Maria Kelemen

Maria Kelemen (also Mária Kelemen; born 17 October 1938) is a Hungarian-born violinist, viola player and music educator based in Dublin, Ireland. A representative of the Hungarian school of violin playing, she trained under André Gertler at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels before embarking on a two-decade career as principal violist of the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and founding member of the Amsterdam Kern Ensemble. She is best known as the founder and director of the Young European Strings School of Music (YES) in Dublin, which she established in 1988. In 2005, she received the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary.

Maria Kelemen
Mária Kelemen
Born	(1938-10-17) October 17, 1938 Budapest, Hungary
Education	Béla Bartók Music Institute Royal Conservatory of Brussels Royal Conservatory of Liège
Occupations	Violinist, violist and music educator
Known for	Founder and director of the Young European Strings School of Music (YES)
Spouse	Ronald Masin (m. 1962; died 2025)
Children	Patrick Masin Gwendolyn Masin
Parent(s)	Dr. Károly Kelemen (father) Klára Juhász (mother)
Awards	Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary (2005)

Early life

Kelemen was born on 17 October 1938 in Budapest into a Jewish family. Her mother, Klára Juhász (1904–1998), and her maternal grandmother, the pianist Emilia Schoffan, were both professional musicians and educators. Around 1909, Schoffan founded the first private music school in Budapest, situated in the heart of the Pest side of the city, with solfège training as an obligatory component for all instrumentalists. The school was subsequently directed by Klára Juhász, and held the distinction of remaining the only private educational institution in Budapest that avoided nationalisation during the communist period following the Second World War.

Kelemen's father, Dr Károly Kelemen, was taken from the family home by the Nyilasok (Hungarian Arrow Cross) in 1942 and sent to a forced labour camp in Balf, Hungary, where he contracted typhus and died shortly before the Red Army liberated the country in March 1945. Klára Juhász survived the war after being intercepted by Raoul Wallenberg while boarding a train to Auschwitz; Wallenberg provided her with a Swedish "protective passport" modelled on Red Cross documents. During the final months of the war, Kelemen was separated from her mother and grandmother and contracted typhus while alone in a cellar in Budapest, but survived.

Education in Budapest

Following the war, Kelemen began piano studies with her grandmother, before commencing violin studies at the age of seven with Klára Kádár, assistant to the distinguished Hungarian violinist Ede Zathureczky. She continued this training at the Béla Bartók Conservatory in Budapest, where she was enrolled from 1952 to 1956.

In October 1956, just as she was completing her final year at the institute, she fled Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, departing as a political refugee with virtually nothing but her violin.

Education in Belgium

After six months in a refugee camp in Vienna, Kelemen was awarded a Ford Scholarship to study violin in the class of André Gertler at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. Gertler, one of the principal heirs to the Hungarian School tradition as a pupil of Jenő Hubay, became a formative influence on her approach to both performance and pedagogy. On completing her violin studies, Kelemen graduated with a Premier Prix distinction. She subsequently spent one year at the Royal Conservatory of Liège studying viola in the class of Georges Longrée, again graduating with a Premier Prix. It was during her time in Brussels that she met the Dutch violinist Ronald Masin, who was also studying under Gertler; they married in Brussels in 1962.

Career

Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra

Kelemen began her professional career at the age of twenty as leader of the viola section of what was then the Kunstmaand Orchestra in Amsterdam, an ensemble subsequently renamed the Amsterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and today known as the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra. She held this position for over two decades, until 1984. Her tenure coincided with that of her husband, Ronald Masin, who served as concertmaster of the same orchestra from 1963 to 1984, anchoring both the violin and viola sections throughout this period.

Amsterdam Kern Ensemble

In 1966, Kelemen and Masin co-founded the Amsterdam Kern Ensemble, a piano quartet comprising Masin (violin), Kelemen (viola), Bob Reuling (cello) and Rinus Groot (piano). The ensemble gave over 600 concerts across 22 countries, touring throughout Europe, the Americas, South Africa, Russia and Latin America. The Kern Ensemble held a recording contract with EMI and commissioned and performed several works by contemporary composers. The ensemble concluded its activities in the late 1970s.

Publication

In 1982, Kelemen and Ronald Masin co-authored a violin tutor entitled Violin Technique: The Natural Way, published in English by Frits Knuf in Buren, the Netherlands. Drawing on the lineage of the Hungarian School as transmitted by Gertler, the text presents a systematic analysis of physiological and psychological approaches to string playing, with a detailed examination of Kreutzer's 42 Studies as applied within the Hungarian tradition. Kelemen has also contributed as a regular author on string pedagogy to international professional journals.

Teaching in South Africa

In 1984, the family relocated to Cape Town, South Africa, where Ronald Masin had accepted a position as head of the string department at the University of Cape Town. Kelemen established her first independent teaching institution there, which she named the Kodály Centre in homage to the Hungarian composer and educator Zoltán Kodály. The school was open to students of all backgrounds during a period when apartheid remained fully in force, representing a deliberate statement of inclusion. The family left South Africa in 1988 as the country's political and social tensions intensified.

Young European Strings School of Music

In 1988, following the family's relocation to Dublin, Kelemen founded the Young European Strings School of Music (YES), located in the Templeogue, Rathgar and Rathmines areas of the city. The school specialises in the early development and professional training of string players, accepting students from the age of two and a half years for violin, viola, cello and double bass tuition. Ronald Masin joined the school as artistic director and principal conductor in 2002, having previously served as a professor at the DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama in Dublin for nearly thirty years. He remained artistic director until his death on 5 November 2025.

Methodology

The pedagogical approach at YES integrates Kelemen's biomechanical methods with the Kodály Approach, centred on the development of what Kelemen terms the "inner ear". Before a child produces a note on an instrument, they are trained to mentally conceptualise and hear the precise pitch, achieved through rigorous vocalization, singing games, hand-sign work and stick notation. Kelemen has observed that adult conceptual language often hinders a toddler's kinesthetic progress and accordingly structures instruction around physical game-based activities designed to build upper-body strength, bilateral coordination and postural alignment as prerequisites for holding and playing an instrument.

Kelemen has been an outspoken critic of the Suzuki method, which she characterises as reliant on rote imitation at the expense of developing the individual musical intelligence and inner ear she regards as fundamental. She places emphasis instead on the student's active critical evaluation of their own sound, drawing on the solfège tradition established by her grandmother Emilia Schoffan at the Juhász Zeneiskola in Budapest at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Young European Strings Chamber Orchestra

The YES Chamber Orchestra (YESCO) was established alongside the school by Keleman and has toured Austria, Belgium, England, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Spain and Switzerland. The orchestra has won the Open Orchestra Cup at the Feis Ceoil national competitions without interruption since 1991 and has performed regularly at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival. Notable competitive achievements include first prize Summa Cum Laude at the 63rd International "Europees Muziekfestival" in Neerpelt, Belgium (2015), and first prize in the international Jugend und Musik competition in Vienna (2009). YESCO made its international debut with a concert tour of Finland in January 2001 and won the Achievement Award from the Irish Association of Youth Orchestras (IAYO) in 2006.

Awards and recognition

In 2005, Kelemen received the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of Hungary, awarded by the President of Hungary, Dr Ferenc Mádl, during a state visit to Ireland, in recognition of her work promoting Hungarian music and the Kodály methodology abroad. In 2009, she was conferred the Businesswoman of the Year Award by the Irish-Hungarian Business Association at Trinity College Dublin. She appeared on the cover of The Strad magazine in September 1996.

Personal life

Maria Kelemen married Dutch violinist Ronald Masin in Brussels in 1962. They had two children: Patrick, and Gwendolyn Masin, a concert violinist, author and educator. Ronald Masin died on 5 November 2025 in Dublin, aged 88, following a short illness; at the time of his death he had been teaching and performing until days before his hospitalisation.

See also

• Young European Strings School of Music
• Ronald Masin
• Gwendolyn Masin
• Hungarian school of violin playing
• Kodály method
• André Gertler

External links

• Young European Strings School of Music
• Artistic History of YES
• Maria Kelemen – Faculty profile