Felix Galimir

Who was Felix Galimir?

Felix Galimir was an Austrian-born American-Jewish violinist and music teacher.

He studied with Adolf Bak and Simon Pullman at the Vienna Conservatory from the age of twelve and graduated in 1928. With his three sisters he founded the Galimir Quartet in 1927 to commemorate the centenary of the death of Ludwig van Beethoven. During the early 1930s Galimir studied with Carl Flesch in Berlin and in 1936, he joined the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, however he was later expelled due to his Jewish background. He then emigrated to Palestine to join the newly founded Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

"My mother was Austrian, but as my father was Romanian, we were considered enemy aliens and lived in fear of internment," he said of his family's plight in World War I.

In 1938 Galimir moved to New York, where he founded another quartet and served as concertmaster of the NBC Symphony Orchestra from 1939 to 1956. In the 1950s he began acquiring a reputation as a music teacher and began teaching at The Juilliard School in New York in 1962 and from 1972 at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. In 1976 he began teaching at Mannes College of Music in New York.