Alexander Fiedemann
Russian-German violin virtuoso and music teacher
Alexander Fiedemann (1878–1940, Russian: Александр Петрович Фидельман) was a Russian-born German violin virtuoso and music pedagogue. His students included Mischa Elman, Toscha Seidel and Boris Kroyt.
Biography
Early life
Alexander Fiedemann was born in Kyiv, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire (today located in Ukraine) on 24 October 1878. His birth name was Ruvim Peysakhovich Fidelman (Russian: Рувим Пéйсахович Фидельман). His father, Peysakh Fidelman, was a Klezmer and gave Alexander his first lessons starting at age 6. At age 9, he began to study under Otakar Ševčík at the Kyiv Conservatory, and at 12 he went to Leipzig to study under Adolph Brodsky at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig. Among his public performances as a student in Leipzig was an 1890 performance of a Charles Auguste de Bériot piece which earned him great acclaim in the music press.
Music career
When Brodsky was offered a position with the New York Symphony Orchestra, he brought Alexander along with him to the United States, where he played some concerts, including at Carnegie Hall in December 1891, and some with Arthur Nikisch and his wife Amelie Heussner in 1892. Upon his return to Europe, starting in 1897, he became the first violin instructor at the newly founded music school (Russian: Музыкальное училище) in Odessa (which would later become the Odessa Conservatory, now known as the Odessa National A. V. Nezhdanova Academy of Music). Among his students there were Mischa Elman, Naum Blinder, Alexander Schaichet, and Joseph Cherniavsky (who was his nephew).
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This entry incorporates text from “Alexander Fiedemann” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.