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Article from the Houston Chronicle 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 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. People who were there that night thought to themselves: "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,
recomposing 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
way 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.


-- Jack Riemer, Houston Chronicle


From an email by Scott.