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Walter Levin (born December 6, 1924) is the founder, first violinist, and guiding spirit of the LaSalle Quartet (active 1947–1987), which was known for its championing of contemporary composers, for its recordings of the Second Viennese School (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern), as well as for its intellectually penetrating interpretations of the classical and romantic quartet repertory, in particular the late quartets of Beethoven. Levin is also an important pedagogue, having taught many of the world’s leading string quartets, among them the Alban Berg Quartet and the Arditti Quartet; other prominent students include the conductor James Levine, the violinist Christian Tetzlaff and the pianist Stefan Litwin. Levin was Professor of Music for 33 years at the College Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati, where the LaSalle Quartet was quartet in residence, and subsequently taught chamber music at the Steans Institute of the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, at the Basel Academy of Music in Switzerland, and the Lübeck Academy of Music in Germany. Now retired, Levin and his wife Evi make their home in Chicago, Illinois. ==Berlin childhood== Walter Levin was born in Berlin, the son of Alfred Levin, a men’s clothing manufacturer and a passionate music lover, and Erna Levin, née Zivi, a professionally trained pianist. The youngest of three children, Levin grew up in a household in which chamber music was played regularly. At the age of four he was given a violin, and began lessons with Jürgin Ronis, a student Carl Flesch, at the age of five. Levin’s playing progressed rapidly under Ronis; he also studied piano with his sisters’ teacher, Marie Zweig. For his bar mitzvah at 13 Levin was given a complete library of string quartet music, ranging from Henry Purcell to Arnold Schönberg, and at least from that time on it was his ambition to make the string quartet his life’s work. As a child Levin experienced the golden age of musical culture that was Berlin in the Weimar Republic, hearing recitals by many of the greatest musicians of that era, including Yehudi Menuhin, Artur Schnabel, Edwin Fischer, Alexander Kipnis, and Erna Berger, and the Calvet Quartet, concerts by the Berlin Philharmonic, and opera productions at the Staatsoper, the Deutsches Oper, and the Kroll Oper, conducted, among others, by Leo Blech and Otto Klemperer. Opera and lieder recitals were decisive in impressing upon him early on the importance of singing and of the vocal literature for understanding the rhetoric of music and the technical means for its expression on the violin. Of particular importance were recordings by Yehudi Menuhin, Jascha Heifetz, and Arturo Toscanini, whose rhythmic elan, precision, and unsentimental verve were to remain models of the interpreter’s art throughout his professional career. After being harassed as a Jew by classmates following the Nazi take-over in 1933, Levin’s parents enrolled him in the Zionist Theodor Herzl School, where the musicologist Willi Apel was among his teachers, an experience that he later recalled as akin to Thomas Mann’s portrayal of the piano teacher Wendell Kretschmar in his novel Doktor Faustus. Levin’s parents joined the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden, the Nazi organization for segregating Jewish musicians and performing artists, when it was founded in 1933, which was able to maintain a high level of concert life in Berlin despite the increasingly vigorous ban on Jewish performers. Levin’s parents were slow to recognize the mortal threat that the Nazis represented: only in the aftermath of the Kristallnacht of 9–10 November 1938, did they undertake to emigrate, departing Berlin for Palestine in December, 1938, having forfeited most of their fortune to the infamous Reichsfluchsteuer, the exit tax imposed on emigrating Jews by the Nazis. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Walter Levin」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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