* 1905, † 1991,

       Max Rostal was born in Cieszyn on 7 August 1905, the son of Józef Rostal, a Jewish merchant, and Amalia neé Schleuderer. He could play the violin from the age of 5, and performed for the first time in public as a boy of six. His first violin teacher was Professor Henri A. Trouck, a Parisian, who ran the school of music and painting in Cieszyn. He then attended the famous music school of Otokar Slawik and Michael “Zeno” Pogrobiński. In 1913, as a wunderkind, he played for Emperor Franz Joseph I himself. In the same year he moved to Vienna, where he attended first the Schwarzwald-Schule, where his teacher was Franz Suchy, and then in the Music High School (Muzikhochschule), in the class of Professor Arnold Rosé.
       The next stage in the musical education of the Cieszyn violinist was Berlin, where Rostal studied in the years 1920-23, first under Professor Karl Flesch, and then in the State Music High School (Staatlische Musikhochschule). In 1924 he began his career as a professional violinist, winning the prestigious Felix Mendelsohn and Jan Sibelius competitions. In the same year he was awarded a prize in Berne, the capital of Switzerland. Numerous concerts and recordings for leading European and American record companies confirmed Rostal’s position as a virtuoso violinist – he was called the “Cieszyn Paganini”. In 1930 he became the youngest professor of the Berlin State Music High School, but after Hitler came to power he fled Germany, to settle in England, where he was a lecturer at the famous Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London during the years 1944-58. He continued giving concerts worldwide, after 1952 even in Germany. In 1958 he came to Poland, as a member of the jury at the Henryk Wieniawski International Violin Competition, also giving concerts in Warsaw and Kraków. He also visited Cieszyn, his home town, for the first and last time after leaving Poland.
       In the same year he moved to Switzerland for good, where he took on a violin master class at the Berne Conservatory. He was also a professor at the Cologne State Music High School. He taught a great number of excellent musicians, and in 1971 founded, with Yehudi Menuhin and Siegfrid Palm, the European String Teachers’ Association. Towards the end of his life he established the Max Rostal Violin Competition, the first edition of which took place in Berne in 1991. The founder did not live to meet the winner, dying on the second day of the competition, the day before his 86th birthday.