Scientific work is often absorbing and exhausting, and it is not uncommon for many scientists to seek balance in other activities, whether physical or intellectual. This was the case with Albert Einstein and music. For Einstein the practice of music was an emotional hobby, an emotional grip that stayed with him throughout his life: “I cannot imagine my life without playing music. In difficult times, and also in happy times, I was able to face myself and the world because I always had that escape. It makes one free and independent,” he wrote to his eldest grandson – who inherited his grandfather’s last violin.
Einstein played the violin – and sometimes also the piano … with almost anyone he could get his hands on; with his children, with fellow students, with professional colleagues, with close friends, with strangers, with virtuosos and amateurs, in Zurich, in Bern, in Berlin, in Princeton…
“Had I not been a physicist,” he once said, “I probably would have been a musician. I often think in music. I live my reveries in music. I see my life in terms of music… From my violin I get the greatest joy in life.”
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