OPPOSITE PAGE TULLY POTTER COLLECTION
When Ida Haendel died on 1 July, aged 96, we lost almost the last survivor from Carl Flesch’s famous 1930s class – only Ivry Gitlis is left now. Like him, Haendel had a rather unorthodox career, not helped in her case by some quixotic decisions.
Born Ida Hendel in Chelm, eastern Poland, on 15 December 1923, at three she picked up her sister’s violin and played a song her mother had been singing. Her father Natan, whose progress as a cellist had been frustrated by his own father, a rabbi, became the archetypal prodigy-pushing parent. When Ida was six the family moved to Warsaw, where she studied with Mieczysław Michałowicz (a pupil of Stanisław Barcewicz and Leopold Auer) who also taught Szymon Goldberg, Roman Totenberg and Josef Hassid. In her outspoken memoirs, Woman with Violin, she denigrated Michałowicz but he clearly gave her a good start. She won a gold medal at nine and the Huberman Prize at ten, and came seventh in the first Wieniawski Competition. She made her Warsaw Philharmonic debut with Mozart’s A major.