System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Helmut Zacharias
d. 2002
GENEVA (Fri March 1, 2002) - Helmut Zacharias, a German composer and musician dubbed the ``magic violinist' for his fast-flowing jazz, classical and popular renditions, has died of a lung infection. He was 82.
Zacharias died Thursday at a nursing home in the southern Swiss town of Ascona, his daughter, Sylvia-Christiane, said Friday. He had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for seven years.
Zacharias earned the title of ``Germany's Mr. Violin,' during a prolific career in which he produced and performed some 1,400 pieces of music, sold 14 million records and picked up awards all over the world.
Zacharias was born into a musical family. His father, a chamber orchestra violinist, gave him a violin of tin and imitation wood when he was just two years old. He learned to play music before he could write or read and made his first public performance in a German cabaret at age 6. He started touring within Germany when he was 14 and joined the Berlin Philharmonic on a European tour as war clouds gathered in 1939.
In 1941, Zacharias branched out into swing. He set up his own ensemble after being drafted into the German army and serving four years during World War II.
He achieved international fame in the 1950s. His jazz interpretation of a 1930 tune, ``When the White Lilac Blooms Again' was in the American Top 10 for six weeks in 1956. In 1964, ``Ask The Wind' topped the British charts. He won awards in several European countries and as far away as Venezuela, and became known as one of the world's best violinists.
In Germany, he had his own television variety shows from 1968 to 1973. He often appeared alongside violin virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin.
Zacharias withdrew from public life in 1996 to his home in Ascona, a lakeside town in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland. The symptoms of Alzheimer's were becoming unmistakable.
``He set his violin aside without knowing it was his soul,' wrote one of his close friends, Fred Wehrich, in a tribute for Zacharias' 80th birthday. By then he was in a nursing home, unresponsive even to the music he so loved.
The family went public about the illness on Sept. 21, 2000 _ World Alzheimer's Day _ with a book that chronicled his suffering. Hella, his wife of nearly 60 years, became patron of a German charity, Hirnliga, that campaigns for more Alzheimer's research.
In addition to his wife and daughter, Zacharias is survived by two sons. Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.
