When Two Strads Aren't Enough

Well, it was my own damn fault, as it usually is. I had, after all, told Naïa that I was a relentless, an indefatigable, diagrammer of sentences, so I was really on the hook: I had to stop listening to some of the twentieth century’s greatest music and take a look at her three sentences.

She got them right, but couldn’t tell me why, nor what the seven parts of speech are.

“I guessed for most of them,” said Naïa, who has the open frankness of Lady, her mother.

I wanted to interfere further, but her tutor was sitting nearby, and it felt a little intrusive: would my intrusion be construed as silent criticism? But I did have to wonder—what good is doing something correctly if you have no idea why it’s correct?

What would I have done? Well, we could have started with the parts of speech, about which Naïa knew nothing.

“We haven’t gotten to that, yet,” said the tutor.

Hunh?

I didn’t say it, but it makes no sense to be diagramming sentences without knowing the parts of speech—it’s like swimming without water.

Well, it wasn’t my battle, so I went back to the question of Anne Akiko Meyers, the young American violinist who has two Strads and was recently given the use—for the rest of her life—of what’s sometimes called the “Mona Lisa” of violins: the 1741 “Vieuxtemps” Guarneri del Gesu.

The “Vieuxtemps” is unusual on several levels—it’s in fabulous shape, never having been cracked, never having had any extensive work on it. It also has a hefty price tag on it—they were asking 18 million bucks, though it was sold at auction for an undisclosed amount (though the auctioneer did note that it was the highest price ever paid for a violin). Lastly, it spent the last five decades lying under the bed of a rich London banker.

Understandably, Meyers was a happy lady, that day in January of 2013 when she was given the use of the Guarneri. Here’s what she said in her press release:

“I have never heard another violin with such a beautiful spectrum of color,” Anne said of the "Vieuxtemps” Guarneri del Gesu in a press release today. “I am honored and humbled to receive lifetime use of the instrument, and I look forward to taking the violin to audiences all over the world.”

Just as understandably, some people wondered what would be happening to the two Stradivarius violins that Meyers owns—would she be playing them, or would they be sitting at home, in their cases? And was it really fair…

It has to be said: not all in the world of classical music is quite as harmonious as the music that gets played. And though cellists are reputedly the nastiest of all instrumentalists, the violinists are no pikers, either. Here’s a sample of the comments on violinist.com:

I’m starting to think this is all a publicity stunt by Anne Meyers. I was told by a reliable source that she has a rich funder who purchased the Molitor strad for her. And now this Guarneri del Gesu too ?? If I was a private collector who owned the Vieuxtemps Guarneri del Gesu. [Sic.] Anne Meyers would NOT be the first artist that comes to my mind.

Whatever the merits of having two Strads and a Guarneri may be, there’s no question that the violin is better off than are many famous, and perhaps equally good, violins that are either in museums or—worse—being held by investors in a vault. Here’s what Time magazine had to say in 2009, at the pit of the recession:

Facing volatile equity markets, investors often look to gold and silver. But an updated study of classical-instrument valuations by Brandeis economist Kathryn Graddy shows that violins may be among the most stable of investments. Graddy's data indicate that between 1850 and April of this year, the value of professional-quality instruments rose in real terms (i.e., after inflation) about 3% annually. High-end violins have appreciated at much higher rates — particularly rare instruments made by Italian masters like Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri del Gesù.

There is, in fact, some good news in this gloomy picture. The first is that, at least in some double-blind tests (where neither player nor listener knew what they were playing or hearing), modern instruments were chosen above Strads or Guarneris for sound. So as glorious as a Strad may be, it’s not the only fiddle in the world.

Lastly, any reader out there with a million pounds lying about used might consider contacting Florian Leonhard, a London-based violin restorer who has made a specialty of authenticating old Italian instruments, advising institutions with money on the instrument, and then acting as a matchmaker between the musician and the institution. Here’s a description:

In addition to the pursuit of capital appreciation, the fund intends to loan the violins to young, up-and-coming musicians who are priced out of the market. The goal is to help exceptional musicians reach their full artistic potential and optimise the quality of classical performance at the highest level. This philanthropic enterprise will separate the fund from museums and institutions which kept fine instruments from the marketplace.

Be sure to tell them I sent you!

A Bow to a Bow

Well, it was a revelation, and I’m happy to say it was a good one.

I had to taken my bow to my luthier—and if you don’t have a luthier, you should get one, if only because it adds total class to be able to say “my luthier.” Of course, you could be a little clearer by saying “string instrument repairman,” but in a choice between clarity and class? No contest….

Actually, his name is Rodrigo, and he’s a totally cool guy. More to the point, he’s a serious luthier, having studied at Indiana University’s Violin Making and Repair Program. So he was the person to whom I fled, several years ago, when I detected the perfect round hole, about the diameter of a pencil point. What was it? I knew too well—a termite.

“I’ll have to freeze your cello for a couple of weeks,” said Rodrigo.

He explained it all carefully. Did I listen? Of course not—I knew it had to be done, I knew he was the man to do it. But how was I going to live for the next two weeks, imagining my cello in a meat locker?

Two weeks later, I was back in his taller, or workshop (OK, how about atelier?) And while I fully expected the cello to sound as good as it had before, it didn’t.

“It sounds much, much better,” I told him.

“The concert master of the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra used to take his violin to New York for the least little thing,” his mother boasted, “now, he won’t let anyone but Rodrigo touch his violin….”

Mothers get to say stuff like that.

So there I was on Monday with a bow that had its hair firmly attached to the frog (yup—bows have frog: that’s the black thing under the player’s hand; it has a screw in it, so that you can tighten the hair.)  The problem? The hair had popped out at the other end of the bow (logically called the tip).

So there were two orders of business, beyond getting the bow fixed. The first was to ask about getting a baroque bow—very important, since I’m doing Bach and Beer every day. And the baroque bow is designed to do so something very important: messa di voce. It’s when a sustained note starts quietly, gradually becomes louder, and then becomes soft again. Done right, it’s ravishing.

As I knew he would, Rodrigo had the answer, with the happy news that a good baroque bow wouldn’t cost me too much—under two hundred bucks. And if my father had collected Leica cameras, can’t I collect bows?

The next order of business was to see if Rodrigo had a spare bow lurking around, waiting for the errant cellist to drift by and claim it. Well, it turns out that Rodrigo has a seriously good bow—which he would lend Yo-Yo Ma, maybe—and another bow, a French bow with German weight. Guess which one I got?

There’s a difference between what you know intellectually and what you know experientally (well, computer, if Sarah Palin can do it, why can’t I?). Because when I start playing with that bow, it was what Stanley said to Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire: “baby, we’ve had this date from the very beginning!”

“The bow is more important that the instrument,” said a cello teacher to me when I was in my teens. So why had it never occurred to me: I had a very good cello, but I had never gone from what were essentially student bows to a better bow.

And if your cello is your sound, your bow is your voice. Or perhaps your speech, since the bow was somehow, miraculously suggesting nuances that I hadn’t thought of. I swear—that bow was telling me how to play Bach.

Bach—which I was playing because I had grown tired of killing myself playing stuff like the Dvorak concerto or the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations. They’re great pieces of music, but for the cellist? It’s a battle: one cellist against 100 musicians. I had gotten tired of working so hard, and besides, it’s strangely unusual how infrequently the Berlin Philharmonic or the London Symphony are calling me these days….

But the bow was having none of that. It wanted a robust, full sound—or maybe it was that just by using the weight of my arm, the bow produced a wonderful, warm sound.

It was, as I say, a revelation. Equally revealing was how much I didn’t know about bows, or bow makers. I knew that François Xavier Tourte (1747 – 25 April 1835) was a big name among bow makers, but I didn’t know that he’s big enough to be called, “the Stradivarius of bow makers.” (If so, my computer is less than impressed—“Tourte” gets red-squiggled, whereas “Stradivarius” sails right through….)

Not only was he a fine maker, but he was the father of the modern bow: he lengthened it, devised the little screw that tightens the tension of the hair, and also came up with a new way to make the curve of the bow. Previously, it had been carved; Tourte cooked up the idea of heating a straight stick of pernambuco, and then, on the edge of a wood table, carefully producing the curve.

For all this, he deserves to have his picture in Iguanas; here he is, in an engraving from 1818:

  

 Nor did I know that the experimentation with the bow is still going on, until I stumbled across Benoît Rolland, a Frenchman of—quite logically—the French School. Because there are, you see, at least three distinct schools of bow making: the French, German and English schools. I get this from a sentence from Rolland’s website:

A musician can sense whether a bow belongs to the French, German or British traditions.

But it occurred to me: shouldn’t there be an Italian school, since the modern violin originated in Cremona, Italy? But it appears no—the origin of the modern bow occurred later, and happened simultaneously but unconnectedly in France and England (John Dodd was the Tourte of England…).

At any rate, Rolland studied at Mirecourt, sometimes called “the Cremona of bow making” and was awarded the prestigious Maitre Archetier d’Art, which beyond sounding totally cool, has only been awarded a few times in history.

Nor is that the only thing Rolland has won—he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012—and they don’t hand those babies out like candy. Why did he get it? Well, the quote below is drawn from his website:

Initially using marine technology, he conceived the first carbon fiber bow of concert quality. Bringing the project one step further, he invented a new generation of bows including a tension mechanism that allows the performer to adjust at will the camber of the bow. The bows embodying this invention were awarded First Prize Musicora in 1994 (also selected for Musicora Anniversary, 2004), and are distributed under the trademark Spiccato®.

Right—so I’m a bit more knowledgeable about bows and bow making. What don’t I know? How I could possibly give Rodrigo’s bow back to him.

Sorry—that’s not Rodrigo’s bow.

Not any more….

So here’s what I going to say to him: “Rodrigo, you’d better let me buy this bow, because I really don’t want to have to steal it!”

The Cellist Destroying America!

Well, it was one of those things I came across in that surreal time between wake and sleep, when a medicine I take that knocks me off reliably forty minutes after taking it then wakens me sternly and craves sweets. It’s called mirtazapine, and if you don’t have to take it, don’t. If, however, like me, the choice is the black dog of depression or mirtazapine, then run for it. Anyway, here’s the text:

Hi, please read this letter. I am a musician who has nothing to do with this incident, but I am very interested in making sure that no harm comes to the extraordinary antique you have in your possession.

1. You need to know that without a violin case, you risk serious harm to a living piece of history. I know you threw away the case, so go buy another violin case at a music store. Today. Store the violin safely in the case.

2. Dry winter air could be very damaging to the violin. Go out today and buy a room humidifier. Run it a few hours a day in the room where you keep the violin. If the wood dries out too much, it will crack, doing terrible damage.

3. You will never sell this violin. The violin is individually known and marked. It is not like a diamond where you can have it recut before it's fenced—think of the violin more like a human being, as someone's child. It is a living piece of history, 300 years old. Benjamin Franklin was a boy of 9 when this violin was lovingly crafted in northern Italy.

There is a powerful network out there looking for stolen instruments. If you attempt to sell it, you will certainly be caught and will spend years in jail. What you have done is tantamount to kidnapping. Violinists the world over hate your guts. Not a one will give you a dime.

4. After you buy the case, your best bet is to take the violin into a local mall and set it down safely, then walk away. Leave it somewhere warm where it won't be crushed or in danger of water damage.

Do the honorable thing. Give the violin up so that it may continue making music. It is worth nothing to you, while the music that still lives inside it is priceless.

Well, as a cellist, that was all pretty interesting. Also interesting is that this appeared on Craigslist > Milwaukee > all personals > rants and raves. What was the deal, or would I go back to bed? Bed I could do, I decided; a stolen violin in Milwaukee was beyond my reach.

The next day, I checked in on what I had been reading during the night, and was interested to find that it was the Lipinski Stradivarius that was stolen in an armed robbery in a Milwaukee parking lot after a concert.

That at least is reassuring, since the possessor of the violin—Frank Almond, the concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony—had been attacked with a stun gun and had the violin taken from him. And that implies—at least to me—that the thieves (a man and a woman) knew very well what they wanted and what it was worth.

In the case of Strads, many of them are named after the famous people who have played them. But this Strad is particularly illustrious—it was owned by Giuseppe Tartini, an Italian baroque composer most known for his “Devil’s Trill” sonata. Why the instrument is known as the Lipinski Strad—after Karol Lipinski, a Polish violinist of the first half of the 19^th century—and not the Tartini Strad is a mystery no one can explain.

So the concertmaster had left the concert with his violin…but wait. It wasn’t—Almond, like so many others, couldn’t afford an instrument of that quality and especially that rarity. So the violin was on loan. But from whom? It isn’t stated—or rather, the violin was lent anonymously by someone who had “strong ties to Milwaukee,” but it’s almost certainly the estate of Richard Anschuetz, a pianist who bought the instrument for his wife, the Estonian violinist Evi Liivak. Here’s what one source had to say:

Mr. Anschuetz missed her dearly, and continued to do so until his death in 2008. He could not bear to be parted from her beloved violin, and treasured it to the end.

So Almond was—in a sense—lucky. The worst fear of a string player is that their instrument will be stolen by some junkie, who will abuse it and possibly destroy it. That said, I can’t imagine the agony of having my cello stolen. It would not be losing my instrument, not even losing my voice: it would be losing my soul.

Don’t think that it goes just one way—that the player makes the music. I recently rented for a week a cello in New York City. It was a cello mass produced in China, and it wasn’t bad, though it was miles behind my instrument at home. But that’s when I learned: even a bad cello can sound good. But it can sound good in only one way. A great instrument can sound good in every way.

And so an instrument teaches the player—suggests a sonority, allows a phrasing, responds and reacts. And it becomes not an instrument but a part of the body.

Which is why a surprising number of players have had their instruments stolen: their instrument is so much a part of them that they forget to watch it, or even take it out of the cab they had been riding in. Think I’m wrong? Quick—what is your left hand doing right now?

It happened to Min-Jim Kym in 2010—she was eating at a London Pret a Manger and checking her iPhone (why am I not surprised?) and then…the Strad that she had been lent was gone. And then, after three years, it turned up in the Midlands. But in a curious and horrible twist of fate, the owner of the violin decided to put the instrument up for auction. It was sold for 1.38 million pounds. Kym, one classy lady, released this statement:

 "This violin was a faithful friend for many years, and I was devastated by its loss," Min-Jin Kym said. "Its recovery is an absolute relief, and I am eager to hear the violin onstage once more. I wish its next owner all the best of luck and success."

What do cellists Lynn Harrell, Yo-Yo Ma, and the violinist Philippe Quint have in common? They all have left their instruments in taxis—and all have gotten them back. And yes, all of them were Strads.

It seems that Harrell, at least, should stick to ground transport, if possible. Why? Check out the video below…. 

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Clara Haskil, In Spite of Herself

However bad your life has been or is, you might be cheered to know that Clara Haskil probably had it worse.

Not that she didn’t have some advantages; she started out life as a musical prodigy, and seemed equally gifted at the piano as at the violin. Here’s one description of her powers:

She was not yet five when a professor at the Bucharest Academy visited her parent’s home and played a Mozart sonata. When he finished she repeated the sonata perfectly, while simultaneously transposing it into another key, all without having had any musical instruction.

Right—not your average five-year old….

Later, she graduated with the Premier Prix from the Paris Conservatory, where she studied with Alfred Cortot (she had earlier stuided with Busoni). She began to tour, but then, at the age of 18, everything grounded to a halt: she spent four years in a plaster cast, trying to correct curvature of the spine.

Her health, it seems, was never great. In 1941, she had a tumor on her optic nerve, and had to have surgery by a doctor smuggled out of Paris. And all through her life, by all accounts, she was frail.

She also had a phenomenal memory, once playing four pages of a composition she had never seen but only heard years before. And also—very nice for a pianist—she had large hands.

Then, in about 1920, she was afflicted with stage fright; here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Frequent illnesses, combined with extreme stage fright that appeared in 1920, kept her from critical or financial success. Most of her life was spent in abject poverty. It was only after World War II, during a series of concerts in the Netherlands in 1949, that she began to win acclaim.

Born in 1895, she would have been 54 before “winning acclaim.”

But what acclaim it was—everyone was raving about her: here’s Charlie Chaplin:

"In my lifetime I have met three geniuses; Professor Einstein, Winston Churchill, and Clara Haskil. I am not a trained musician but I can only say that her touch was exquisite, her expression wonderful, and her technique extraordinary." (Swiss Radio interview, 19 April 1961.)

Well, everyone was raving but Clara; here’s  one account:

In years to come I heard her many times, both publicly and privately. For these experiences I remain eternally grateful. As I left the hall, a friend who knew Haskil offered to take me backstage. She seemed inconsolable and unhappy, excusing her poor performance to anyone who congratulated her.

She lived through two world wars, and not without adventure. Here’s a vivid description of her escape from Paris (she was born a Sephardic Jew):

We left Paris at night from the Gare Montparnasse, which was plunged into murky darkness, and before dawn we left the train at Angoulême. Our luggage had gone ahead of us, since, as we expected to have to do a lot of walking, we did not want to be heavily laden. In the sinister railway station, cold and dark, we huddled together, speaking in hushed tones; then we met the guide who was to lead us through fields and woods to the free zone. A taxi drove us to the edge of a forest, where we listened to the scarcely reassuring advice of our guide. He was obviously frightened and told us that the prisons in the neighborhood were full of people like us who had been caught. One road was especially dangerous; we had to crawl across it for, not very far away, as we could see, was a German police station. It was the end of march. The wind was cold but spring had come; there were violets in the woods and birds were singing, but we were not in a mood to enjoy that particular morning walk. On every signpost was a skull and crossbones and a menacing warning to anyone who ventured into this forbidden zone. Our guide wheeled his bicycle ahead of us and we followed in a single file. Le Guillard carried his viola and Clara’s suitcase since she, after a night without sleep, was physically and emotionally exhausted. Each of us wore several overcoats and my wife carried our cat in its basket. Our hearts beat wildly; at last we had crossed that terrible road. I remember that at the exact moment that our cat started miaowing our guide showed us the road we should take to rejoin the railway; he claimed his fee, mounted his bicycle and rode off as fast as he could. Relieved and reassured at having survived this disagreeable experience we soon found a farm whose hospitable owners were used to groups of people in our situation and gave us something to eat.

At last, in 1960, she fell down a staircase in a Brussels rail station, and died in a matter of days.

May her death be happier than her life! 

Music or Mystique?

It’s a curious thing—the relationship that string players have with their instruments. Yes, guitarists can rave about one “brand” of guitar, and pianists line up in favor of the Bösendorfer—which is now, by the way, owned by Yamaha—or the Steinway. But nobody seems to get as metaphysical, as enraptured, as enamored as string players with their instrument. It leads, at times, to extreme statements that are almost embarrassing. “I felt like my soul was disappearing,” said one violinist, who had his violin stolen. Another violinist takes his instrument to the luthier—the educated reader of this blog will not need to be told that that’s the repair guy; the computer, however, is another story—and gets paid this compliment. “I can tell you two are happy together,” says the luthier. And no, he hasn’t heard the two—just seen them.

Ummm?

Then there’s the widely held belief that an instrument not played “dies.” This, I can tell you, is not true. I know this because my own cello, at various points in my life, has gone untouched (in two senses, since the word for play in a musical sense is tocar or touch in Spanish) for years. In fact, I have just gotten my own luthier—everyone should have one, it adds a bit of class when speaking—to work on my cello. And the sound? Wonderful? Oh, and it had been five years.

“It’s male, I suppose?” said my luthier—OK, his name is Rodrigo, which is, come to think of it, every bit as classy as “my luthier.” Rodrigo met me and Mr. Fernández decades ago.

“Of course,” I said. And if I were on the opposite spectrum, it would be “she.”

So I’m prepared to go part of the way in this mysticism that we have with our violins, violas, celli and basses. I believe, for example, that the instrument makes or at least helps make the musician. Certainly, without having the instrument I have, I would never have created my own sound. But it’s more than that—it’s also true that some instruments let you explore easily: should I hold that note longer, elongate the appoggiatura, play the triplets more staccato? There are times the instrument is suggesting things.

What’s also true is that the instrument is my voice, and then, well, very close to my soul. So much so that when the principal cellist of the local orchestra raved about the sound of my cello, I was a little offended. ‘I created that sound, and if you played my cello, it wouldn’t sound the same. Maybe better, maybe worse. But not the same….’ That’s what I wanted to—but didn’t—tell him.

I tell you all this because I’ve just spent 50 minutes watching the video below. And for the benefit of people who actually have lives to live—I can recap for you.

There’s this mystique about Stradivarius and his instruments—1000 of them, of which 500 have been lost. They are the Himalayans of instruments, and they don’t come cheap. A “basic” Strad will set you back 1.4$ million Euros—a couple of million bucks. And yeah, that’s a lot of money for a young violinist….

Oh, and the great violins, from Stradivarius’ “gold period?” Here’s Wikipedia:

A Stradivarius made in the 1680s, or during Stradivari's 'Long Pattern' period from 1690 to 1700, could be worth hundreds of thousands to several million U.S. dollars at today's prices. The 1697 Molitor[4] Stradivarius, once rumored to have belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte (it did belong to a general in his army, Count Gabriel-Jean-Joseph Molitor), sold in 2010 at Tarisio Auctions to violinist Anne Akiko Meyers for $3,600,000, at the time a world record.[5][6]

Depending on condition, instruments made during Stradivari's "golden period" from 1700 to about 1725[7] can be worth millions of dollars. In 2011, his "Lady Blunt" violin from 1721, which is in pristine condition, was sold at Tarisio auctions for £9.8 million (it is named after Lord Byron's granddaughter Lady Anne Blunt, who owned it for 30 years). It was sold by the Nippon Music Foundation in aid of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami appeal.[8]

That’s 15 million dollars. And that should tell you something: these instruments have stopped being instruments and have become…investments.

Which means that two things can happen to them, both risky. The first is that the bank or foundation can stick the violin in a vault. There, it’s safe, protected and—duh!—unheard. Or, the bank can lend the instrument to a young, aspiring musician, who will fall in love with the instrument, cherish it, speak to it and…

…wait for the letter from the bank asking for it back. And this is—yes—traumatic; it’s every bit as bad as losing a spouse.

Right—so the absolutely best thing would be to find the “secret” to the Stradivarius. And the legend always was—if we could just get our hands on the family Bible, there we would find it: the recipe for the varnish, in the Master’s own hand!

The varnish is one theory—and it’s been studied. But in fact, most of the Strads have lost a lot of the original varnish, and been re-varnished. Oh—and some parts of the violins have lost their varnish completely. So nix that one.

OK—the wood. Spruce and maple—and in the time of Stradivarius, the wood used would have been exceptionally hard, since it from trees growing in a miniature ice age. But wait—that was the wood everybody was using, not just Stradivarius. So that’s not the secret.

OK—is it the shape? Stradivarius standardized the form of the violin, but in fact people have been playing with it for centuries after he died. And in the clip below, one luthier made a violin with a bigger top than bottom. And guess what? It sounded terrific—the low notes more mellow, the high notes more brilliant.

Lastly, there’s another, somewhat less appealing theory. It may all be just hype—since in double blind studies, the Strad has been picked out over similar or even modern instruments only as often as—statistically—you’d expect. And in the clip below, it was a modern instrument that everyone thought was the Strad.

In fact—it may be that there’s nothing special about a Strad. Other instruments compare favorably; it’s just that everyone decided that a Strad was a benchmark. And therefore, all the greats played them—which reinforced the legend.

And technology moves on. I’m seriously thinking of investing in a carbon fiber cello, since they are impervious to heat and—especially—humidity. And guess what? If they’re good enough for Yo-Yo Ma, they’re probably good enough for me….

Have a listen!

A Demented Violin Concerto

Well, is it any good or is it—as Menuhin thought—a historical footnote, the missing link in the violin repertoire?

Yehudi Menuhin, one of the great violinists of the last century, was referring to the Schumann violin concerto, which dates from 1853—a year before Schumann gave in to syphilitic madness and jumped into the Rhine. Fearing that he would harm his wife, the pianist Clara Schumann who had long supported him creatively and financially, he asked the fisherman who rescued him to take him directly to the sanatorium. He died in 1856.

That’s part of the story. The other part? Joseph Joachim, a friend of both the Schumanns and Johannes Brahms, and the greatest violinist of his day. And so the concerto was written for Joachim, who played through it, and was less than impressed. In fact, he suspected the music was part of Schumann’s madness; allegedly, he called the work morbid. And he wrote the following words in a letter to a friend:

The piece has ‘a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy’, though ‘certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist’.

Joachim never played the work in public, and later convinced both Brahms and Clara Schumann that the work wasn’t worthy of publication. Joachim kept the manuscript, and left it in his will to the Prussian State Library, with the instruction that it was not to be played until 1956, 100 years after the composer’s death..

OK—here the story gets seriously weird. Two grandnieces of Joachim—one improbably named Jelly D’Aranyi, the other Adila Fachiri—both violinists, decide to go to a séance in London in 1933. And guess who comes sailing through? Yup—Robert Schumann with instructions from the beyond. Yeah—“play my concerto,” or words to that effect.

First problem—where the hell was it? OK—round two, and this time Joachim comes through with the info. And so the sisters hightail it over to the archives and dig the concerto up. And they swear until their dying day that they had no idea that the piece existed.

(….stop that sniggering out there!)

The trail went cold until 1937, when the music publisher Schott sent the manuscript to Yehudi Menuhin. And he announced that he would give the world premiere in San Francisco.

You can guess what happened. Yes, Jelly stepped up and claimed right of first performance—hadn’t it been she who had been tipped off from the beyond? (You might wonder why Adila, the other sister, didn’t stake her claim—at least, I wonder…. Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn’t say…)

It might have been interesting to see how the struggle developed—but sadly, the Germans held the copyright, and they decided it should be one of their own, Georg Kulenkampff, should premiere the work. So Menuhin gave the American premiere, and Jelly gave the London premiere—one critic said, “of this dismal fiasco, the less said the better.”

Since then, the work has met with divided opinion. Some have called it a violin concerto without the violin. And one senses what Joachim felt—it’s the work of a man whose mind is slipping. It may lack coherence, ultimately; but there are still beautiful moments.

In short, it’s a thing to hear….

    

Grrr….

Voice 1—Give it up, Marc. You’ve written about it before. Everybody’s tired of it. Find something new!

Voice 2—Why does it make me so crazy? He’s 32, he’s an adult, and if he wants to cross over from classical to pop—why is that such a sin? Why not let him?

Voice 1—Hmmm, jealousy maybe? Do you secretly wanna do rock?

Voice 2—Come on, I don’t even listen to it. But look, the guy, David Garrett, spent years at Juilliard and the Royal College of Music. He’s got an amazing technique on the violin. He was given a Stradivarius when he was eleven. The jerk is 33 and has gotten more awards and done more first than anybody around. Look what he can do!

 

Voice 1—That is pretty amazing.

Voice 2—Yeah, and look what he does with it!

Voice 1—Ummm, yeah… Pretty bad….

Voice 2—Pretty bad? Pretty bad? That’s an atrocity, that’s a slaughter. Look, I don’t mind playing Bach with exaggerated vibrato or a hokey style. But why add stupid drums? Why make it sound like Muzak? But there he is, with that huge screen behind. At least he appeared in a concert hall—other videos have him in football stadia…

Voice 1—See? We don’t believe in stadiums….

Voice 2—Nor auditoriums…

Voice 1—Look, what’s the problem?

Voice 2—Joyce DiDonato said it best: why are we so insecure about what we do,—and what we’ve spent years learning to do—that we have to dumb it down? Why not own it?— This is what we are, this is what we do. No, I’m not going to jazz up Bach to play down to your level. That’s an insult. To both of us. And you know what? It doesn’t fool anybody—nobody is going to hear this rhinestone gaudy arrangement of Bach and then decide, ‘hey, let me just sit down and listen to the Well-Tempered Clavier!’

Voice 1—OK, so what’s the big deal? If he wants to use his talent and his Stradivarius to making money—oh, and also making people happy—is that a crime? Elitism, Marc?

Voice 2—Guilty as charged. Look, maybe we should just come out and say it. There is nothing wrong with going into new areas of music, of forging new types of music. If Garrett had wanted to do something like Laurie Anderson—hey, no problem!

Voice 1—So?

Voice 2—Look, will we ever do rock better than rock stars? Who are we kidding? And you know what? Beyond the flash, how much of a musician is there here? Because I heard him doing Bach and I heard him doing Schubert, and guess what? It was the same rich, throaty tone. And it might have worked in the Schubert, but the Bach?

Voice 1—OK, so what is it?

Voice 2—you know, there are a lot of good violinists out there. Hey, I came to Garrett through Philippe Quint, who was playing the hell out of John Corigliano. There’s Hilary Hahn, and Sarah Chang and a LOT of good musicians out there. And guess what? They’re not out there doing crossovers. They’re out there presenting and furthering a long and distinguished tradition. Isn’t this selling out? Isn’t this a child prodigy who’s hit a wall? There’s a limit to fast technique, you know. I mean, an hour and a half of fast, flashy music is unsustainable. There’s also such a thing as musicianship….

Voice 1—Wow, harsh words, Marc. And by the way, isn’t Yo-Yo Ma also a crossover?

Voice 2—Dunno, maybe…. But there’s something different. Ma’s Silk Road Project takes music from many cultures and fuses, producing something new and traditional at the same time. Quite different from putting snare drums to Bach, or playing a rock song on a violin.

Voice 1—Not letting go, are we, Marc! Bite ‘em, boy! Bite ‘em!

Voice 2—OK, maybe it’s purely irrational. Maybe it just rankles to see a 32-year old kid, pretty enough to have modeled his way through Juilliard, getting all this fame and attention when other musicians are laboring away, one concert after another.

Voice 1—Ya,  Marc—give it up…

Voice 2—Grrr….

With a Nod to Shirley Jackson

It’s curious to think about—I’ve probably spent more time listening to this song than Schubert spent writing it. The manuscript is, if the website I stumbled upon can be trusted, a single sheet of paper. It was published some two decades after it was written. Liszt transcribed it—as he did so much else—and Primrose as well. Not surprising, if you’re a violist, you gotta do a little borrowing to fill in the repertoire.

That was a cool, cool paragraph written on the day after a bloodbath. And by cool I mean not hip but emotionally chilly, neutral, stepped-back and slightly ironic.

Which is not how the rest of the nation is feeling. People are in shock. The New Day has discovered that a little girl with connections to a town on the east side of the island was killed. Boricua Blood in the Tragedy screams the front page today.

And people are saying the usual. Evil, we are told by CNN, visited the town of Newton, Connecticut, yesterday.

Yeah?

Or was it a paranoid schizophrenic who had access to semi-automatic rifles?

I’m skipping this one. I’m assuming that if we had wanted to do something about it, we would have. I’m forced to conclude that there is something in my countrymen that wants slaughter, that relishes in the bloodshed, that thirsts to see anguished families and a weeping president and destroyed lives.

Why don’t we celebrate it?

The Spanish—a more honest people—go happily to their bullfights, and delight in seeing the bull downed in a pool of blood.

Well, we could do the same thing. Every Saturday, at random, a school somewhere in the nation is picked—will it be yours? Your children’s? Your grandchildren’s?

No matter, Friday night you will not sleep. Little children will beg to sleep with their mommies. “I’m scared, Mommie,” they’ll whisper.

Go back to bed, it will all be all right.

But you’re not sleeping either.

Because after all, it could be your child, your daughter, your sister.

Right, school chosen. Now we have to know the grade, the classroom.

Hey, do it in real time.

Add some excitement to the game.

How long does it take for the killer to walk from his home to his car? How long is the drive? How long to search for parking, to unload the guns, to pull the mask over his face?

Half an hour?

Forty-five minutes?

Right, so now we have the kids in the school. Everybody is there—teachers, principal, kids. Everybody is in their places.

Waiting for the slaughter to begin.

The media is filming. Relieved parents in other towns all across the country are cracking the first beer.

Better than Monday Night Football!

It’s old, our bloodlust. The Romans, seeing the Christians fed to the lions.

The gentry, viewing the mad raving at Bedlam.

Maybe it’s time to say it. We love to see the young butchered, the blood splattered on the chalkboard, the entails underneath the little desks / seats.

Love it.

Death and destruction and blood and tears.

Makes us feel good.

Or some of us. Because who’s going into that school?

The killer.

Also chosen by lottery.

A card-carrying member of the NRA.

Litany for the Feast of All Saints

Rest in peace, all souls,

Those that have done with care and suffering,

Those that have fulfilled a happy dream,

Those sated with life, those scarcely born...

All who have passed from this world to the Beyond,

All souls, rest in peace.

Souls of loving-hearted maidens,

Those who shed uncounted tears,

Whom false lovers deserted,

And the blind world cast out...

All who have departed hence,

All souls, rest in peace.

And those that have never smiled on the sunshine,

But beneath the moon waited, on thorns,

To see God one day, face to face

In the pure light of Heaven...

All souls that have departed hence,

All souls, rest in peace.