From today's New York Times:

   Felix Galimir, 89, a Violinist Who Taught Generations
    By ALLAN KOZINN

   NEW YORK -- Felix Galimir, a violinist who was one of the last links
   to the vital musical world of prewar Vienna, and a chamber music
   player who was revered by several generations of instrumentalists as
   a demanding and inspiring coach, died on Wednesday at his home in
   Manhattan.  He was 89 and had continued to teach and advise young
   musicians until his health began to fail in recent weeks.

   It would be difficult to overstate Galimir's centrality in American
   chamber music life, but perhaps the best measure of his influence is
   that at virtually any chamber concert today, at least one musician
   on the stage is likely to have studied with, been coached by or
   performed in an ensemble with him.  He was, with the pianist Rudolf
   Serkin, a guiding spirit at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont, where
   for 50 years young musicians and experienced colleagues have spent
   summers exploring the chamber literature.

   In addition to his work at Marlboro, a typical concert season for
   Galimir included teaching commitments at Juilliard School and the
   Mannes College of Music, both in New York, and the Curtis Institute
   in Philadelphia -- he was on the faculty of all three -- as well as
   at the New York String Orchestra seminar, a program for young musicians.
   He was also a coach at the chamber workshops that Isaac Stern conducts
   periodically at Carnegie Hall.  He performed as a member of New York
   Philomusica and appeared regularly with Musicians From Marlboro, the
   touring ensembles that keep the festival's name and work alive between
   summer sessions.

   One reason Galimir was such a compelling and authoritative teacher
   is that in addition to his long experience as a quartet player -- he
   formed the Galimir String Quartet when he was still a teenager, in
   1929, and kept it going with younger musicians until 1993 -- he knew
   and worked with many of this century's great composers.  The circle
   in which Galimir traveled early in his career included the composers
   Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern -- the founders of
   Serialism -- as well as Ernst Krenek, Alexander von Zemlinksy and
   other members of Schoenberg's Society for Contemporary Music.

   Berg coached the Galimir Quartet in his Lyric Suite in 1931 and
   inscribed the score of the 20-year old violinist, "To Felix Galimir,
   outstanding quartet leader, excellent violinist, splendid musician,
   in remembrance." In 1936, when the Galimir Quartet recorded the Lyric
   Suite and Ravel's String Quartet, both composers were on hand to
   oversee the ensemble's rehearsals and recording sessions.  The
   recordings were awarded the Grand Prix du Disques.

   For his entire life, Galimir was an eloquent and passionate champion
   of the composers he knew in his youth, and in discussing Schoenberg,
   Berg and Webern, he always emphasized the soulfulness he found in
   their works, rather than the austerity that many listeners hear in
   the music.

   "Berg asked for enormous correctness in the performance of his music,"
   Galimir told The New York Times in 1981.  "But the moment this was
   achieved, he asked for a very Romanticized treatment.  Webern, you
   know, was also terribly Romantic -- as a person and when he conducted.
   Everything was almost oversentimentalized.  It was entirely different
   from what we have been led to believe today.  His music should be
   played very freely, very emotionally."

   As a teacher, he sought to instill a love for new music in students,
   and he spoke wistfully of a time when that did not require such an
   effort.

   "When I was a student, it was understood that young people played
   new music," he said in the 1981 interview.  "Now, unfortunately, this
   is no longer so.  I have difficulty asking my students to play even
   the Bartok violin and piano sonatas.  The students want the best
   sellers.  I would like to see that any young group that plays Beethoven
   quartets plays something new also.  Somebody who is at the end of
   his life and plays only Beethoven and Brahms, that's a different
   story.  But a youngster, he should try everything."

   Galimir was born in Vienna on May 12, 1910, and said in interviews
   that he felt like an outsider from an early age.  Although his mother
   was an Austrian, his father was from Romania and was considered an
   enemy alien during World War I.  The fact that the Galimirs were
   Sephardic Jews and spoke Ladino, a hybrid of medieval Spanish and
   Hebrew, raised similar suspicions because it sounded vaguely like
   Italian, and Austria and Italy were at war.  "I had to learn German
   very quickly," Galimir said later.

   He also learned the violin quickly.  At 12, he entered the New Vienna
   Conservatory, where he studied the violin with Adolf Bak and chamber
   music with Simon Pullman.  In the early 1930's, he continued his
   studies with Carl Flesch.  But by then he had already made his public
   debut as a soloist in the Beethoven Violin Concerto and formed the
   Galimir String Quartet, in which his sisters were the other players.

   In 1936, Galimir was hired by the Vienna Philharmonic.  In "Felix
   Galimir in Conversation," a film by Ken Kobland that was produced
   for the Bard Festival this year, he remembered himself as an
   inexperienced musician at the time.  "I had never heard a Brahms
   symphony until I played one," he said.  It was also an increasingly
   uncomfortable time for him as a young Jewish musician in a society
   where anti-Semitism was increasingly open.  In the film, Galimir
   spoke about one performance at which, just as the lights went down,
   the principal clarinetist called out, in a voice audible throughout
   the theater, "Galimir -- have you eaten your matzos today?"

   The following season he was barred from playing in a performance at
   a resort outside Vienna, and then dismissed from the orchestra.  By
   then, his father and his older sister had left for Paris and were
   urging him to follow.  Instead, he and two of his sisters accepted
   the invitation of Bronislaw Huberman to come to Palestine, where
   Huberman was starting the orchestra that became the Israel Philharmonic.

   In 1938, Galimir emigrated to New York.  He immediately played a
   recital at Town Hall, formed a new version of the Galimir String
   Quartet and had some freelance performing jobs at WQXR, the radio
   station owned by The New York Times.  He also played for several
   years with Arturo Toscanini's NBC Symphony.

   By the early 1950s, though, Galimir had become increasingly involved
   in chamber music, both with his own quartet, with the New York
   Philomusica ensemble and at Marlboro, to which he was invited by
   Serkin in 1952 after the death of one of the festival's founders,
   the violinist Adolf Busch.  And after 1954, when he joined the faculty
   of the City College of New York, he devoted himself increasingly to
   teaching.

   His affiliation with the Juilliard School began in 1962, and he was
   appointed head of the chamber music department at the Curtis Institute
   in 1972.  In 1976 he began teaching at the Mannes College of Music.

   Galimir was a short, genial man who held strong opinions and delivered
   them in a Viennese accent that underscored both their vehemence and
   the current of humor that sometimes ran through them.  Expressing
   his distrust of politics mixed into music, for example, he remarked
   in "Felix Galimir in Conversation" that he had heard the Shostakovich
   11th Symphony a couple of days before the interview.  "It was a
   disgrace," he said.  "Such noise.  Stalin decides who writes good
   music.  Who was Stalin?"

   Although he said music was both his profession and his hobby, he also
   enjoyed watching football, and he had a large collection of clocks.
   His wife, Suzanne, died last year; there are no immediate survivors.

Scott Morrison