Photo: WFIU/WTIU
Jonas Starker takes a bow after playing at a concert celebrating his 75th birthday.
Cellist Janos Starker, a renowned concert soloist and a Grammy Award-winning recording artist, died Sunday morning at age 88.
Starker was a child prodigy. He began playing the cello in the early 1930s in Hungary at age six, and by the time he was 8 years old he had his first student.
“I played in public at 11, 12, 13, 14, and 14 was the big, dramatic break-through for me because a colleague of mine was supposed to play with a student orchestra, Dvorak Concerto,” Starker remembered. “I, as a student, was in the orchestra, as a cellist. At noon the phone rang in our apartment and my teacher called and said, ‘Would you like to play Dvorak Concerto?’ I said ‘When?’ ‘This afternoon.’ And I said, “May I use the music?” They said, “Sure.” And I played and that was supposedly one of the big dramatic successes of childhood prodigies,” he says.
At age 14, Starker’s teachers encouraged him to quit school so he would have more time to practice. A year later his teacher retired so Starker took over and began teaching a number of the students.
Starker says his big break came in 1939, when he performed the Zoltan Kodaly Sonata for Solo Cello – a piece known for being unplayable.
The Road From Performance To Teaching
Starker was held in a Nazi war camp during World War II. In 1948 he was able to emigrate to the U.S. thanks to a plan engineered by then Indiana University president Herman B Wells and music school dean Wilfred Bain.
The Dallas Symphony was recruiting Starker, but they were not sure they would be able to hire him because he was not a member of the orchestra’s union. Bain wrote a letter of intent saying IU would be interested in hiring Starker.
The letter found the approval of immigration officials and Starker got into the country but not to work at IU.
Instead, he joined the Dallas Symphony, then the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and finally the Chicago Symphony. Not until 10 years after entering the country did he officially join the IU School of Music faculty.
“This came as a perfect solution to me because the fact was that the understanding has been that I would concertize whoever and as long as I take care of my class nobody will find out how many days I’m here,” Starker recalled in a 2011 interview with Herald Times columnist Peter Jacobi.
In the same interview Starker claimed that he pursued his true professional love not on the road, but in Bloomington.
“I’ve been caught confessing that basically I was born to be a teacher,” he said. “People question of course the validity of it because I played all those 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 concerts in my life, but the fact is, I think I was put on earth basically to be a teacher.”
Starker was famous for what he called “An Organized Method of String Playing.” Every aspect of string playing, he said, can be put into groups – playing preparation, right and left arm placement, responses to the demands of specific pieces – an overall examination of one’s technique.
“Anticipation in music making is the most important element. Have you realized what happens if someone doesn’t anticipate why speaking… this – is –what-happens. “There is no fluency, no continuity,” Starker says in a stop and start fashion to a class at IU in order to demonstrate his lesson.
A Tough But Dedicated Teacher
“We often come up with a problem that the students come and they play Beethoven sonatas, Schumann concertos and this and that they play very well, musical this and that but something lacks,” he says. “And what’s lacking is partly because of the timing. They are too young yet. They have no real understanding of the composer’s language.”
Starker was known for being tough on his students. Former IU basketball coach Bobby Knight, himself known for the demands he placed on his players, asked Starker to come speak to his team.
Afterward one of the players came up to Starker and asked if he could tell Starker a joke.
“Mr Starker there was a car accident and three cellists died and they all tried to get to Heaven,” the student said. He then goes on to explain the joke. St. Peter asks the first two with whom they studied. They answer they studied with Mstislav Rostropovich and Leonard Rosen. St. Peter tells both of them they have to go to Hell.
The third one tells St. Peter he studied with Starker. Then comes the punch line.
“St. Peter says ‘You may come in. You already went through Hell.’”
Starker trained some of the most accomplished cellists. Among them is Emilio Colon, David Effron and Maria Kliegel. At Starker’s 75th birthday celebration in 1999 many of them performed.
Starker believed music was the highest form of expression and as a musician it was something he said he could not live without.
“It is part of our lives in a way that we cannot wake up in the morning and go through life without music and without having this essential aspect of it, that music means just as much as eating and drinking or living then that person should not be involved in music,” he says.