As a child prodigy, he started studying the violin at the age of 5, and played in front of Emperor Franz Josef I in 1913.
[5] In 1930–33 he taught at the Berlin Hochschule, from 1944 to 1958 at the Guildhall School of Music, and then at the Musikhochschule Köln (1957–82) and the Conservatory in Bern (1957–85).
His pupils included Yfrah Neaman, Igor Ozim, Edith Peinemann, Bryan Fairfax, Lars Anders Tomter and members of the Amadeus Quartet.
[6] Rostal played a wide variety of music, but was a particular champion of contemporary works such as Béla Bartók's Violin Concerto No.
[7] He was the dedicatee of Benjamin Frankel's first solo violin sonata (1942),[8] and he also made the premiere recording.