I vividly remember that grey spring day of 1950 as I walked
down Arbat Street in Moscow on the way from my violin lesson. A
woman, probably in her 30′s, suddenly approached me.
“I see you are a violinist,” she said. (Of course, I was
carrying my violin case.) “Maybe you would be interested in buying
some old violin records. My father recently died and left a few
boxes of records, and I really don’t know what to do with them. If
someone would buy them, I want, well, maybe, half of what they would
be in the store, and if you are interested, I live nearby, just a
couple minutes walking distance.”
No doubt, it was my lucky day. Just a few years before, my closest
friend Ilya Dvorkin and I had begun to collect
violin records. We were especially interested in antique records.
The names of Joachim, Sarasate, Ysaye, Kreisler, Huberman, Kubelik,
Elman, and Heifetz were legendary–a magic spell surrounded them.
Just consider the fact that Joachim was born in 1831, when Paganini
was at the height of his career. That was the year of the most
famous recital in music history. Paganini had played in Paris in
the presence of Liszt, Mendelssohn, Rossini, Donizetti, Heine,
Sand, Delacroix, Balzac, and many other giants of music, literature
and painting. And if Paganini’s playing was impossible for us to
hear, maybe we could get an idea, indirectly, of his playing
through comparison. Indeed, Liszt, who was stunned by Paganini’s
playing later in his life, played recitals with Joachim…and
Mendelssohn had played a chamber music concert with Paganini, and
then, only ten years after that, had conducted an orchestra with the
13 year old Joachim playing the Beethoven Concerto. And so,
listening to the recordings of Joachim (remember that he was one of
the greatest and the most distinguished violinists from the pinnacle
of the Romantic epoch), we sense the spirit of the time of Paganini,
Liszt, Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn…truly, it is like having a
time machine.
Of course, acquiring the records of non-Russian artists was
not an easy matter, given the circumstances in which we lived then.
It was the darkest time in the Soviet Empire. The campaign against
everything foreign, which was called “cosmopolitanism,” was at its height.
All but Russian names were banned. The radio played records only
by non-emigrated Russian artists. After 1948, there was not even
one broadcast of Heifetz, Kreisler, Elman or Huberman. For us who
lived behind the Iron Curtain, these were almost alien species from
another planet.
As is customary among collectors, private exchange is the only
way to obtain rare, antique records. My friend, Ilya Dvorkin, who then worked in
the theater, was on tour in the town of Ryazan about 60 miles from
Moscow. There he found in the gramophone store a record of Yehudi
Menuhin playing the Capriccio No. 24 by Paganini. Most likely, the
record had been in stock for years. Nobody in this town knew who
Menuhin was and nobody had bought it. So, we bought the seven records
that made-up the entire stock. Later, we traded them for something else.
It was still the time of 78 rpm records, and we played them using
wooden needles. Once we had fun tricking a man by splitting the
end of the needle so that when the needle was placed on the record,
you would hear two violins, sounding like a canon. We told this
innocent man that the great violinist-virtuoso of the last century,
Sauret, who wrote famous cadenzas for Paganini’s concertos, was
playing his version of Paganini’s Capriccio No. 24. The fellow was
absolutely amazed. The next day he told all his friends about the
fantastic performance, and soon after, one of my colleagues told
me, to my great amusement, that he had heard a recording of
Paganini himself playing the Capriccio in the most unusual and
impossible way!
But now, back to Arbat Street. The woman and I walked to an
old wooden house which had a distinctive smell of wet clothing,
cooking food, cats living under the stairways, and something else
beyond description.
“There are the boxes,” she said, pointing to two boxes on the
floor. “Look through them.” Indeed, they were truly records from
the beginning of the century. Among them was one of Varia Panina,
a very famous gypsy singer of the second part of the 19th century.
There were Schaliapin records and those of the violinists Kubelik,
Thibaud, and Franz Von Vecsey on a Fonotipia label. Among them,
there was a label reading: “A ten year old violin virtuoso, Jascha Heifetz.”
It was recorded, as could be seen in the photograph of the label,
for the Russian Gramophone Society. The date was 1911. Hurriedly,
I paid a few rubles to the woman, feeling fortunate to have been
carrying some money, and left the place.
I brought the Heifetz record to the U.S. without the slightest
idea that it was an unknown disc. In 1978, I saw a Heifetz
discography and noticed that his first recording was attributed to
the year 1917 when he was already in the U.S. My first reaction
was to call Mr. Pfieffer, who was the producer of the Heifetz albums,
to tell him about my record. He told me that the project was
already finished and that nothing could be added. Also, he said he
had heard rumors of the Heifetz Russian recording, but Mr.
Heifetz himself did not remember doing any recordings before coming
to the U.S. Only in 1985, when The Strad Magazine was in preparation
for Heifetz’s 85th birthday issue, did I receive a call
from editor Eric Wen inquiring about this record. Someone had told
him about the existence of such a rarity, and he asked me if I
would be willing to produce a recording of the record in order to
create a flexible disc for the special Strad issue. And that is
the story of how the recording became known to the music world.
Meanwhile, I had an idea for a radio program dedicated to
Heifetz. In the beginning, I planned one thirty-minute program.
But in the working process, the program expanded to a three-hour,
six-part program. This program, as well as others totaling a series
of 32 thirty-minute programs, were broadcast on the classical music
station WFMR in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
My general aim had been to show Heifetz’s career
chronologically from his first recording in 1911 until his last in
1972. But I thought it would be especially interesting to analyze
the Heifetz style of playing and the roots of his art, which in my
opinion evolved directly from cantorial singing. This is a very
important point. As in my other programs on Auer and his violin
school, I show that during the main part of Auer’s teaching career
in Russia from 1868 to 1900, he did not produce any significant or
important artist. Looking through the list of Auer’s students of
this period, we see almost nothing but Russian names. But
something happened around the turn of the century. Jews in Czarist
Russia lived in areas known as Pales of Settlement. In the
Ukraine, Byelorussia and Lithuania, in small towns and villages,
lived the poor Jewish population, oppressed and stripped of all
civil rights, who from time to time were devastated by terrible
pogroms. It was life in a closed circle. Where was there to go? To live in
large cities was strictly prohibited by the Tsarist government.
Only a few were able to get special permission to live in St.
Petersburg, Moscow, or Kiev. Confined within the close circle of
the shtetl, Jews concentrated around the synagogue, which was the
center of their spiritual life. The Hassidic movement was the main
stream of Jewish life there, and music was an integral part of
Hassidism. “Fiddler on the Roof” became the musical symbol of the
Jew from the shtetl. There the cantorial art of singing was highly
respected and each and every Jewish community took great pride in its
own cantor. The great voice, the most dramatic presentation of the
chant, the best ability for sobbing-singing, the most perfect technique of the
coloratura passages were all competitive factors between cantors.
And the sound of the cantorial chant was like mother’s milk to the
Jewish children from the Pale of Settlement who had been listening to
these chants from the earliest age. The cantorial chant was second
nature to the musical soul of these Jewish children.
Mischa Elman, the first of Auer’s superstars, was of this
breed.. Auer heard him in Odessa when Elman was 11 years old, took
him under his supervision, and obtained permission for him and his
father to live in St. Petersburg. After only one year and four
months with Auer, Elman played a sensational debut in Berlin.
Henry Roth was absolutely right in saying that it is hard to
believe that Auer could change Elman’ s playing during one year,
especially considering that Auer himself was an old-fashioned
violinist in the tradition of the Spohr-Joachim school with its
minimal usage of vibrato (resulting in a dry sound), limited
emotional projection, and little stress on technical perfection. So
it was Elman himself, who through his playing was teaching Auer a
new concept of violin playing.
After Elman, an army of Jewish children with fiddles under
their arms and cantorial chants in their hearts, began their exodus
from the Pale of Settlement. Looking at the list of Auer’s
students from this period, we see almost exclusively Jewish names.
Auer’s class flourished with the names of Efrem Zimbalist, Miron Poliakin,
Richard Burgin, Mischa Elman, Joseph Achron, Toscha Seidel, Jascha Heifetz…and
all of them in some way or another recreated cantorial singing on
their violins. The Jewish soul was literally crying out, lamenting
and weeping in their playing. And Auer was responsible for
obtaining permits for all his Jewish students to live in St.
Petersburg.
After the program on Heifetz, I produced a program on Yehudi
Menuhin. Menuhin was born in the U.S. of Russian Jewish parents
who, before coming to America, spent a good number of years in
Palestine. Menuhin’s playing (I concentrated mainly on his Golden
Era of the 1930s and 40s) was probably even more Jewish in character
than that of the Auer school.
The name of Wieniawski is easily associated with Paganini’s
epoch. He was born in 1835 and had close connections with such
notable Paganini contemporaries as Ernst and Vieuxtemps. And
Paganini’s playing was, of course, fresh during the years of these
great violinists. Wieniawski’s teacher was J. Massart (1811-1892).
Massart was a professor of the Paris Conservatory and a very
prominent violinist himself who, as a matter of fact, played
recitals with Liszt. Wieniawski studied with Massart between 1844
and 1848. After Paganini, he is without a doubt the most important
figure in violin art of the 19th Century. Quite intriguing is the
fact that Fritz Kreisler, who was born in 1875 and became one of
the most important violinists of the 20th Century, studied with
this same man, J. Massart, between 1885 and 1887. In his letter to
Kreisler’s father, Massart wrote: “I have been the teacher of
Wieniawski and many others, but little Fritz will be the greatest
of them all.” To all those imagining just how Wieniawski played
the violin, it might be interesting to read what Kreisler himself
said: “I believe Massart liked me because I played in the style of
Wieniawski. You will recall that Wieniawski intensified the
vibrato and brought it to heights never before achieved, so that it
became known as the ‘French Vibrato’. Vieuxtemps also took it up,
and after him Eugene Ysaye, who became its greatest exponent, and
I. Joseph Joachim, for instance, disdained it.”
Giving lectures on “An Historical Perspective on the Art of
Violin Playing since the Beginning of the Recording Era” in
Chicago, Milwaukee, Moscow ( Russia), and at an international workshop in Eisenstadt,
Austria, I was astonished at how little is known presently about the
violin playing of the past, its technical level, its style, and its
sound quality. Many professional musicians in the field of violin
have very little idea that violin playing was not always the same,
but has changed significantly in the last 150 years. Listening to the
recordings of the great personalities of the violin from the
previous era must, I believe, be extremely important now that
standardization of playing takes more and more precedence over
personalization of performance. We are losing the most important
aspect of any art, which is the personality of the creative artist. And
hearing the playing of Kreisler, Heifetz, Elman, and Menuhin could
inspire and enlighten today’s playing immensely. Heifetz
established the modern, extremely high level of perfection in
violin playing. Violin art benefitted immeasurably from the
Heifetz phenomenon, but, through the years, the personal approach
to interpretations of musical works has diminished in direct
proportion to these steadily rising levels of perfection. If the
renditions of the great masters’ pieces could combine the technical
perfection of today with the great personalization of the past,
the next step in violin art will be achieved.
Yuri Beliavsky