Josef Wolfsthal

There he performed the Concerto for 2 Violins in D minor, BWV 1043 by Johann Sebastian Bach with his teacher Carl Flesch, who then encouraged him to gain some experience as an orchestral player to make him a more disciplined ensemble player.

Some of his students were Szymon Goldberg (1909–1993) and Marianne Liedtke, who later named herself Maria Lidka (1914–2013) after emigrating to United Kingdom.

[3] He played in a distinguished string trio with cellist Emmanuel Feuermann and violist and composer Paul Hindemith in which his pupil Goldberg succeeded him after his death and led the group in recordings for Columbia of Beethoven's Serenade Op.

But when Wolfsthal was engaged to accompany young piano virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz, his lack of discipline betrayed him when, while performing for Piatigorsky's manager, he abruptly stopped accompanying in midstream and started to improvise, laughing boyishly.

After attending a funeral in Berlin in the winter of 1930, he caught a cold which escalated to pneumonia several weeks later and took his life at only 31.

[5] Reviewing Wolfsthal's 1929 recording of Beethoven's Violin Concerto, the Penguin guide to compact discs wrote of his "breathtaking mastery, making one regret that this pupil of Carl Flesch died in his early thirties.