[nukkad] Playing A Violin With Three Strings

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I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, 
and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers. 
-Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet and artist (1883-1931)
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Playing A Violin With Three Strings
    Jack Riemer             

                                                      
                     

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.


 



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