String Theory

When I was sixteen, I had the honour of being invited to turn pages at a recital in Montreal for the great Soviet violinist David Oistrakh, one of the last of a generation of Russian virtuosi that included Heifetz and Elman, and his musical partner, the formidable pianist Frida Bauer. Given the august occasion, it probably wasn’t the shrewdest decision to test out my father’s claim that after years of non-surgical experiments he had successfully corrected my “wandering eye syndrome” (the right eye cruised its socket like a lazy pinball), and I could now “see without glasses!” This despite the fact that since the age of four I had spent my life in a pair of bifocals framed like the fenders on a Mustang and as thick as a middle-aged waistline.

Nor was it my most incandescent moment to turn up for the concert at Place des Arts that evening dressed in the latest in seventies discount-mall fashion: a shiny black dress made from some of the first attempts with “unknown fibres” that draped from my waist, briefly, to reveal an entire set of teenage legs which were punctuated at my feet by a pair of really ugly black platform pumps. This outfit, a metaphor, apparently, for “Hey Mista, fifty rubles to heaven,” was entirely unsuitable, a message made clear by the now hysterical Russian impresario who threatened to dismiss me, Soviet style. I managed to keep my job largely through the efforts of Oistrakh himself, who probably welcomed the contrast I brought to the otherwise staid landscape on stage; next to the Russians, I looked like some kind of strange sapling loosely planted behind two sturdy boxwood hedges.

For a young violinist, the opportunity to get this close to one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century, to witness first-hand his pre-concert warm-up (Oistrakh repeated the opening bars of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 8 in G major, op. 30, the first piece on the program, over and over and over again), to shake the hand that shook the hand of Prokofiev that shook the hand of Rimsky-Korsakov that shook the hand of Tchaikovsky that shook the hand of Liszt that shook the hand of Salieri who brushed the silver-sweet palms of Mozart was to touch the flesh of a world I had only imagined.

Oistrakh is five years old. It is 1913. Like Heifetz, Zimbalist, Elman, and Seidel, he was born among the colonies of poor in the dark, dank corridors of Tsarist Russia, an empire that would have swallowed him whole had it not been for the passport of his talent. He grabs his mother’s hand as they travel along the grim limestone arteries of Odessa, through alleys that spill onto expansive nineteenth-century boulevards, almost every corner of which houses a statue or cultural icon of historical significance. They file their way past anxious shopkeepers loitering in front of small, disappointed businesses. A mess of smells from coffee to tobacco mix with the acrid sea breeze and tails them like a spy. David and his mother are on their way to the Opera and Ballet House, a cathedral-like theatre at the intersection of Rishelevskaya and Lanzjeronovskaya, not far from the Stolyarsky School where Oistrakh will spend the next fifteen years unravelling his giant talent. But tonight, because his mother is a singer, the five-year-old gets to stand in the orchestra pit next to the conductor for a performance. It is a reward for being good, for practising every single day of the week and then not cutting the strings off his violin at the end of it. And it is his favourite thing too, in particular the thick chocolate comfort of the cello sound. When he closes his eyes, the walls echo legendary performances of Chaliapin, Tchaikovsky, of Wieniawski, the sounds and spirit of which will become the mortar of his playing.

Sitting beside Ms. Bauer in the dressing room before the concert, I was struck by the contained power in her small hands, cigar-thick fingers perched like the hammers inside a piano. They told the story of thousands of hours of dull drills, each muscle reluctantly trained into submission, carving out a memory for itself so that in the shotgun of performance they could fire like a string of perfectly calibrated bullets. These are the building blocks of the Russian school of playing, where the dreamy ad libitum of childhood is transfigured into the lexicon of a mature imagination.

I can still remember Oistrakh’s performance those thirty-five years ago and how he was able to animate the gestures in the musical ideas and suspend you in their moody arms. I love his playing and grew up with the deep personal warmth of his sound and the integrity of the evocations in my ear, which of course I tried to imitate, as I tried to imitate the emotional fragility of Elman’s playing and the charisma of Heifetz’s. What is characteristic of that generation and school of musicians is the unique and recognizable sound of each player and a conviction of interpretation so powerful that it is difficult to imagine the music played otherwise. These artists, pushed to the limits of their talent, delivered us into the interior of our own experience.

From my position next to Ms. Bauer at the piano that night, I watched with envy Oistrakh’s left hand scale the fingerboard (I couldn’t see his bow arm, peripheral vision, it seems, not being on the list of benefits from my father’s claim), and for a while I wished that I too had been brought up in the trenches of the Russian school. I wish that I had been subjected to the punishing daily grind of the Flesch scale system and the monotonous routine of all the Sevçik opuses; had been forced to learn the viola (okay, I didn’t wish that); had been shamed into the corner to practise the cadenza I didn’t prepare and then made to play it an hour later, memorized, for the torturous weekly public class; had been outperformed by someone younger, playing Dont Études op.35; had dragged myself into Stolyarsky’s studio three times a week for lessons, elated if, for a moment, his eyebrows moved from north to south; had spent years analyzing the symphonic and chamber-music repertoire; had heard Kreisler play, who’d heard Joachim play, who’d heard Ysaÿe play, who’d heard Wieniawski play, who’d heard Vieuxtemps play, who’d wrapped his hands around the moonstruck hands of Paganini so that I too could find my voice.

Unfortunately, my remarkable talent for choosing the eyewear and wardrobe appropriate for a concert with Russian musicians also informed my presumption that my hands-on experience of the violin and a taste for borscht were all the tools I was going to need to be an effective addition to their ensemble. It turned out that a background in trills and boiled cabbage was hardly adequate.

Not only was I expected to turn pages for Ms. Bauer (this on its own is a very delicate business—a page-turner can seriously compromise the performer by turning the page at the wrong time, by moving too much, by eating anything my mother cooked), but I was also expected, at specifically indicated moments in the piano score, to leave my seat beside the piano, tiptoe to the front of the stage where Oistrakh stood, turn his page, tiptoe back to my position at the piano, determine where Ms. Bauer’s fingers had advanced to, and continue turning her pages. All this was to be accomplished with the breezy élan of a pro. To complicate matters, the procedure was explained to me by Ms. Bauer in Yiddish, a language I soon realized neither of us actually spoke. Luckily, there was only one piece on the program that demanded this and it was slotted right after the Beethoven Sonata, a good thirty minutes into the performance, which I hoped would be enough time to subdue the sudden bubbling enthusiasm of my lower digestive tract.

The school of violin playing from Russia was developed over centuries by the cross-fertilization of instruments and musicians from across Europe. The instrument, as we know it—four strings, tuned in fifths, bowed and held under the chin—has a sketchy history. Curiously, its three-stringed antecedent was first documented in a painting by the Italian artist Gaudenzio Ferrari in 1529 and then magically appeared in the arms of Monteverdi’s concert master Salomone Rossi, an Italian Jew so highly revered for his playing that he wasn’t forced to wear the Star of David in court. There is no record as to who made the first violin, but a three-string version dated 1542 was in existence in Italy, possibly crafted by Andrea Amati, a relative of Nicolò Amati, who taught Stradivari.