Last week, my mom mentioned to me that Eriks Klavins had passed away.

This probably wouldn’t mean much to anyone who didn’t follow the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.  He’d been principal of the second violin section for a few decades, and had performed as a soloist with them on a few occasions.

He’d also been my violin teacher for many years.   He’s the guy who elevated me from “violin-playing kid with a modicum of talent” to “actual musician.”   Under his tutelage I developed skills beyond the basic technical ones,  and learned that pretty much anything in the violin repertoire, no matter how “basic” it was deemed by standard pedagogy, could be made into a personal showpiece.

My first private violin teacher was the same guy who had been the string instructor to my 3^rd grade class.  He was an…odd…guy.   Former military, deeply fundamentalist, with an outspoken approach to string playing.  As I progressed under his instruction, it became increasingly apparent that while he was a decent player, he was not an especially strong teacher.  One evening he suggested to my mother that she physically discipline me if I didn’t practice.  We agreed as a family that he was crazy, so we quickly began to search for another teacher.

A piano-playing cousin of my mother’s had two teenage children who were also taking violin lessons.  Their  teacher was a woman who was a substitute violinist for the MSO and who also taught in a local school district.  She was, at the time, full-up on students, but through a little persistence, she was convinced (whether by my mom, my mom’s cousin, or just luck I never did find out)  to take me on as a student.   This was Mrs. Arlene Klavins.  She was an excellent teacher, especially for a kid like me – one who was clearly interested in playing but had been bored and, frankly, damaged by an earlier teacher.  She was a great teacher and a very nice person.

Of course, me being me, after getting comfortable, I got ambitious.  After listening to a record (yes, an LP, it was still the early 80’s) of Anne-Sophie Mutter performing Bach’s Concerto No. 2 in E, I decided I was going to play this.  This was not a piece that was usually in the standard string pedagogical path (as defined by the “Suzuki Books” that dominated so many schools) so this was a bit unusual.  But still, I grabbed my lawn-mowing money (the only income 12-year-old me had), got my mom to drive me to Beihoff Music, and I bought the first score I could find.  I brought it in to Mrs. Klavins, set it down, and said “I want to play this.”  She looked at me, sighed, and said “Well, okay.”  By the end of the year,  I could play the entire concerto, and play it rather well.  Mrs. Klavins either decided (it was never made clear to me which) at that point that I had gone off the rails and needed someone to reign me in, or that she’d taken me as far as she could.  Either way, she suggested that we switch teachers, to her husband.

Eriks was a large figure in almost every way.  He was a tall, somewhat cherubic guy with a big personality, a deep voice, and an nigh-unplaceable accent that came from both his heritage and a rather multi-national life.   He seemed to dwarf his Guarneri violin, although whether that effect was physical or merely psychological I don’t know.  His playing style was fiery and emotional, but not especially ornamented.

In short, he was an imposing and intimidating figure.  This guy was a real violinist, a real musician, passionate about his instrument, and demanding of his students.  This was a big step for me.  Training with this guy said “I’m going to play the violin.  Really play.  There is no slacking here, because it will not be tolerated.”  Certainly, at the price per hour for a lesson,  I couldn’t afford to slack off.   He was demanding, but thankfully also friendly and really quite funny – in a very dry way, of course.  He would say things like “that was perfectly in tune.  Now play it more in tune.”  Or, after  I had decided to ornament a particularly boring set of whole notes in a concerto, as I had heard Itzhak Perlman do once, he looked at me and said, flatly “that was lovely.  Now don’t ever do that again.”

His passion for his instrument was infectious.  It had to be, otherwise there was no way anyone in their right mind would devote that kind of effort to practicing.  I would get up every morning at 5:45, practice for an hour before school, practice for an hour again during study hall, then come home and practice some more.  I didn’t always like doing it, and my parents often heard me grouse about having to spend an hour playing $%^@#$ Kreutzer etudes while most normal humans were still asleep, but I did it.

At one point, we started running through Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for unaccompanied violin.  Only got through some parts of the partitas, but to this day they remain some of my favorite pieces of music, and certainly whenever I need to burn off some energy or frustration or, well, anything, I’ll grab a violin and plow through the Allemande and Sarabande from Partita No. 2.

One lesson, he announced that I was going to learn, and perform, Mozart’s 3^rd Violin Concerto in G.  I’d heard this piece played a zillion times – it was one of the Suzuki standards, and it was one of the Suzuki standards that was usually taught at a much earlier level.  I wasn’t much of a fan of Mozart to begin with, and that concerto in particular always struck me as rather banal and grating – and I’d already heard it butchered by waves of high school freshmen.   I weakly protested, but he was insistent.  He simply picked up his violin,  tore through the first few pages of the first movement, and it was revelatory.  I admit that to this day I’m still not a huge fan of that concerto, but at that moment I understood what this was all about.  It wasn’t about learning the music for the sake of the music, it wasn’t about showing off techniques (it’s far from a showy piece, except for the cadenza) it’s about demonstrating that you have the chutzpah to extract something visceral from the music.   After that, I stopped complaining.  We practiced that for months, including the finger-spraining-ly difficult Sam Franko cadenza.  With that piece of “intermediate” violin music, I found myself placing at young artists competitions, performing it for large audiences at concerts (well, larger than any I’ve played to since).  It was…well, it was about where I peaked as a performer.   I think Mr. Klavins expected at that point that I would go professional, and I admit, I briefly considered it.

I hadn’t seen Mr. Klavins much since I left for college, other than a few random meetings and seeing him at the occasional MSO performance.  I’d heard that recently he’d retired from performance for health reasons – he’d been plagued by tendonitis for years – and was focusing on teaching.   Then last week I’d heard he’d died.   I can’t say we were ever good friends, or ever had anything beyond a teacher-student relationship, but every time I play a note of music to this day, regardless of whether I’m scratching out something on the violin or two-fingering notes on a keyboard, the lessons I got from him about music are there.