Cyprus-born violin virtuoso Matheos Kariolou tells THEO PANAYIDES the strings workshop he has created is his legacy to music on the island
With hindsight, the most crucial time in Matheos Kariolou’s life may have been the year he turned 15, when he staged an insurrection – a bloodless Reign of Terror – against his own parents. Matheos wanted to become a musician, and demanded to leave straight away for Vienna to study violin at the city’s fabled Music Academy. His parents – civil-servant dad and housewife mum – were understandably reluctant, not just because this was Cyprus in the mid 60s but also because Matheos was an excellent student, gifted in Maths and Physics, and they didn’t want him to throw it all away for a dubious career in music.
Matheos didn’t care: “I was determined to leave,” he says now, sitting in the bar of the Cleopatra Hotel in Nicosia a few hours before his flight back to Austria, “and I knew what I wanted”. If he couldn’t have music, he wouldn’t have anything else either: from now on, he told his parents, he resigned from school – “and I kept to that vow for a year, never opened a book, never took an exam”. They could make him go but they couldn’t make him care, let alone study. From being top of his class, he began to languish near the bottom. Finally, his parents relented – and he found himself on a ship to Venice, travelling alone (he refused to be accompanied), armed only with his schoolboy English and a trunk full of clothes, thence by train to Vienna where he arrived in the dead of night, a 16-year-old who’d never even been outside Cyprus yet already knew he was going to be a famous musician. Was he always so stubborn? Always, he replies. “And I continue to be stubborn”.
Actually, the musical seed had been planted some years earlier – initially in primary school where Matheos met Mr Pipis, a “charismatic man” and enthusiastic Music teacher who spotted the boy’s talent and started him on the violin, then a little later when he studied under Mr Nicolaou, a rather sad figure who’d lived in London and pined for the world outside Cyprus. Matheos was his only student, and Nicolaou didn’t just teach him how to play the violin; they also talked, and “he told me stories about the musical life of London, the great virtuosos of the time – Heifitz, Menuhin – whom he’d heard play. And it was like listening to Tales from the Arabian Nights… It was like talking about life on Mars”. His folks – though far from musical – liked to listen to classical music at home, but that was all; there was no YouTube, no classical music on TV (in fact, there was no TV) to whet a young man’s appetite. It was luck, he says now, a case of having met the right people at the right time; despite his “great battle” to pursue music it could all have been totally different. “If, for instance, I’d had a maths teacher who gave me lots of attention and made me love his lesson more – well, I might be a mathematician now.”
It’s worth pondering that point, the influence a teacher has on his charges’ lives – because Matheos is himself a teacher as well as a violin virtuoso, having taught Music for 30 years in Austrian universities (first Graz, now Linz). He’s also, since 2006, been artistic director of the Strings Workshop in Cyprus, finding and nurturing local violinists from the tender age of three. Earlier this year, a group of 15 youngsters from the Workshop played concerts in Brussels and Vienna calling themselves the ‘Cyprus Young Strings Soloists’ – and the response, according to Matheos, was phenomenal, going far beyond the polite enthusiasm one would expect (the concerts were held to mark the 50th anniversary of the Republic of Cyprus). In Brussels, the kids got a standing ovation; in Vienna, the hall was packed to the rafters, and the audience applauded for minutes on end. “We are, I believe, No. 1 in Europe,” claims Matheos, adding that “musicians from all over Europe are very excited, and tell me ‘I wish we had this in our own country’.”
Is he exaggerating slightly? Hard to say. It’s true he’s a man of great vitality, a rather elfin figure with a trim white beard, dressed in black, speaking softly but quickly and unstoppably. It’s also true, as he says, that he’d wanted to launch the Workshop in Cyprus for 30 years, his long-cherished dream finally becoming a reality when he met the late Pefkios Georgiades, a visionary Minister of Culture who shared his big plans (their ultimate plan, says Matheos, was for every single child in Cyprus to be able to play a musical instrument, a goal that may still be attained someday). No surprise, given all that back story, that he’d want to talk up the Workshop’s achievements as much as possible.
Yet it’s hard to doubt him when he speaks of the sacrifices he’s made for the project. He comes here once a month to test and grade the 35 students – local assistants do the day-to-day teaching – meaning his work in Austria has to be piled into 12-hour workdays, including weekends. He was up at 6 this morning (like every morning), practising his violin for an hour and a half, then – after our interview – he’ll spend the morning checking and correcting a video of the Soloists in concert, then fly to Austria, then work from 9am to 10pm Saturday and Sunday, then start preparing his students for the class concert on Thursday plus two concerts of his own in Switzerland at the end of the month. Not an easy schedule for a man of 61 – but he puts himself through it because the Workshop is “the most important thing in my life right now. Whether people like it or not, whether they oppose it or not”. Do people oppose it? Is there resistance in Ministry circles? Matheos sighs deeply. “Let’s not get into that. Someday we will, but not now…”
I suspect it hasn’t been easy, especially since the death of Georgiades in 2007 (the next Strings Workshop concert, in February, is dedicated to his memory). I also suspect Matheos is the type who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and doesn’t hesitate to tell them to their face. “I don’t hesitate,” he confirms, “which is why I have enemies. But, you know, a man’s enemies are his war medals.”
Then again, he’s always been stubborn – which is where we left him earlier, a 16-year-old boy arriving at Vienna Station with a trunk of clothes and a violin, not speaking a word of German. He auditioned, and was instantly accepted, at the Music Academy, but soon found out that not everyone in Vienna was a music lover: he lodged for a while with a distant acquaintance, a woman whose daughter was married in Cyprus – but his violin practice drove the neighbours to distraction, and after two weeks he had to move out. There was also racism: he and a Cypriot friend went to Landtmann’s, the famous coffee house, but a waiter sidled up to say that other customers had complained, and asked them to leave. Why, exactly? “We were a bit too dark-skinned,” explains Matheos wryly.
Yet he stayed in Vienna for eight years, followed by seven years at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow – then back to Austria, and his first university job. He also got married, a marriage that ultimately failed but produced two children, Roman and Isabelle – who in turn became “guinea pigs” (he admits) for Matheos’ teaching methods, known as the “child prodigies of Vienna” for their precocious violin-playing. They imbibed the violin with their baby-milk, taught to play from the time they were toddlers. Aged six and four, they travelled the world and beguiled no less a personage than Yehudi Menuhin, who invited them to board at his exclusive Academy. And now? Roman is still a musician, composing for TV among other things; Isabelle made a sideways move, and is finishing her Masters in History.
That raises another question – the question Matheos’ own parents must’ve asked themselves, the question that must trouble the parents of his talented students: Does it really make sense to attempt a career in music? His teaching method emphasises “freeing the muscles”, staying limber and relaxed – “to be a virtuoso your fingers must be nimble, your muscles mustn’t ache; because it’s a totally unnatural posture, and you have to make it natural” – yet a life in music is the opposite of relaxed. Fierce competition, too many musicians for not enough jobs (even before the recession), makes for a System that puts too much pressure on young players, and ends up smothering the kind of “personality” that comes with life experience.
Everything happens too quickly, laments Matheos. No longer can young violinists study till they’re 30, like he did. “If you’re 15 or 16 today and can’t play your instrument perfectly, you can’t do anything” – but the result is an emphasis on technical skill and “professionalism”, making individual voices thin on the ground. At 20 you need to find a job, because orchestras seldom hire anyone older than their mid-20s; if you’re lucky, you might have an “international career” – but that often puts you at the mercy of mercenary managers who schedule as many concerts as possible, knowing there are hundreds of others waiting in the wings once you burn out. Luck trumps talent almost every time, says Matheos, adding that he recently went online to track down an old friend from Moscow – an incredible violinist when they were both young together at the Conservatory. He’s now playing second violin with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, which is not exactly the Berlin Philharmonic. Still, it’s a living.
Maybe Matheos Kariolou should’ve listened to his parents and stayed in school. Maybe he should’ve been a mathematician. Then again, I’m sure he doesn’t think so – because he’s not just a violin virtuoso, he’s a teacher, with a teacher’s wild idealism. He has high hopes for the Strings Workshop. Maybe someday, when his students are all grown up, they’ll come back and teach other students, he says. Maybe they’ll make Cyprus world-famous as a centre of musical excellence. Or they might become politicians, part of the Cyprus elite – but a new breed of Cypriot elite, politicians who know (and support) music, like the aristocratic patrons of old. For Matheos, the Workshop is nothing less than a legacy, a bid to improve Society, his gift to the homeland he left 45 years ago: “Because of our history, we became isolated from European music,” he explains. “But now we’re starting to show that we’re not just about beaches and halloumi – that we have other talents too.”
Some might call him utopian, or worse. For all his calm, soft-spoken demeanour there’s a touch of the obsessive in his personality (I suppose it comes with the territory), even a touch of megalomania. Turning his own children into music students, the better to test his theories, could be seen as extreme, though it doesn’t seem to have done them any harm.
Music is his weapon, but also his shield. “When I have a problem – something that upsets me, people opposing me or saying things about me – I listen to my music,” says Matheos. “I concentrate and try to go deep into the noblest, most beautiful feelings. It’s like a wall that protects me from every crook, evil character and cheap person.
“And I’m very happy. And I feel I want to share this with the whole world…”
