Shinichi Suzuki was a Japanese violinist and music educator, best known as the author of a music teaching method that became widespread around the world. He was born in Nagoya in 1898 and was one of twelve children of Masakichi Suzuki, the owner of a violin-making factory.
As a child, Suzuki worked at his father's factory. At the age of 17, after hearing a recording of the violinist Mischa Elman, he began teaching himself to play the violin. When he was 22, a friend of his father, Marquis Yoshichika Tokugawa, persuaded Suzuki's father to send him to study in Germany, and from 1921 to 1928 he studied at the Berlin Conservatory with Karl Klingler. While in Germany, he also had personal contact with Albert Einstein.
In 1928 Suzuki married Waltraud Prange, with whom he lived for the rest of his life. In 1930 he returned to Japan, formed a string quartet with his brothers, and began teaching at the Imperial Music School and the Kunitachi Music School in Tokyo. During the Second World War, his father's violin factory was destroyed in an American air raid, one of his brothers was killed, and the family was left without money. To survive, Suzuki gave lessons to orphaned children in the cities where he lived.
One of Suzuki's first pupils, Koji Toyoda, began studying with him at the age of three and a half, and with this pupil Suzuki began to develop his philosophy of music teaching. Like many self-taught teachers, he built his theory of early childhood education from personal experience rather than from scientific research or controlled experiments. His guiding idea was that character comes first and ability second.
Suzuki's teaching principles emphasized the formative power of environment, the importance of beginning as early as possible, the necessity of repetition in learning, and the responsibility of teachers and parents to maintain a high level of personal development. He also stressed that teaching systems should provide illustrations appropriate to the child's understanding and argued, in what he called the philosophy of the "mother tongue," that children learn by observing the world around them.
His ideas spread widely throughout the world, and the movement of his followers continued to apply the theories he formulated in the mid-1940s. Suzuki collaborated with other educational thinkers, including Glenn Doman, and included an interview with Doman in his book Where Love is Deep. He set out his philosophy of music education in books translated into English by his wife Waltraud Prange, including Ability Development from Age Zero and Man and Talent: Search into the Unknown. Suzuki was also the national patron in Japan of the international professional music fraternity Delta Omicron. He died at his home in Matsumoto on 26 January 1998 at the age of 99.