By IRA ROSENBLUM

Henry Meyer (1923-2006). (Photo courtesy the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music )

A wave of nostalgia swept over me when I learned that the violinist Henry Meyer had died. I was fortunate to have known Meyer, a wonderful musician and extraordinary human being. As an undergraduate piano major in the early 1970s at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, I was privileged to be one of the regular accompanists in his studio. Lessons with him were always lively affairs. He would dance and sing and laugh with a contagious enthusiasm, evoking images—depending on the repertoire at hand—of country peasants, wild gypsy dancing, Parisian lovers. When he demonstrated passages on his violin, his playing was soulful and joyous.

At some point while in school, I learned that the German-born Meyer was a Holocaust survivor. Born in Dresden in 1923, he had narrowly escaped extermination several times as a prisoner in the most horrific Nazi camps, including Buchenwald and Auschwitz-Birkenau. I was stunned. How could anybody endure such misery, such horror, and not only survive, but thrive and go on to create such gorgeous music? He seemed a living testament to the uniquely human capacity to transcend even the most heinous circumstances. "I am a winner," he told The Cincinnati Enquirer in 2002. "With me, all their effort failed."

A winner he was. He had a winning way with all his friends and students. One of them, Wendy Caron Zohar, recalls: "I can still hear Henry saying his famous expressions: 'Play with more starch,' and 'put the phrases in a girdle.' These were common metaphors for him, so I secretly imagined him as a child prodigy dressed in starched shirts, laced up in a girdle. He spoke of playing passages in uniform tempo despite the difficult bits, comparing incorrect playing to those annoying drivers whose speed fluctuates depending on the inclination of the road. Though he was demanding and his criticism could sometimes be caustic, he had an infectious, hearty laugh, loved teaching and performing, and had the ability to redeem just about everything with humor—even me."

He had a winning way with the violin. As a founding member of the LaSalle String Quartet, formed in 1948 when its members were students at Juilliard and in which Meyer played second violin until the group disbanded 40 years later, he gave numerous concerts around the globe. I remember the LaSalle's performances at school. One in particular, of Beethoven's Op. 130, opened up the world of the string quartet for me. I had never heard anything so beautiful, so probing.

Meyer was a familiar face around Juilliard. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he visited regularly to coach the graduate string-quartet-in-residence for the annual Arnhold concert. Shortly after I became the publications director in 2001, I heard that Meyer would be at the School. Henry Meyer! I hadn't seen him in decades. I found out what room he was going to be in, and waited by the door. When we saw each other, a big smile filled his face. Although he didn't remember my name right away, he knew exactly who I was, which of his students I had accompanied, and was genuinely pleased to see me, as I was him. I made it a point of saying hello to Meyer the next year when he came to Juilliard. Then, his visits stopped. A hit-and-run accident in front of Cincinnati's Music Hall put him in a wheelchair three years ago. This wonderful man who had lost his entire family in the Holocaust and survived four Nazi death camps was brought down by a hit-and-run driver. What cruel irony. Meyer spent the last few years of his life in a nursing home in Cincinnati, where he died of heart disease on December 18, 2006, at the age of 83.

In 2005, the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education established a fund in his honor: the Henry Meyer Music and the Holocaust Project. As a result of this fund, in addition to the many students he nurtured, his friends and colleagues around the world, and his performances and recordings with the LaSalle Quartet, Henry Meyer has trumped fate and left the world a precious legacy.