On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak
Perlman, a 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.
