In late June and early July 2026, violinist Stephan Picard sat on the jury of the Ilona Fehér International Violin Competition in Budapest, judging violinists as young as eleven for prizes awarded across two age groups. Later that month, on July 19, 2026, he died at 66: a concert violinist and, for more than thirty years, a violin professor at Berlin's Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler.

Picard was born in 1960 in Barcelona, Spain, and took up the violin as a child before moving into formal conservatory training in Germany. In 1974 he became a junior student at the Folkwang University of Arts in Essen under Saschko Gawriloff, and from 1978 he continued his training at the University of Music, Drama and Media Hannover with Rami Shevelov and in Mannheim with Roman Nodel, according to The Strad. He went on to take first prize at the Maria Canals International Music Competition in Barcelona and second prize at the Rodolfo Lipizer Violin Competition in Gorizia, Italy.

He built an early career as a concertmaster, leading the orchestra of the Stadttheater Aachen opera house before taking the same role with the Munich Chamber Orchestra, and he appeared as guest first concertmaster with the NDR Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic. As a chamber musician he was a founding second violinist of the Michelangelo Quartet, playing alongside Mihaela Martin, Nobuko Imai and Frans Helmerson until 2012, when Daniel Austrich succeeded him, and for years he performed with the Mendelssohn Trio Berlin.

In 1995 Picard joined the violin faculty of the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin, where he went on to teach for more than three decades after earlier posts in Münster, Mainz and Aachen, according to his faculty page at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin. He later headed the school's string department for more than ten years, served as a permanent guest teacher at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, chaired the jury of the Deutsche Stiftung Musikleben, and judged the Max Rostal, Leopold Mozart and Seoul international violin competitions.

That teaching and judging carried through to his final weeks. The Ilona Fehér competition ran in Budapest from June 24 to July 2, 2026, and Picard sat on its jury alongside violinists including Hagai Shaham and Boris Kuschnir, The Strad reported when the results were announced. He kept performing too: he had recorded Wolfgang Rihm's Chiffren with the ensemble Musikfabrik NRW, performed the complete chamber works of Anton Webern at the Bundeskunsthalle, and built a spoken word and music program called Musikgedankentheater with pianist Ben Süverkrüp and cabaret performer Tina Teubner. He played a Petrus Guarnerius violin made in Mantua in 1715.

Three decades of students trained in Picard's studio at the Hanns Eisler school now hold posts as orchestra musicians, chamber players and professors of their own, the clearest measure of a teaching career built one lesson at a time. His recording of Rihm's Chiffren and the Musikgedankentheater programs he built with Süverkrüp and Teubner remain on record for anyone who wants to hear how he approached music. He was still judging young violinists in Budapest weeks before he died, still doing at 66 the work he had begun doing in 1995.