David Oistrakh was born in Odessa, in the Ukraine, on Oct. 30, 1908. His father was a bookkeeper who was an amateur fiddler, and his mother sang in the chorus of the Odessa Opera. Not many careers were open to Jews in Russia, but music had long been one of the few available avenues of escape.
Oistrakh’s father started his son on a tiny violin (⅛ size) at the age of 5, and the boy progressed to ¼, ½ and full‐size instruments. Everywhere he went in the Soviet Union in later years, the virtuoso told friends, people would bring out the tiny violin on which he was alleged to have begun his career.
During the Russian Revolution, the young musician studied at the Odessa Conservatory. He made is first public appearance at the age of 12, playing the Beethoven Concerto for an audience that included the composer Serge Prokofiev. At Odessa he studied with Pavel Stolyarsky, who was regarded as the successor to Leopold Auer, and graduated in 1926. For some years, however, David supported his family as a wandering fiddler, in villages and cities from Leningrad to Siberia. “I played with good conductors and bad,” he later recalled. “but it was all a great school for me.”
Listen now to one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century as he performed the Violin Concerto by Jean Sibelius:
