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 unforgettable 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.
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.
By Jack Riemer, Houston Chronicle
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