Boris Kroyt: The Violinist Who Learned Viola in Three Days
When a colleague fell ill and a concert needed a violist, Boris Kroyt — a violinist by training, with no experience on the larger instrument — learned to play viola in three days. It was a party trick that turned into a life's work: Kroyt would go on to spend three decades as the violist of the Budapest String Quartet, one of the most celebrated chamber ensembles of the twentieth century, anchoring its sound from the inside of an instrument he had picked up almost by accident.
Odessa Beginnings
Kroyt was born on 3 June 1897 in Odessa, then part of the Russian Empire, to a Jewish family — his father Osip a tobacco merchant, his mother Tzipa known as Cecilia. The family's Odessa apartment, in the city's Jewish quarter, was a gathering place for radical intellectuals, including relatives of Leon Trotsky, giving the young Kroyt an early exposure to a household of political ferment alongside his musical training. He began violin with an art-student lodger before enrolling at the Imperial Music College of Odessa under Max Fiedemann, making his concert debut at age nine. A year later, at ten, he moved to Berlin to study at the Stern Conservatory under Alexander Fiedemann, with his way paid by the banker Franz von Mendelssohn, who provided a stipend and lent him a Storioni violin — patronage on the scale usually reserved for the most exceptional prodigies. Kroyt graduated in 1913 with the Gustav Hollander Gold Medal.
A Working Musician in Weimar Berlin
Kroyt built an active concert career as a violinist and chamber musician in the years after graduation, performing under conductors Richard Strauss and Erich Kleiber and appearing alongside Pablo Casals, Artur Schnabel, and Artur Rubinstein. He founded his own string quartet in 1921 and, in a striking illustration of his musical adaptability, played viola in the original Guarneri Quartet from 1927 to 1934 — the very instrument he had first picked up on three days' notice. He was present at the first post-World War I performance of Schoenberg's *Pierrot Lunaire* in 1924, a concert that had to weather disruption from anti-modernist protesters before it went ahead. To make ends meet during the 1920s, Kroyt also worked in popular music, performing jazz and leading a tango orchestra under the stage name "Tino Valerio" — an unusually broad range for a classically trained conservatory graduate of his generation.
Escaping Europe
In 1932 Kroyt married Sophie "Sonya" Blumin, a Lithuanian-born ballet dancer and law student; their daughter Yanna was born the following year. As Nazi persecution intensified across Germany, Kroyt began seeking engagements outside the country, and rather than accept an offered orchestra position in Tel Aviv, he took up an invitation from first violinist Josef Roisman to join the Budapest String Quartet, becoming its violist on 31 August 1936.
Three Decades with the Budapest Quartet
Kroyt remained the Budapest String Quartet's violist for the rest of the ensemble's active life, until it disbanded in 1967 — a run of more than thirty years alongside Roisman, second violinist Alexander Schneider, and cellist Mischa Schneider. When the Second World War broke out, the quartet found itself in the United States and accepted a residency at the Library of Congress, performing an annual concert series in the Coolidge Auditorium on a set of Stradivarius instruments the Library lent them, in addition to the Deconet viola Kroyt owned and played. The Kroyt family settled in Northwest Washington, D.C., and became naturalized American citizens in 1944, hosting soirées that drew prominent musicians and political figures alike. Later, the quartet held a residency at the University at Buffalo, giving its final three performances there in February 1967.
A Teacher to the Next Generation
As the Budapest Quartet's activities wound down by the mid-1960s, Kroyt joined the faculty at the Marlboro Music School and Festival, where he coached the newly formed Guarneri Quartet — a group whose name he himself suggested, tying his own early career full circle back to the ensemble he had helped found decades earlier. He became a mentor to the pianist Murray Perahia, who called Kroyt his "musical godchild," and the violinist Jaime Laredo later credited him as one of the biggest musical influences of his life. The music critic Michael Steinberg, who knew him personally, remembered Kroyt as "a man of rare warmth, charm and humor, who spoke generously, perceptively, and with pleasing irreverence, about his colleagues" — a portrait of a musician whose influence extended well past his own playing into the temperament he brought to a room.
Why Boris Is Called a Genius
The specific, documented basis for calling Kroyt a genius is narrower than a broad claim of musical greatness, and it is worth stating exactly: he possessed an unusual, almost improvisational adaptive facility, demonstrated concretely by mastering an entirely different instrument — viola, with its different clef, hand position, and repertoire — in three days under emergency conditions, and then building a career-defining thirty-one-year tenure on that same instrument inside one of history's most acclaimed quartets. That is a rare form of musical intelligence: rapid technical assimilation combined with an ensemble sensitivity that let him blend seamlessly into a group sound rather than assert a soloist's individuality. It is not, on the evidence gathered here, matched by a documented reputation as a composer or an innovator of repertoire — Kroyt's genius, such as the record supports, was interpretive and adaptive rather than creative in the sense normally meant by that word, and none of the sources found here quote a contemporary critic using "genius" about him directly; the praise on record, from Steinberg and from students like Perahia and Laredo, centers on warmth, mentorship, and ensemble musicianship rather than singular virtuosity.
Legacy
Diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1968, Kroyt gave his last public performance on 18 October 1969, playing Beethoven's String Quintet at Alice Tully Hall, and died less than a month later, on 15 November 1969, at French Hospital in Manhattan, at the age of seventy-two. The Guarneri Quartet, the ensemble whose name he had chosen, performed at his funeral, and Perahia dedicated a Bach sarabande to his memory at a subsequent recital. His daughter Yanna went on to a career in television production, earning an Emmy nomination for a Nutcracker special with Mikhail Baryshnikov before her death in 2008, and his grandson Anthony Brandt is today a composer and professor at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music — a musical line that runs, in its own way, from Odessa's Jewish quarter through the Library of Congress and into the present.
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