Can anyone become an accomplished violinist?

A circle of shell-shocked parents in a mansion flat; a dozen toddlers gripping minute, 16th-size violins, the concentration causing them to sway like drunks; the merciless sawing of their tiny bows; and a noise of indescribable horror – ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ reconceived as the hold music for Hell. These were the group violin lessons I remember (and enjoyed) as a disciple of the world-famous Suzuki method, devised in Japan in 1948 by an unworldly idealist called Shinichi Suzuki.

The principle on which Suzuki hit was that learning music must be analogous to learning a language: just as any child can pick up their mother tongue, no matter how complicated, surely anyone can become ‘fluent’ in a musical instrument if they start early enough. (In one of history’s more cryptic eureka moments, when Suzuki realised what ‘great brains’ toddlers must have, he shouted: ‘Children throughout Japan ALL SPEAK JAPANESE!’)

The Suzuki method tries to mimic mother-tongue acquisition: no sheet music at first, just listening to recordings and repeating them, a bit every day, with a parent as the child’s main coach. According to Eri Hotta’s bittersweet biography, ‘about 400,000 children around the globe are today learning to play music the Suzuki way’.

Hotta, an erstwhile Suzuki violin student and the author of an excellent book on Pearl Harbor from the Japanese perspective, is the ideal person to show how Suzuki’s 99-year life rubbed up against the rollercoaster of Japan’s 20th century. We start in fin-de-siècle Japan, with its surprising fashion for Sherlock Holmes-style Inverness capes, worn over kimonos and accessorised with a violin case, symbols of western progress. Cashing in on this fad was Suzuki’s father, the violin tycoon Masakichi Suzuki.

Masakichi made his first violin in 1888 from memory, after studying a borrowed one all night.