These schools of playing eventually established distinct tastes and styles. The Russians favoured passion (molto vibrato) over the pure reason of the Germans (they hated vibrato and hardly ever used it), above the porcelain fastidiousness of French playing (they used vibrato, but sparingly), and beyond the earnest stoicism of the British (they vibrated all the time, but no one could tell). So by the time the Hungarian-born violinist and pedagogue Leopold Auer emigrated to the US in 1918 at the age of seventy-three, the Russian school, following the familiar historical pattern, had already migrated to America. But, as the teacher of the more recent émigrés—Heifetz, Elman, Milstein, Seidel, and Zimbalist, the most exceptional products of the Russian method—Auer was greeted in New York with the ceremony usually reserved for kings. Heifetz, then only seventeen, had already established his legendary status six months earlier in his first concert at Carnegie Hall, eclipsing every violinist before and after him; the urgency in his sound, the sheer scope of his musical phrasing and a ruthless attention to detail unleashed the spirit in the music and the breath of his audience. He made a performance read like a thriller. His playing—unmistakably Heifetz.
Talent is the ultimate coordination of the mind/body schism, a simultaneous relationship between thought and action that references the supernatural. It is a direct translation from the abstract to the concrete that when expressed has the quality of a phantom history relived. We look for talent because it forces us to expand our sense of reality—from believing we know what is possible to incorporating what we believe impossible. Think of Mozart. Think of the idea of Mozart. Both Stolyarsky (Oistrakh’s teacher and Milstein’s for a period) and Auer had a genius for spotting musical talent in the uncut bodies of Russia’s kindergarten population. What they looked for was a strong sense of rhythm, an unfailing ear, hands and fingers appropriate in size and strength for the violin, and the shiny curiosity that comes with raw intelligence. Like Michelangelo, they chiselled through the uncarved stone, the perfect David waiting to be released.
On this day, perhaps, in 1902, Mischa Elman, age eleven, is being tested on the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. He plays beautifully, but the octaves at the end of the introduction are out of tune and the passage is rushing. Auer pokes Elman in the ribs with his bow and demands that he repeat it. Also, there is not enough of the military in the second half of the opening statement, not enough contrast from the first phrase to the second, so Auer asks the pianist to play the reduced orchestral score alone and points to harmonic and rhythmic details. Look at the score, he thunders. Elman listens closely to the pianist and then plays the phrase again, this time injecting it with the character of a saluting sergeant. They go through the entire movement in this fashion, Auer interrupting with demands for “more fire” here, “sweeter” there, “this passage on the A string,” Elman producing on the spot. The transformations are obvious, and the audience responds. The music soars where it had languished, but Elman has no idea how he has accomplished this feat. What Auer does not tell him is how to achieve these nuances, how to translate these feelings into the subtle mechanics of the execution. That is left to Elman’s talent, as it is left to the talents of Heifetz and the others, each one distilling his own interpretation of the concerto. When Elman goes home to practice he will translate these images into the anatomy of his art.
One of the lessons I learned very quickly about the art of page-turning was that the slower the speed of the music, the better. So it was with a certain relief that I discovered the tricky second piece on the program, the North American premiere of Shostakovich’s Violin Sonata, a sixtieth-birthday present for Oistrakh, began with the instruction Andante. However, ever since the publication of The Rite of Spring in 1913, no twentieth-century composer worth his salt sticks to one tempo for longer than a few bars or stays in the same meter for too long. That means that, in a matter of seconds, the music can fluctuate from the relative safety of white notes written in 4/4 to a scream of black dots scored in alternating patterns of 3/8, 7/8, 5/4, and, my personal favourite, 11/16. Unfortunately for me, Shostakovich had perfected this technique, and his sonata is rife with these musical gymnastics. So not only did I have to read the music, I had to count as well.
Ms. Bauer pointed to the three separate moments in the score where Oistrakh was going to need my services. A red “x” was marked above the designated bars. In those instances, I would have to make my way over to the front of the stage, where Oistrakh stood. There was no sign in the music for my return to the piano because I could arrive back at any time, sort of like a via Rail schedule. I remember negotiating the first episode pretty easily, slipping discreetly beside Oistrakh, turning his page, and getting back to my seat next to Ms. Bauer with plenty of time before I had to turn her page. But this first stroke came about in the Andante section of the piece where the counting was easy. It was my second turn at it, in the rhythmically inventive second movement, Allegro Furioso, when things proved more difficult.
This is what I remember: I got up on cue, walked around the piano to my destination beside Oistrakh, calmly looked at the music to see when to turn, couldn’t quite figure it out, looked at the audience of 3,000 look at me, took a deep breath, knew that panic was not a good idea, toyed with the idea of a career as a migrant farm worker, decided not to jump to drastic conclusions—this was a visual problem not an intellectual one—moved in a little closer to focus (my eyes were slipping into their old pinball routine), still couldn’t figure out where Oistrakh was, noticed with some apprehension that the audience was now debating the issue of the visual versus the intellectual, the visual scoring heavily only with the first seven rows, noted how unfair it was that a visual problem can look like an intellectual one, began to reflect on existential religious matters and considered the merits of panic when, suddenly, in a moment of divine-issued clarity, I realized that Oistrakh probably knew the piece from memory and that it wouldn’t matter when I turned the page. Which I did. Right away. And, I managed to make it back to home plate without disturbing either Oistrakh’s or Bauer’s performance but not, however, without skidding into the side of the piano, ripping my nylons and puncturing my skin. I was mentioned in all three papers.
Some of the visas stamped on Ellis Island during the waves of immigration from Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century were granted to artists, from all disciplines, whose communities were dissolving at home. They crossed the threshold into America carrying their luggage of skills and traditions and the secret ambitions of hope. Weaving through the loose fabric of a new culture, many of them rose to prominence combining the old-world ways with the new. Ivan Galamian, though born in Persia of Armenian parents, spent his early life in Moscow, where he studied the violin at the School of the Philharmonic Society in Moscow with a pupil of Auer’s and then continued his education in Paris before coming to America in 1937. By then he had committed himself to a life of teaching and quickly established his reputation. Within ten years, he had positions at both the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, where he taught the giant talents of Rabin, Zukerman, Perlman, and legions of less-known but extremely fine players. Unlike Auer, whose “method” of teaching relied on the superior gifts of a student, Galamian’s approach was much more democratic. He believed that almost anyone with serious intentions could learn to play and learn to play well.
“Democratic,” except for his theory of pedagogy, was not a term closely linked with Galamian. If Auer had the aristocratic hubris of Bismarck, then there was a touch of the stubborn autocracy of General Franco in Galamian. I did not study with him (I could have; he died in 1981, just a few years after I stopped rewriting the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto and got contact lenses), so I cannot give direct testimony, but his former students display a surprising empathy for civil war victims when it comes to describing their education. Aside from the rank-and-file curriculum of the Juilliard School—theory, literature and materials, orchestra, bulimia—Galamian expected his students to prepare massive amounts of music in very short periods of time, for some a complete concerto every few weeks. To make this more possible, he ran a summer “camp,” Meadowmount, where the enlisted could practice their instruments without the distraction of academic requirements. The regimen at Meadowmount was five to six hours a day of intense practice, followed by time out for ping-pong, hush puppies and cornbread drenched in gravy, and unscheduled visits of panic. Galamian’s lessons were a precise fifty-five-minute event, not unlike psychiatric appointments, except that on his couch, you kept a lid on that id.
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