The Violinist

On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to give a

concert at Avery Fisher Hall at LincolnCenter 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 nightItzhak

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 the m 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.