From an early age, Betty Haag-Kuhnke seemed destined for a professional life on the orchestral stage.
Beginning in 4th grade, she demonstrated her promise as a violin student and quickly blossomed into a bright, young musician. Prestigious awards, study with renowned instructors and solo concerts with national orchestras followed, placing her on course toward a brilliant career.
Yet in the midst of it all, Haag-Kuhnke, an Arlington Heights resident, changed direction and concentrated on teaching, rather than performing.
Using various instructional methods, including the Suzuki technique, where children learn to play by imitating their instructor, Haag-Kuhnke has taught thousands of students at her Des Plaines school and has booked many of them in performances that might have made even Mozart envious.
Her pupils, some of them only 3 years old, have played before world leaders, royalty and even the pope. But as the children dazzled their audiences, Haag-Kuhnke watched from the wings.
“Years ago, when I started teaching, it consumed my life. Passing the legacy on is important,” said Haag-Kuhnke, who has operated her school for 20 years.
Today, her proteges are members of orchestras around the world. Others followed her footsteps and are teaching.
“Without her guidance and support, there are so many things I would not have dared to try,” said 24-year-old Sang Mee Lee, an internationally known violin soloist who lives in New York City.
Lee, a Highland Park native, began with Haag-Kuhnke when she was 2 1/2 years old, and within four months, she played with Haag-Kuhnke’s performing group at Chicago’s Orchestra Hall. Lee received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Juilliard School in New York.
When Lee began at the famed music conservatory at age 17 and started mingling with other talented music students, she soon discovered that few others had toured as extensively as she had.
“I was quite surprised. I could look back on my experience and could feel proud about what I had done,” said Lee, who studied with Haag-Kuhnke for five years and then continued with a private instructor. “What she did with us was amazing. At that young an age, getting the experience to be on stage before getting into serious study, really helped (us).
“I’ve stayed in touch with her for the last 10 years,” said Lee, who has begun a teaching career too. “She still offers me a lot of support.”
Haag-Kuhnke’s admirers are not limited to her pupils. “Betty has developed scores of well-trained violinists with the Suzuki method during her many years of Suzuki teaching,” said Doris Preucil, who operates her own school in Iowa City, Iowa, and is past president of the Boulder, Colo.-based Suzuki Association of the Americas. “And she is a highly respected teacher in the Suzuki movement.”
The annual tour schedule of Haag-Kuhnke’s performing group–this year it’s Taiwan and Singapore–astounds even professional musicians.
“I’m absolutely amazed. My own grandson has gone to Beijing,” said Sam Magad, concertmaster for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since 1971.
Magad has two grandsons currently studying with Haag-Kuhnke: Jared Rabin, 11, and Michael Rabin, 8, of Deerfield. Although Magad learned to play violin under the conventional methods, he is pleased with the Suzuki technique and is especially impressed by Haag-Kuhnke.
“I really think a lot of her. I think she does an excellent job preparing the young children to play. She provides a place for children to enjoy music and come together,” Magad said.
Haag-Kuhnke felt the pull of teaching early. By the time the La Porte, Ind., native neared the end of high school, she already was instructing other students.
Haag-Kuhnke attended the Jordan Conservatory of Music in Indianapolis for two years, during which time she received an award for Outstanding Woman Student and performed in a series of solo recitals around Indiana.
Haag-Kuhnke began her junior year at Indiana University in Bloomington, and while pursuing bachelor’s and master’s degrees in music, she received two university music honors and was chosen as an alternate in the Fulbright awards.
After completing the graduate degree in 1956, Haag-Kuhnke spent the next year performing with the Atlanta Symphony, as well as touring the country as a soloist.
Haag-Kuhnke’s life as a performing musician came to a halt in 1957 when she married and began raising a family. For the next several years, she would tend to her children and teach violin. (Daughter Kippy Blake and son Kevin Haag now both live in Mt. Prospect.)
In 1974, Haag-Kuhnke and a group of other music teachers headed for Japan to study with a man named Shinichi Suzuki, an instructor who founded a method to teach children how to play instruments before they could read a note–typically at the age of 3.
“Most (of us) educators in this country were just astonished at the number of students in Japan studying the violin,” she said. “So we all came back with as much knowledge as we could . . . and tried to do the same thing in this country.”
Shortly after, Haag-Kuhnke accepted an offer to teach in the Arlington Heights school system. But the initial signup for her classes amounted to only eight students.
Convinced that there was more potential than that, Haag-Kuhnke talked her superiors into letting her recruit students for the Suzuki classes. Toting her scaled-down violins, she visited all of the school buildings.
“I went around to the kindergarten grades and showed the children small violins to show them that the violins were actually graduated to their size, that they could actually play the instrument. And I sent letters home to the parents,” she said. “After that meeting, 250 students signed up to play the violin, and I was the only teacher.”
To handle that many pupils, Haag-Kuhnke required the parents to accompany the children to school for the lessons, a practice that continues today at the Betty Haag Institute of the Performing Arts in Des Plaines.
By the second year, Haag-Kuhnke had 750 children studying the violin.
“Literally, every place you would go in Arlington Heights, you would see little kids carrying violin cases,” she said.
Haag-Kuhnke left the school system in 1976 and started her own school at a church in Mt. Prospect. The rapid growth of her program required Haag-Kuhnke to relocate within five years, this time to rental space in a vacant Mt. Prospect school building, where she stayed for another 10 years.
Since about 1991, Haag-Kuhnke has operated in a wing of The Science and Arts Academy in Des Plaines that specializes in gifted students.
Haag-Kuhnke teaches violin to about 125 students each week, although she employs instructors who teach other students, too. Currently, she has a waiting list of 50.
Instruction at the Betty Haag Institute consists of various graduated methods, but the student always begins with the Suzuki technique, which simply has the child imitate the teacher.
“We (prefer) to start them at the age of 3. The ear development is so great that by the time they are 5 years old, they are reading notes, which is much sooner than a conventional student would learn to read,” she said. “Just like a child learns to speak by imitating the mother tongue in their environment, that’s how a child learns to play an instrument.”
Haag-Kuhnke has students 3 to 5 years old who are playing Vivaldi concertos. That progress wouldn’t be possible without the help of the parents.
“The success depends totally on the parent and how well they can work with the child. When the child is 3, the mother’s role is one of teaching at home. As the child becomes older, the mother’s role changes and her role becomes more supportive and encouraging because the child has soon passed the mother,” said Haag-Kuhnke, a self-admitted strict instructor who also teaches pedagogy at Northwestern University in Evanston.
Wednesdays at 2:45 p.m. are reserved for 5-year-old Ha Young Kim of Niles, who has been with Haag-Kuhnke since September and studied the instrument previously.
During the lesson, Ha Young plays her tiny violin along with Haag-Kuhnke and then by herself, reading the sheet music. There are a few squeaks that come from the instrument. But for the most part the music is fluid and pleasing in tone.
On the other side of the room, Ha Young’s mother, Hae Kyung Kim, has set up a video camera and then moved closer to her daughter. For the Kims, 30 minutes have been set aside each night for practice.
“We are very proud to be here,” Hae Kyung Kim said.
Haag-Kuhnke’s students come from as far away as Milwaukee and Goshen, Ind., but most are from the Chicago suburbs.
In addition to teaching such young children to master the violin so early, Haag-Kuhnke has become renowned for her concert tours, which began in 1976 with a trip to Hamburg, Germany.
Members of the Magical Strings of Youth, the touring group, range in age from 3 to 17 years old and in numbers from 35 to 70. The group has made appearances all over the world, including France, Italy, Taiwan, Korea and China. The audiences have been equally as impressive: Princess Margaret, President Nasurbaev of Kazakhstan and even Pope John Paul II, at the Vatican.
At home in the United States, the group played in December 1994 at the White House and at places such as Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center.
In a typical year, the students play at least 15 concerts. The arrangement is simple: Haag-Kuhnke leads the group on stage, starts them and walks off.
“The most memorable experience was probably when the pope got off his convertible and came over to the children. He took my hand and then he eventually went behind the children and prayed over them. And that’s one I really will never forget,” said Haag-Kuhnke, whose husband, Horst Kuhnke, is a custom violin maker. “It’s a wonderful experience for them, too. . . . It’s a wonderful cultural experience for all of us involved.”
Haag-Kuhnke’s days of performing may have ended long ago, but she remains fulfilled through her teaching efforts.
“I think the rewarding part of teaching is that you see children developing from the struggling stage of a toddler to very advanced violinist who can go into music as a profession themselves. It’s always a joy to see what you’ve developed, in a sense,” she said.
She’s also happy for the children who have been able to travel abroad as young musical ambassadors.
“Of course, they’re probably too young right now to understand the impact they’ve had on other countries and other cultures,” she said, “but someday they will.”
