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Four strings, 85 years By Haggai Hitron Tags: Israel News Yesterday morning, the Tzavta club hosted the 90th birthday celebrations for Ze'ev Steinberg, the oldest musical performer in Israel. Violinist Steinberg was born in the German town of Trier, which sits on the banks of the Moselle River, arrived in Israel over 70 years ago through the youth aliyah movement to kibbutz Ein Harod, moved to kibbutz Beit Hashita, and then settled in Be'er Tuviya. From 1937 he lived in Tel Aviv, and in 1960 he resettled in Kiryat Ono. His Hebrew is meticulous, rich, and bears a Yekke [Jew of German origin] accent, but he still counts in his native tongue and speaks German with his sister. He began his career in the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) in the late 1930s, when he worked as a taxi driver transporting the musicians to their performances. At the age of 90, Steinberg still plays, drives, helps with household chores and shopping, and raises - alongside his second wife, who is 30 years his junior - his 24-year-old daughter. He has a son and a daughter from his first wife, Hava, who passed away in 1974. He also has five granddaughters and eight great granddaughters. Advertisement A book by Uri Teflitz recounting the history of the IPO recalls one wartime idiosyncrasy - orchestra musicians would often moonlight in coffee shops. In one instance, they arrived late to a concert in Haifa after failing to persuade the taxi driver who was bringing them from Tel Aviv to drive above the legal speed limit. The driver, Teflitz reveals, was Wolfgang Steinberg, who a short time later became a member of the orchestra. Steinberg also performed with the most prestigious string quartets, including the Polishuk Quartet, the Tel Aviv Quartet and the New Israeli Quartet. In recent years, he founded the "Musica Nova" ensemble, which features modern music and comprises musicians his grandchildren's age. He also draws upon his vast experience and talents in contributing to the Ramat Gan Chamber Orchestra. During your years spent as a farmer, did you play? Steinberg: "Always. In Ein Harod and Beit Hashita, and from Be'er Tuviya I would travel to [kibbutz] Givat Brener to play." Many people would want to understand the secret of your health. "My physical activity is practicing the viola every day, which keeps me in good playing shape. My physical state is perhaps a genetic matter - my maternal grandmother passed away at age 98 in Tiberias." As part of the birthday celebrations for Steinberg at Tel Aviv's Tzavta club on a Saturday morning in November, those in attendance watched a film on the man of the hour's life, produced by photographer and sound man Ya'akov Aviram. In the film, Steinberg recalls his days driving musicians to their shows in his cab (he worked as a driver from 1937 until 1942 with the "Aviv" taxi company), after which he would sneak into the concerts. These sessions were for him a lesson in chamber music. At the time, he was also enrolled in the music academy on Takhkemoni Street until his teacher, Eden Portush, advised him to try be accepted into the IPO. Did they accept you with no problems? "Not everybody. Chief among the naysayers were the cellist Baruch and the violinist Aryeh Ginsburg (two of the three Ginsburg brothers who played in the orchestra) who said, 'What do we need a taxi driver for? An amateur, this is unseemly.' Most of the Germans, including the flautist Teflitz, and the Hungarians supported me, but some of the Poles did not, even though the violinist Kaminski did support me. I played for an entire year without pay. After a year, they held an audition for me and then Baruch approached me and apologized. He said, 'We were wrong.'" Did relations remain chilly? "Not at all, on the contrary." How was your relationship with the two first violinists you played alongside for dozens of years, Daniel Binyamini and Aryeh Yisraeli? "I'm one of the few who managed not to fight at all with Danny or Arik. Danny, after all, would often travel abroad as a member of the board of directors, and I would take his place as the leader of the violinists. I was sufficiently satisfied professionally." In the movie you mentioned that your meeting in the 1940s with the Italian conductor Bernardino Molinari was an important milestone in your career. "Molinari's importance is that period in the philharmonic's history. He came after a long time when we worked especially with Singer and Taubeh, and this turned into a routine that was becoming boring. Molinari taught us things we didn't know, built for us a symphonic sound. Until the meeting with him, the young musicians from back then - including me, as opposed to the older ones who had earlier performed with orchestras in Europe like Yosef Kaminski and Rudolf Bergman - did not know how a real orchestra should sound." You also say in the movie that despite the fact that the grand pieces are open to new interpretations, a conductor needs to know how to persuade the musicians that his interpretation is the ultimate one. "Certainly. The confidence that a conductor exudes can sometimes be enough, if the orchestra is persuaded to go his way, even if his technique is lacking. For example, Sergei Koussevitzky had zero technique and musicians 'got lost' if they followed his hand movements instead of deciphering what he wanted by the look on his face. A contemporary example would be Simon Rattle, and in this case we are talking about a huge mistake by the philharmonic. When he conducted us, half the orchestra laughed because his movements were unusual." In another segment of the film you say that for you, after all the hundreds of pieces you have played and got to know, the greatest ones are by Bach and Mozart. There are certainly those among Haaretz readers who remember your rendition of Bach's "The Art of Fugue." "The story with 'The Art of Fugue' began with me at the age of 10. I was in Cologne with grandma and grandpa Steinberg when I attended a concert where I heard this piece for the first time, and I couldn't sleep for a few nights because of the impact it had on me. I wrote my rendition, which is a string quartet version, here in 1970. Could music from the 20th century rattle you emotionally like that? "There is modern music that could excite me, for example the compositions of [Estonian composer] Arvo Part, or Ligatti's second quartet, or the three operas of my deceased friend Yosef Tal. It is true that this music demands time for me to understand what we have here, but I didn't even understand Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" immediately. At first, it sounded to me like a potpourri of sounds." You were born into a musical family? My father, Paul Steinberg, graduated from the Cologne Academy of Music as a violinist, alongside Adolf Busch. He was debating whether to be a musician or a doctor. After serving as a doctor during the First World War, he decided that his future is in medicine, and when he immigrated to Israel in January 1936, he opened an x-ray clinic in Tiberias that served the entire area." And you have been playing music from a young age? "Since age five, and I also took part in rehearsals for the Trier choir. My father insisted." Your entire family made aliyah? No one perished in the Holocaust? "My grandfather, my father's father, came to the country to visit us in 1936. We pleaded with him throughout entire nights to stay here, but he wanted to go back to the retirement home in which he lived in Cologne, and he said, 'Who will harass an old man like me?' Grandpa died in Theresienstadt at age 82." How could one encapsulate your attitude toward the German people today? "My position is a principled one and it touches on the Bible. If God had mercy on the city Nineveh, in the book of Jonah, because its inhabitants became devoutly religious, then what are we? I also know at least a dozen Germans who risked their lives to save Jews." Have you visited Trier, the city in which you spent your childhood? "I was there a few times - the last time was two weeks ago at the invitation of the mayor. I received some sort of honorary citizenship and played in a morning concert before students at the school where I myself studied. Even the house in which we lived is still standing." If you are asked to cite a specific moment that you remember as being special from your performances with the orchestra, what would you choose? "When the state was declared. We were approximately 40 musicians and we were packed into a room on the upper floor over the hall where independence was declared, at Dizengoff House on Rothschild Boulevard. Some of them played while standing on the steps. I was pushy and went downstairs with my violin. I wanted to see the grand moment with my own eyes." Bookmark to del.icio.us   A real mensch Chabad leaders say the slain rabbi's only concern was helping Jews away from home. An immodest proposal Likud MK suggests using Palestinian prisoners as human shields against Qassams.

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