Always ready to profer advice to musicians, George Bernard Shaw once told the young Jascha Heifetz: ”Nothing must be perfect in this world, or else the gods become jealous and destroy it.” Shaw went on to suggest that the violin virtuoso make a habit of playing one wrong note every night before going to bed.
It is safe to assume that Heifetz ignored the advice. During a career that saw his first public performance at age 7 and his final public appearances when he was 71, Heifetz embodied the ideal of musical and technical perfection. When he died recently at 86, he was by general consent the greatest violinist of his time, and one of the greatest in history.
The American debut of the teenaged Russian-Jewish emigre at New York`s Carnegie Hall in 1917 not only instantly established Heifetz as the absolute monarch of the violin world, but it irrevocably changed the ground rules for virtuoso violin playing. Prominent in the audience were pianist Leopold Godowsky and violinist Mischa Elman. As the 16-year-old Heifetz played, the older violinist mopped his brow and remarked to Godowsky: ”It`s rather warm in here.” ”Not for pianists,” Godowsky replied.
From then on, a new fiddle hierarchy emerged: There was Heifetz, and there was every other violinist. The imperious authority, unruffled ease and patrician style of his playing transfixed audiences and left his rivals in despair. ”The Heifetz sound” became synonymous with a powerful yet silken tone, colored by a sensuous, subtly controlled vibrato. He played two fabled instruments, a 1731 Stradivarius and a 1741 Guarnerius on which Ferdinand David had premiered Mendelssohn`s E-Minor Concerto. But all violinists knew Heifetz would sound like Heifetz on a $30 factory fiddle.
Although he lacked the showmanship of Fritz Kreisler, the spiritual depth of Yehudi Menuhin, the intellect of Joseph Szigeti, so flawless was his technical and instrumental gift that even these great violin masters had to defer to him. Heifetz, Isaac Stern once remarked, ”has been in the inner ear of every violinist since at least 1930.”
On the concert stage, he was the Great Sphinx, body immobile, facial expression impassive, if highly concentrated. Yet his notorious reserve could not conceal the deep musical understanding that informed his interpretations of the great violin masterpieces from Bach to Tchaikovsky, whose Romantic warmth was no less genuine for being held at arm`s length.
Of course, there was more than a touch of the autocrat about Heifetz;
there had to be for him to hold his exalted position so long. In chamber music, he always insisted on (literally) having the upper hand. Heifetz, so the story goes, once was listening to playbacks of a work he had just recorded with his longtime colleague, cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Suddenly, Heifetz told the engineer to stop the tape machine. ”There must be something wrong,” the violinist said. ”I can almost hear the cello.”
Yet Heifetz and that famously autocratic conductor, Fritz Reiner, managed to subdue their egos long enough to collaborate on esteemed recordings of the Brahms and Tchaikovsky concertos. Theirs no doubt was a contest of musical wills in which each man believed he had the other under his thumb. The reason Heifetz and Reiner got along, one suspects, was that they worked on the same rarefied level, respecting each other`s musical integrity.
Musical modernism as such never appealed to Heifetz, who shunned Bartok, Berg and Schoenberg in favor of such conservative 20th Century composers as William Walton, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Louis Gruenberg and Miklos Rozsa, all of whom wrote concertos on commission from him. One idiosyncrasy was his insistence on playing salon pieces and transcriptions long after such fluff had disappeared from most recital programs. Critic Virgil Thomson scolded the violinist for being a purveyor of ”silk-underwear music,” though glitzy bonbons like ”Hora Staccato” were just the kind of fare Heifetz` adoring public came to hear.
Where Heifetz was most influential was in shaping the modern esthetic of technical excellence combined with beautiful, expressive playing. Before him, violinists often took outrageous liberties with the score, and sloppiness of execution was tolerated in the name of Romantic license. Heifetz demonstrated that great violin playing must be both beautiful and truthful-an inspired fusion of head, heart and an intangible something called personality.
Like many musical legends, Heifetz lived long enough to be considered something of an anachronism. The laissez-faire attitude of the modern world disturbed him. He railed against the young musicians who learn their craft sloppily, rush around to competitions and premature engagements, and lack the broad general culture they need as complete musicians. And he scorned performers who indulged in showy tricks for their own sake. ”It`s not enough to be an honest-to-God artist,” Heifetz dourly observed. ”A man has to be an acrobat.”
The price he paid for his lifelong devotion to the violin was emotional isolation from his fellow men. From all accounts, his was not a happy life. Both of his marriages ended in divorce. After he stopped playing in 1972, Heifetz became a recluse, shunning publicity, though he continued to give master classes at the University of Southern California. At his 80th birthday, he disappeared from his Beverly Hills home; the man who revolutionized violin playing in the 20th Century did not want any celebration or parties.
Yet his name will live on, through his recordings, through his teaching, through the lofty standards of violin playing to which he so rigorously adhered and, by his example, instilled in every other violin virtuoso. Perhaps the secret of Heifetz`s power as a musical communicator was the extent to which he was able to convince the listener that perfection is attainable. At least when Heifetz happened to be performing.
HEIFETZ`S RECORDING LEGACY SOURCE: John von Rhein.
Jascha Heifetz recorded his first disc (Schubert`s ”Ave Maria,” in the August Wilhelmj transcription) for the Victor Company on Nov. 9, 1917, two weeks after his American debut at Carnegie Hall. He made his last studio recordings for RCA Victor in 1970, and these, too, consisted of the encore-type pieces (in this case Debussy, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff) with which he was long associated.
Perhaps no other artist has put so much of his work on so many records spanning so many years, from the acoustic and electrical eras through the stereophonic age. In 1975, RCA, for whom the violinist made virtually all his recordings, gathered 133 Heifetz performances onto 24 records; the mammoth six-box retrospective was followed by a six-LP chamber music collection. All seven boxes-still in print-are essential to an understanding of Heifetz`s art. Seven volumes of Heifetz recordings are presently available on compact disc, and RCA plans to release seven more CDs on its midprice Gold Seal label in March. Those wishing to hear this violinist in the standard concertos should start with his nonpareil Beethoven and Brahms concertos, coupled on one CD. Another CD features his Tchaikovsky and Mendelssohn (E-Minor) concertos. Not to be missed, also, are his Sibelius and Prokofiev (G-Minor) concertos, coupled with the Glazounov A-Minor. Newly reissued is a collection of double concertos by Bach, Mozart and Brahms.
Then there are the concertos written for Heifetz. These LP-only recordings include the Korngold Concerto in D, Gruenberg`s Concerto and, on a single record, concertos by Walton and Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Heifetz the chamber musician is heard in a two-record set devoted to Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert piano trios as recorded in 1941 by RCA`s ”Million-Dollar Trio” of Heifetz, Arthur Rubinstein and Emanuel Feuermann.
Next spring, RCA plans to reissue on CD the Bach Sonatas and Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin, the Beethoven Violin Sonatas, as well as collections of French works and concertante pieces by Lalo, Saint-Saens and Sarasate.
A VIOLINIST PAYS HOMAGE TO THE MASTER For me and for most of my colleagues in the world of violinists, it is difficult to imagine our world without Jascha Heifetz. Most of us were youngsters when we first heard him on record or in concert. As mere youths, we stood in awe of this formidable artist. Little did I know that years later, from a more mature viewpoint, that awe and admiration would be increased tenfold; for only the skilled violinist can fully appreciate the genius that is Heifetz.
Many things set him apart from all the rest. He was not merely another great violinist. He was ”the” violinist, the pace-setter, the prophet of his art, the most universally respected fiddler of his generation, if not all generations. Someone told me that Joe Gingold, a famous violinist in his own right, once said, ”There are violinists, and there are violinists-and then there is Heifetz.” He was the mountain peak, the North Star to whom we looked for direction and inspiration. Even talented violinists were praised with this reservation: ”He`s no Heifetz.”
So what made him so different from the rest? Everything! His technical accuracy was legendary, both in performance and on record. His sound was utterly unique, well-focused and full of overtones. His vibrato was so easily recognizable that one had only to hear one bar of Jascha on the radio and instantly you knew who was playing. And those slides-those slides that only he could bring off-so sexy, so quick, so moving that we have all many times been moved to exclaim, ”Oh, Jascha!”
But more than these things, it was Heifetz the musician, the romantic, the poet, the patrician coordinator of all of these assets towards the goal of profoundly moving his audience that sets him forever in our affections as the greatest violinist of all. To hear Heifetz is to be emotionally stirred.
When asked the necessary ingredients for a concert artist, Heifetz answered ”enthusiasm, integrity and self-respect.” May we all walk in his steps.
