumped at the chance to take Amtrak up to his New York apartment. I hadn’t been there since my first lesson with him, two years before, and the room somehow seemed smaller this time.

I wasn’t imagining it: this really was a tiny space for a string quartet, with all our instruments, chairs, and stands, plus a coach (even if he was tiny). And even though we had prepared a “classical” piece, Haydn’s Quartet in A Major, Op. 55 No. 1, we played it for all it was worth!

As the first violinist of the group, I bore the most responsibility for this approach. The worst insult I could imagine a listener lobbing at me was that I was boring, timid, or “safe”. So I encouraged our quartet to maximize every detail, even if we colored outside the lines… way outside.

After one too many of our whiplash-inducing dynamic changes, Mr. Galimir let out a yell, which stopped us cold. He breathed hard for a few seconds; evidently he had been getting worked up for a while and we had failed to notice.

“You don’t have to… blast me out of the room! Yes, I know that this measure you have piano and the next you have forte. But this is Haydn, and here piano and forte are next-door neighbors!”

I wondered what Mr. Galimir’s neighbors had been thinking all those years.

My last conversation with Felix Galimir took place at the Marlboro festival in Vermont, in the summer of 1999. After two years of spending several hours a week with him, in lessons and chamber coachings, I had barely seen him over the past year.

I hadn’t exactly avoided him at Marlboro, but he had so many lifelong friends there that I always felt it was the wrong moment to approach him for a conversation. And to be honest, I had begun enjoying my status at Curtis as an “upperclassman”, someone who no longer felt as though he had to look up to everyone else in the building (though I still hadn’t grown any taller). I was sure that if I interacted with Mr. Galimir on his home turf, I’d either embarrass myself or somehow end up the butt of one of his jokes.

Lunch was letting out one afternoon, and all of us were meandering out of the dining hall. A familiar voice caught my ear: “Mr. Nathan…”

I turned to see Mr. Galimir shaking a crooked finger at me. “What should we play together?” I was incredibly moved, since we had never played anything together, and I knew how special music-making at Marlboro was to him.

With only a few weeks left in the summer, there wouldn’t be enough time to prepare a work for performance there. Just the chance to read, rehearse, and learn alongside him would have been enough.

But I was at a loss as to how to answer his question. What repertoire could I suggest that he would deem worthy? Should I just be selfish and mention a piece I wanted to play?

I decided to turn the question back to him. “I don’t know… what have you always wanted to play here?”

“What was that?” he asked, squinting at me.

“I mean, what have you not played that you’ve always wanted to work on?”

“You know,” he started laughing, “in my long life, I have played just about everything.”

A few days later, Mr. Galimir was attending one of the regular concerts there when he had to be taken away in an ambulance. After recovering at a hospital in Vermont, he returned to his home in New York, with plans to see a few students there during the coming semester.

Though I was scheduled to visit him in September and October, both visits got pushed back due to his failing health. He died in early November while I was on tour with the Curtis Orchestra. We were in Vienna, his birthplace and the city from which he had been expelled more than 60 years before.

There is hardly a chamber group active in the United States today without a connection to Felix Galimir.