On Nov. 18,
1995, Itzhak Perlman, the 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.
Thank you to our good
friend, Mr. Lee Steitz,
for sharing this story with us!
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