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Rudolf Matz - Biography


Rudolf Matz was born September 19, 1901 in Zagreb, Croatia. When Matz began to attend the Lycee Classique at the age of 10, his mother also enrolled him in preparatory classes at the Zagreb Academy of Music. Matz began his study of the cello with Umberto Fabbri and later studied with Professor Juro Tkalcic, but the teacher who most influenced his development as a cellist and was crucial to the evolution of his ideas on cello technique was violinist Vaclav Huml. In addition to receiving cello instruction at the Academy, Matz also studied conducting and composition; at the time of his death in 1988 he had written more than 300 instrumental and vocal compositions.

As a young man, Matz was an accomplished athlete and world-class sprinter. His early athletic training and interest in the anatomically correct and physiologically natural use of the body and its musculature enabled him to refine the concepts of cello pedagogy that are embodied in his internationally acclaimed cello method, the 32-volume Prve Godine Violoncella or "First Years of the Violoncello." This work began to appear in print in 1943 and continued to appear intermittently until 1971, bringing him to the attention of cellists around the world, among them Luigi Silva. In 1950 Matz was appointed Professor of Cello at the Academy of Music in Zagreb and held that position until his retirement in 1973.

On leave from the Academy from 1955 to 1957, Professor Matz and his wife, Margita, an accomplished pianist and harpsichordist, came to the United States at the invitation of the Croatian Singing Society of Gary, Indiana. They spent those two years in the Chicago area, where Matz was active as a conductor, gave private cello instruction and performed as a member of the Chicago Chamber Trio with Margita and violinist Boris Zlatich. Before leaving the United States, Matz and Luigi Silva met and began exchanging ideas. They planned to write a cello method together but Silva's death in 1961 brought the project to an end. Correspondence between Matz and Silva is preserved in the Matz Collection, and manuscript pages of one of the pedagogical works on which Matz and Silva were collaborating are in the Luigi Silva Papers.

Rudolf Matz devoted his life to the promotion and development of musical activity in his native country, organizing musical societies and a variety of performing groups, including the Musical Society of Intellectuals, the Zagreb Chamber Orchestra (later I Solisti di Zagreb), Sklad, and the Zagreb Chamber Choir. He was also popular as a teacher of cello master classes and served as a jury member at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1966, 1970 and 1974, and at Gaspar Cassado's competition in Florence in 1973. Matz was also a pioneer in establishing the field of music therapy as a profession in Croatia.

Selected Appearances as Cellist and Conductor

Other Honors and Events

This material may not be reproduced/republished in any format without the expressed permission of Walter Clinton Jackson Library of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

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Maintained by Carolyn Shankle.
Updated January 7, 2003.