Jascha Heifetz

Jascha Heifetz — violinist with roots in the Russian Empire

Joseph Ruvimovich Heifetz, known as Jascha, was born in Vilna, then in the Russian Empire, on 2 February (20 January, Old Style) 1901, to Ruvin Heifetz and Anna Sharfstein. His father, a violin teacher who had served a season as concertmaster of the Vilna theatre orchestra, tested how the infant responded to the violin, bought him a small instrument before he was three and was his first teacher. He then studied with a teacher named Malkin, a former pupil of Leopold Auer.

In January 1910 he entered the St Petersburg Conservatory in the class of Ionnes Nalbandian, and in the autumn of 1911 joined the class of Auer himself, with whom he studied for six years; Auer's summer colony at Loschwitz in Germany was part of the training. He made his first recordings in St Petersburg in 1910 and 1911, gave his first full recital at the Conservatory in April 1911, played an outdoor concert in St Petersburg that month before some 25,000 people, and in August drew thousands to outdoor concerts in Odessa. In 1912 he made his debuts in Warsaw and Berlin, where he played with the Berlin Philharmonic under Arthur Nikisch, and before he was a teenager had toured Germany and Scandinavia.

In 1917, during the Revolution, the family left Russia, travelling by rail across Siberia to the Far East and by ship to San Francisco. On 27 October 1917 he gave his first American concert, at Carnegie Hall, with the pianist André Benoist; in the audience the violinist Mischa Elman, another Auer pupil, asked whether it was hot in the hall, and Leopold Godowsky replied, "Not for pianists." Within weeks he was recording for the Victor Talking Machine Company, where he stayed for most of his career. He became an American citizen in 1925. Auer himself and many of his St Petersburg students also settled in the United States.

In later life he taught master classes in California, first at UCLA and then at the University of Southern California. He died in Los Angeles on 10 December 1987, aged eighty-six, and in 1989 received a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Tracing the roots — Vilna, Vilna Governorate (now Vilnius, Lithuania)

Born in Vilna (Russian Empire, now Vilnius, Lithuania) on 2 February 1901 to Reuven (Ruvin) Heifetz, a local violin teacher and concertmaster of the Vilna Theatre Orchestra. In 1910 he entered the St Petersburg Conservatory in the class of Ionnes Nalbandian and later studied for six years with Leopold Auer.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Vilna, Vilna Governorate (now Vilnius, Lithuania). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition