Critical Essay by
Daniel Temianka MD
Henri Temianka was born in Greenock, Scotland in 1906, to Polish Jewish parents. After studying with Willy Hess in Berlin and Jules Boucherit in Paris, he enrolled at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where the great pedagogue Carl Flesch said that he “possessed a model collection of talents, both musically and technically.” He also studied conducting with Artur Rodzinski, and became the first graduate of the Curtis Institute in 1930. His playing was further influenced by Bronislaw Huberman, Jacques Thibaud and Eugène Ysaÿe.
After a brilliant 1928 debut in New York City, he returned to Europe and quickly established himself as one of the era’s foremost concert violinists. In Leningrad he gave five complete performances in one week, to rave reviews. He made extensive tours throughout Europe and the United States, performing with major orchestras under the foremost conductors of the time, including Sir John Barbirolli, Sir Adrian Boult, Otto Klemperer, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Pierre Monteux, Fritz Reiner, William Steinberg, George Szell and Sir Henry Wood.
In 1935 he won third prize in the first Wieniawski Violin Competition in Warsaw, Poland. Ginette Neveu took first prize, and David Oistrakh second; he and Oistrakh remained lifelong friends. In that year he also performed with Benjamin Britten, Sergei Prokofiev and Ralph Vaughan Williams. In 1936 he founded the Temianka Chamber Orchestra in London, and was the concertmaster of the Scottish Orchestra from 1937 to 1938. He gave his first concert in Los Angeles, a violin recital, at the Wilshire Ebell in 1940. From 1941 to 1942, at the invitation of Fritz Reiner, he was concertmaster of the Pittsburgh Symphony.
His career was interrupted by World War II, during which he became a senior editor in the U.S. Office of War Information. Because of his fluency in English, French, German and Dutch, he translated and edited sensitive documents. Through bureaucratic and personal relationships he was able to secure the release of his parents from the Nazi concentration camp in Gurs, France in 1941.
He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1945 with pianist Artur Balsam. In 1946 he performed all the Beethoven violin sonatas with pianist Leonard Shure at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. In that year he also joined the Paganini Quartet, founded by the great Belgian cellist Robert Maas; the other original members were Gustave Rosseels, second violin, and Robert Courte, viola. The quartet drew its name from the fact that all four instruments, made by Antonio Stradivarius, had once been owned by Italian virtuoso violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini; the violin which Temianka played was the “Conte Cozio di Salabue” of 1727, Paganini’s own concert violin. In 1946-47 they played all the Beethoven string quartets at the Library of Congress, and subsequently flourished worldwide for 20 years with Temianka as first violinist.
In 1960 Temianka founded and conducted the California Chamber Symphony at Royce Hall, UCLA, including a “Concerts for Youth” series. The orchestra gave more than 100 concerts over the ensuing 23 years, including premieres of major works by Malcolm Arnold, Aaron Copland, Alberto Ginastera, Gian Carlo Menotti, Darius Milhaud and Dmitri Shostakovich. Soloists who performed with the CCS included David Oistrakh, Jean-Pierre Rampal and Benny Goodman. Chamber groups affiliated with the CCS performed at the Los Angeles Music Center, Mark Taper Forum, Pepperdine University and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, California.
Temianka broke tradition by speaking from the stage about the music and composers; for this reason the series was originally titled “Let’s Talk Music.” In 2022 a graduating student from Chapman University, Mitchell Tanaka, placed Temianka’s pioneering contributions in historical perspective in his production “Temianka Talks Music” – https://scalar.chapman.edu/scalar/temianka/index
In his career Temianka appeared in more than 3,000 concerts in 30 countries, with some 500 concerts in the Los Angeles area alone. Over 2700 of Temianka’s letters, photographs and other effects are housed in his Archives and Multimedia Room in the Leatherby Libraries https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/temianka/, and some are displayed in the Mezzanine of the Musco Center for the Arts. An identical copy of this bust, produced in Miriam Baker’s foundry, was dedicated at the McLean Museum and Art Gallery (now the Watt Institution) in Greenock, Scotland, his birthplace. The ceremony was reported by the BBC and honored by a Motion of the Scottish Parliament.
In February 2013, Chapman University established the Henri Temianka Professorship in Music and Scholarship in String Studies. The violin played by the late Albert Saparoff, concertmaster of the Hollywood Symphony, was endowed as the Temianka-Saparoff violin, and is dedicated for the use of a selected recipient while studying here. In addition, the Temianka Quartet, composed of Chapman students, has been established at Chapman, and in 2024 participated in a master class with the Juilliard String Quartet.
In 1973 Henri Temianka’s memoirs Facing the Music was published by David McKay. He wrote more than 100 articles for various periodicals, including Instrumentalist, The Strad, Reader’s Digest, Saturday Review and others. About one third of those essays concerned string playing and teaching, and have been collected into a privately printed anthology augmented with photographs from his Archives, titled The Art of the Violin.
Temianka hosted frequent evenings of chamber music in his Los Angeles home, with famous fellow musicians including Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, David Oistrakh, Leonard Pennario, Gregor Piatigorsky, William Primrose, Jean-Pierre Rampal, Isaac Stern, Henryk Szeryng and Joseph Szigeti. He received numerous honors, including the French Officier des Arts et des Lettres, an Honorary Doctorate at Pepperdine University, and numerous resolutions by the California Legislature, County of Los Angeles and City of Los Angeles. He was a visiting professor and guest lecturer at many universities in the United States and abroad.
In 1980 the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians said of Temianka that he was “...known for his flawless mastery of his instrument, a pure and expressive tone, and forceful yet elegant interpretations.” In 2016 Jim Svejda at Classical KUSC FM radio aired a four-hour program of recordings by Temianka, the Paganini Quartet, and the California Chamber Symphony. In 2018 the Henri Temianka Audio Preservation Lab was endowed at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Temianka’s students included Leo Berlin, who became concertmaster of the Stockholm Philharmonic; Nina Bodnar, who won the 1982 Thibaud International Competition in Paris; Alison Dalton, who joined the first violin section of the Chicago Symphony; Eugene Fodor; and Camilla Wicks.
Among his most notable recordings were solo performances in the 1930s, primarily on the Parlophone label, of works by Wieniawski, Pugnani, Sarasate, Schumann, Bach and others. In The Book of the Violin, Dominic Gill appraised Temianka’s recording of the Schubert Rondo in A, D. 438, as follows: “The divine playing of this work in 1937 by Henri Temianka stands out as a pinnacle among the great violin recordings of all time.” All of these recordings were reissued on CD by Biddulph Recordings in 1992.
After World War II the Paganini Quartet recorded eleven of the sixteen Beethoven quartets on RCA Victor, for which they won a Gramophone Award. They also recorded Joseph Haydn’s “Emperor” and Mozart’s “Dissonant” quartets, and quartets by Britten, Debussy, Ravel, Schumann, Verdi, Ginastera, Lajhta, and Benjamin Lees; and the Schumann Piano Quintet and Fauré Piano Quartet No. 1 with Artur Rubinstein.
Later Temianka recorded all of Handel’s violin sonatas and others by d’Indy, Dukas, Dvořák, Grieg, and the Tchaikovsky Piano Trio in A minor. His live performances of the Beethoven sonatas in 1946 with pianist Leonard Shure were restored by DOREMI and released by Allegro Music on CDs, winning the prestigious French Diapason d’Or award. The six Bach sonatas for violin and keyboard, performed at UCLA in 1977 with Anthony Newman, have also been released on CDs.
“It’s easy to avoid criticism,” said my father. “Just say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.”
Dedicated to my godfather, the great cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, my “Uncle Grisha.”