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Renaissance Man: After a 35-year break, Walter Stark made a comeback to music
July 16, 2009
Editor@montanaliving.com
 Walter Stark
Music helps heal the soul. For Walter Stark, it helped him heal his heart. After his wife of 35 years, Gisela, passed away in 1990, Stark was faced with the cold reality of life without his partner.
Stark, who is the personnel manager for the Glacier Symphony, left his long career as a station manager with Swissair and moved to Stuttgart, Germany. There, he found his music — again.
It had been more than 30 years since Stark, 77, had touched a violin, but the music called to him after his wife’s death. “I was devastated,” he said. “I had to find something that I could get completely into.”
From that point on, he began taking violin lessons every week, and still does. He auditioned with the Glacier Symphony 11 years ago, and earned a seat in the second violin section. The year was 1940 when his grandfather arrived at his parents’ house in Zurich, Switzerland, and offered to pay for violin lessons for young Walter. But it was jazz music that called to him — not classical violin. “It wasn’t really macho enough for a boy,” he said. “I wanted to play something like trumpet or drums,” he said. So, Stark used his allowance money to pay for clarinet lessons, in hopes of joining a Dixieland jazz band. “I couldn’t tell my parents that,” he said. Two years later the jazz band won second in a national jazz festival.
Stark said he admits he’s not on the same musical level with some of the “super-talented, musical whippersnappers” in the orchestra, and that’s why he has to study and practice his music every day. “I’ve never been a musician, so I’m the guy in the orchestra who has to practice the most,” he said, in his thick Swiss accent. “The other talented musicians and teachers seem to be able to just shake it out of their sleeves. But I’ve become so attached to my violin now, that it’s almost like part of my body.”
Stark is proof that hard work does pay off. “Music isn’t always about just talent,” he said. “It’s effort.” As the personnel manager Stark is the right-hand man to music director John Zoltek. It’s Stark’s job to help line up the imported musicians who fill out the ranks of the Glacier Symphony, and he serves as the liaison between the musicians and Zoltek.
Stark keeps in shape by doing a lot of road cycling — a sport he’s always enjoyed. In fact, he is a three-time former Illinois state masters champion and he rode coast to coast in the 1976 Bikecentennial. He also spends his spare time — when he’s not cycling or playing violin — creating oil paintings, with his wife, Corrine, whom he met on a blind date nearly 17 years ago.
After he retired from the airline industry in 1992, he moved back to Stuttgart. While in Stuttgart he received the “luckiest telephone call of my life,” Stark recalls. The call was about a terrific lady his friend thought he should meet. Two days later he was on a flight to New York City. “The dinner date with Corrine that evening was the beginning of a great relationship followed by a happy marriage, now in its 16th year,” he said. “Corrine is still that terrific, lovable lady I met back then.”
Stark said the last 17 years of his life, immersed in music, have been good for his soul. “I cannot be thankful enough to Maestro Zoltek and my violin teacher, Jackie Melvin,” Stark said. “They’ve both added so much to my exciting and challenging retirement.”
Stark knows that someday the curtain will fall on his violin career with the Glacier Symphony. “That doesn’t mean I’m at the end of doing things,” he said. “I’ll be riding my bicycle until I fall off it.” • |
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