Josef Hassid

Josef Hassid (Polish: Józef Chasyd) (28 December 1923 – 7 November 1950) was a Polish violinist.

Born 28 December 1923 to Jewish parents in Suwałki, Poland, as Joseph or Józef Chasyd, he was the second youngest of four children. He lost his mother when he was ten and was brought up by his father, Owsiej, who took charge of his career. After lessons with a local violin teacher he studied from 1934 at the Chopin School of Music in Warsaw under Mieczysław Michałowicz (1872–?) and Irena Dubiska (1899–1989). In 1935 he entered the first Henryk Wieniawski International Violin Competition in Warsaw, but suffered a memory lapse; he received an honorary diploma.

His father arranged for him to play for fellow Pole Bronisław Huberman, who was much impressed and he arranged for Hassid to study under the Hungarian virtuoso Carl Flesch at his summer course in 1937 at Spa, Belgium, where fellow students included Ivry Gitlis, Ginette Neveu and Ida Haendel.

Hassid came to London with his father in 1938 at Flesch's invitation, to continue studies with him. Flesch concentrated on his musical and interpretative development rather than technical skills. Musical celebrities who heard him play at Flesch's house and were astonished at his ability included Joseph Szigeti, Jacques Thibaud, David Oistrakh and Fritz Kreisler. In a passage supplementing his father's memoirs Carl F. Flesch wrote that "Hassid was no doubt one of the strongest violin talents of his time. Indeed Fritz Kreisler, after hearing him at my father's house, said: 'A fiddler like Heifetz is born every 100 years; one like Hassid every 200 years.'" Kreisler lent Hassid for the remainder of his career a violin of 1860 by the French maker Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, which was a great improvement on the instrument he had played up until then.

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