Stern at 70--Artist-Statesman Par Excellence

He started studying piano when he was 6 years old. But at age 8, he saw a playmate’s violin and decided he liked that better.

The playmate grew up to be an insurance agent. Isaac Stern became a violin virtuoso.

Stern turned 70 this summer and, a luminary’s life being what it is, the birthday is being celebrated over and over this year by an international community of music lovers.

It already has been marked in Paris--where President Francois Mitterrand named him a commander of the Legion of Honor--and in San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Israel. Amsterdam and London are next.

While some men are soldier-statesmen, Stern is an artist-statesman. He toured the Soviet Union in 1956, before official bilateral cultural exchanges existed. An Academy Award-winning film, “From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China,” recorded his 1979 visit to the Shanghai Conservatory.

With his wife, Vera, whom he met in Israel in 1951, Stern founded the America-Israel Cultural Foundation. He was also an original member of the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts.

In 1960 Stern led the campaign to save Carnegie Hall, one of this nation’s most famous landmarks, from the wrecking ball. In the 1980s he helped raise $60 million for renovations.

“Stern is first and foremost a great artist, but he also has a very developed sense of social responsibility,” said James Wolfensohn, chairman of Carnegie Hall.

The standards Stern has adhered to through his long career have sustained, even enhanced, his passion for violin playing.

“I adore it,” he said in a recent interview. “I get more pleasure out of music than I ever did.”

The musicianship that evokes that pleasure is much admired by Stern’s colleagues.

“Isaac is quite an extraordinary musician,” violinist Itzhak Perlman said.

“He was never part of any particular school of violin playing. He was his own school. As a player, he’s an extreme individualist and yet, because his interpretations are always thought out, they seem logical. There’s an eloquent simplicity to his music-making that makes it seem just right.”

Stern is known in the music world for his generosity to talented, younger musicians. They play for him. He offers suggestions. He becomes their advocates.

Stern calls working with younger colleagues the most pleasurable aspect of his musical life.

When Stern plays chamber music concerts with young musicians, “he insists the fees be split equally among all the performers, no matter how junior,” Yo Yo Ma recently wrote.

Stern said the life of a musician has changed unalterably during the course of his career. Speed of travel means that no corner of the globe is unreachable.

What has stayed constant, Stern said, is the attention that must be paid to musical problems, to rethinking musical interpretations.

“Music is the essential ingredient of a civilized life,” he said. “It has nothing to do with the glitter of the occasional gala. You need it as you need bread.”