Violin Resources – A Performing, Learning, Artistic, and Teaching Web Resource and Platform for Violinists and Musicians, By Orion Music and Arts, Cambridge, MA, est. 2023

Leopold Auer, one of the greatest of all violinists, educators, writers, and violin pedagogues combined (1845-1930)

Leopold Auer – Writer, Author, Teacher, and Pedagogue

Leopold Auer – also author of the greatly insightful Violin Playing As I Teach It (1921) – one of the greatest violinists and violin pedagogues of the twentieth-century – and teacher of violinists from Mischa Elman to Toscha Seidel, Efrem Zimbalist, Jascha Heiftetz, and Nathan Milstein – is also known as one of the greatest of all violin pedagogues of all time. 

Himself a pupil of the great violinist and pedagogue Joseph Joachim, Auer’s teaching method is characterized – among others – by a strong and rich focus on the musical individual, as well as an integral balance of the musical and technical, and in a matching of technique in tandem in musicality and artistry.

A proponent of a bit of solo Bach daily, for example, Auer’s belief was that technical development unfold in securely foundational and accretionary, as well as psychologically tangible and valid ways.

Auer’s ability as a teacher and in pedagogy was also a remarkable ability to challenge and develop each student to their absolute fullest potential – being aware, even, of a person’s unique personal shortcomings and also offering technical and musical as well as innovative answers and solutions.

Tailoring every lesson for every student, Auer’s was a remarkably ability to teach with profound insight as to how to solve every problem in the particular.

As his legendary pupil Jascha Heifetz recalled, ‘Auer was a wonderful and incomparable teacher. I do not believe that there is any teacher in the wold who could possibly approach him. Don’t ask me how he did it, for I would not have known how to tell you, for he is completely different with each student.’

Auer is known, also, for having systematically written his teaching notes and observations down for future generations of students. His Violin Playing, as I Teach It, for instance, is one of the only teaching manuals of all the legendary teaching greats of his time to have ever emerged; a work treasured alongside other similar rarities by violinist-pedagogues like Carl Flesch, for example, which focus less on teaching and pedagogy, per se, but rather on violin playing itself.

Auer’s approach to pedagogy is unique in its personal approach; steeped richly in personal history, and rooted in experience and a vivid personal view, as greatly evinced in Violin Playing as I Teach It.

Other written works by Auer include My Long Life in Music (1923), as well as Violin Master Works and Their Interpretation (1925).

Auer’s life, as a result, and pedagogical legacy, extended beyond the innumerably gifted students that he taught – many of which came to him on a scholarship – but also through a deeply invested and widespread effort to record and annotate his work and teaching for others; accessed, for example, by way of his writing and compelling of teaching and educational work.

This is particularly manifest in the historical, biographical, musical, and technical work, Violin Playing as I Teach It, in which Auer balanced principles and perspectives with how they might each and collectively work, refracted and reintegrated in the particular and individual.

One here also learns a range of musical and teaching practices for both hands, as well as all manner of violin teaching on repertoire and technique besides.

For more educational material on the subject, as well as a copy of the e-book that more extensively delves into work here presented, please feel free to contact us with the contact form to enquire, or e-mail.

By The Orion Music and Arts, Cambridge MA, Team, 2023-2024

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