On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, a violinist, came on stage to give a
concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City.
If
you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know that getting on stage
is no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child,
and so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two
crutches. To see him walk across the stage one step at a time, painfully
and slowly, is an awesome sight.
He walks painfully, yet
majestically, until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down, slowly,
puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one
foot back and extends the other foot forward. Then he bends down and
picks up the violin, puts it under his chin, nods to the conductor and
proceeds to play.
By now, the audience is used to this ritual.
They sit quietly while he makes his way across the stage to his chair.
They remain reverently silent while he undoes the clasps on his legs.
They wait until he is ready to play.
But this time, something went
wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on
his violin broke. You could hear it snap – it went off like gunfire
across the room. There was no mistaking what that sound meant. There was
no mistaking what he had to do.
We figured that he would have to
get up, put on the clasps again, pick up the crutches and limp his way
off stage – to either find another violin or else find another string
for this one. But he didn’t.
Instead, he waited a moment, closed his
eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again.
The orchestra
began, and he played from where he had left off. And he played with
such passion and such power and such purity as they had never heard
before.
Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a
symphonic work with just three strings. I know that, and you know that,
but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that.
You could see
him modulating, changing, re-composing the piece in his head. At one
point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds
from them that they had never made before.
When he finished, there
was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered.
There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the
auditorium. We were all on our feet, screaming and cheering, doing
everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had done.
He
smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and
then he said – not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone –
“You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music
you can still make with what you have left.”
What a powerful line
that is. It has stayed in my mind ever since I heard it. And who knows?
Perhaps that is the definition of life – not just for artists but for
all of us.
Here is a man who has prepared all his life to make
music on a violin of four strings, who, all of a sudden, in the middle
of a concert, finds himself with only three strings; so he makes music
with three strings, and the music he made that night with just three
strings was more beautiful, more sacred, more memorable, than any that
he had ever made before, when he had four strings.
So, perhaps our
task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering world in which we live
is to make ‘music’, at first with all that we have, and then, when that
is no longer possible, to make ‘music’ with what we have left.
By Jack Riemer