Does it take a strong personality to study with him? I wonder.

“Personality is ego, and students don’t need that, but they have to be strong,” he says. “When they leave here, they will never be as nervous as they have been in my class. I want them to experience the problems that come in a musical life. If somebody has a mediocre talent, I am most of the time nice to those people. I know they cannot do certain things. But when it comes to the things they can do, I am tough.”

How can a person become one of his students? “People are always asking me what they have to do to get into my class. I pick those who need my help,” he says. “I’m usually looking for people who have the kind of brain that can absorb information, hopefully with some semblance of speed.”

Almost all of the other teachers in the department are his former students. How does he collaborate with them?

“We send students to each other when the need arises,” he explains. “All my crew here, they know the rules. We have an open-door policy for students, even during lessons. These chairs are usually full of cellists, violinists, violists, all kinds of people.

"The smart ones bring the music and take notes.”

I ask him to explain his concept of “anticipation,” which he mentions often during his master classes and lectures. “It’s the single most important element in music making and in every facet of life,” he says. “Anticipation is part of music itself. It is not the same if you take a slow, even breath before an entrance or a sudden, quick one. This motion affects the sound you will make on the instrument. You must anticipate the start of a phrase, the connecting of phrases, the speed of the bow, the connecting of positions, and so on.

“Hearing the music before you play it is essential.”

What then is the place of spontaneity?

“Even spontaneity must be prepared,” he says. “Spontaneity means choosing, because of changing conditions, among the things you have already prepared.”

And “professionalism?”

“Professionalism is simply consistency,” he says. “On every night, if you are a professional, you must be able to give at least 85 percent, no matter how you feel. This is the cultivation of discipline. Only from discipline comes true freedom.”

I ask about his teaching method and whether he takes the same approach with each student.

“Teaching means planting ideas that students can work with the rest of their lives, to build their own convincing performances,” he says. “Each will use my ideas differently. For example, I want all my students to have a rhythmic sense, not just a sense of rhythm. If you don’t have a rhythmic sense, the music you play is not just meaningless, it’s directionless. In the opening of the prelude of the G major suite by Bach, for example, you establish the harmony by taking time on the first three notes. Then you have to make it up by the end of the bar. One must also learn the geography of the instrument. The left hand is the subject of a book I published a long time ago, An Organized Method of String Playing.”

As for practicing, Starker recommends that students use the time to challenge themselves. “If you practice four hours a day,” he says, “the first hour should be devoted to experimental practice. What happens to the bow if I start at the frog and go to the tip? If I lose sound, what am I doing wrong? One must simply listen to the sound. Play single notes and regulate your vibrato. Listen to the difference when you delay a shift and when you anticipate it.”

Given the breadth of his career as an international soloist as well as the principal cellist in opera and symphony orchestras, I ask where teaching fits into his life.

“For the past 48 years I have been here, and for 37 of those years I was playing 100 concerts a year,” he says. “Yet the most important thing for me is teaching. I was basically born to be a teacher. That’s my temperament. No matter how great the ovation is after a concert, the people eventually sit down and stop applauding. But if you teach, you may affect generations.

“I have a historic hang-up,” he adds. “I am much more concerned with the future than with all the accolades I got for performing. I stayed alive when many other people, including my brothers, were killed in the war. The fact I stayed alive means it is a duty for me to do as much good as I can.”

WHAT JANOS STARKER PLAYS
Janos Starker owns a 1705 Goffriller cello and a 1707 Guarneri (Joseph filius Andreae). He usually plays a copy of the Goffriller made in Portugal by Antonio Capella and his son, also named Antonio. Additional copies of the Goffriller were made for him by Lawrence Wilke of Connecticut and Tom Sparks, head of the violin-making school at Indiana University. From 1950 to 1964, Starker played the Lord Aylesford Stradivarius.

On his Bach recording for Mercury, suites two and five and the gamba sonatas were recorded on the Strad, while suites 1, 3, 4, and 6 were played on the Goffriller. Among his two dozen bows are a Hoyer, a Tubbs that belonged to his teacher, Adolf Schiffer, and a Vigneron previously owned by Pierre Fournier. His everyday bow is a Kun, made by the Hungarian inventor of popular shoulder rests for violin and viola.