Carl Halir
Carl Halir was a Czech-German violinist and music teacher, born on February 1, 1859, in Vrchlabí. He studied at the Prague Conservatory with Antonín Bennewitz and later studied in Berlin with Joseph Joachim.
From 1876 to 1879, Halir was first violin in Benjamin Bilse’s orchestra. He then served as concertmaster in Königsberg and Mannheim, and from 1884 to 1894 in Weimar. His musical partnership with Joachim began in 1884 with a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Double Concerto at the Bach Festival in Eisenach. In 1894, Halir became first violin in the Berlin Opera orchestra and a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts.
Halir married Berlin opera singer Therese Zerbst in 1888. He toured the United States in 1896 and 1897, performing works by Ludwig van Beethoven, Louis Spohr, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. In 1897, he took over the second violin part in Joachim’s quartet and began leading his own quartet, with Hugo Dechert as cellist. He also performed in a piano trio with Dechert and Georg Schumann.
On October 19, 1905, in Berlin, Halir gave the first performance of the final version of Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto and of Charles Martin Loeffler’s Divertissement, a work previously rejected by Fritz Kreisler and Eugène Ysaÿe because of its technical difficulty; Richard Strauss conducted. Halir wrote a violin teaching manual, New Studies in Scales for Violin (1896). His students included David Mannes. He died in Berlin on December 21, 1909.