Among denizens of the Fine Arts Building, there’s an ongoing debate about the age of Mr. Perlman — as its oldest tenant is invariably called.
In or out of his presence, no music lover would presume to use his first name, George. It would be a little like referring to Beethoven as Ludwig, or calling out to a passing Mozart, “How’s it going, Wolf?”
Perlman himself will only answer the question with a biblical allusion: “Let’s just say, I got here before the Flood.”
In fact, it was in 1926 that he signed his first lease on a performance studio at the Fine Arts Building, our local equivalent of a temple to the muses. Ever since, his students have been adding the sounds of their violins to the cacophony of strings, woodwinds, brass and singing voices that echo through the building in a symphony of atonality worthy of Schoenberg.
The best guess is that Perlman is either 101 or 102.
That would make him only a dozen years younger than the building itself, which was built in 1885 and houses innumerable music teachers. The calculations are lent a bit of supporting evidence by a recent change in Perlman’s work habits.
“I used to see students six days a week,” he said, as one pupil put away his violin and the next one opened his instrument case. “Now, I’m only here Wednesday through Saturday, from 9 to 7.”
Not much else has changed over the years in Perlman’s studio, a windowless room decorated with faded prints and photographs of violins and violinists. A notice hangs on one of the lime green walls announcing that, as of Sept. 1, 1985, his tuition is being raised to $25 a session. Each lesson still begins not with scales or bowing exercises but a psychological inventory of master and student.
“I had some bad news from the doctor, who says I’m getting a cataract,” Perlman lamented as Tony Kawalkowski, 41, set the sheet music for his lesson on a music stand. “And I’m terribly worried about one of my students who has gotten herself into a real mess.”
Kawalkowski, a professional violinist who has been studying with Perlman for 24 years, replied that he, too, had been down in the dumps recently. While rosining his bow, he noted that such weekly reports are a natural corollary of his teacher’s pedagogical method.
“Mr. Perlman is like a second father,” Kawalkowski said.
“To all his students,” added Pierre Clarke, 75, who had taken a lesson the previous hour.
Kawalkowski began to play, accompanied by Perlman who was seated at a piano. About five years ago, the centenarian stopped playing the violin himself, saying his fingers were getting too stiff. Yet the piano seems to show its age much more than he does. Several keys are chipped or faded.
The two of them worked through a few bars somberly, even a little mechanically. But after a bit, the vigor of their playing picked up dramatically, and by the end of the piece, each wore a broad smile.
“Music soothes the soul,” Perlman said of their transformation. “It lifts us, if only for a moment, out of the mundane circumstances and vexing problems of our everyday lives.”
Years ago, when the 20th Century was young, Perlman concertized, appearing as a soloist with various symphony orchestras and leading his own string ensemble. But he didn’t like having to hop from town to town, wherever his booking agent could find him an engagement. So he retired to the Fine Arts Building, where he has been teaching and composing–and, most especially, sharing his philosophy of life — ever since.
That detour in his career path was, in a sense, a return to a family tradition, he noted. In the Ukraine, where he was born, Perlman’s ancestors had been famed Talmudic scholars. His great grandfather once represented his fellow villagers in front of the czar of Russia, the force of his moral argument convincing the czar to free them from the oppressions of the local nobility.
“I found that my vocation,” Perlman said, “was to be a rabbi of the violin.”
For some Chicago families, he has been performing that service for generations. In 1935, the parents of Joseph Golan knocked on Perlman’s door. They had given their 4-year-old a tin violin, which he straightaway outgrew. After working with the boy for three years, Perlman decided that Golan was ready to make his debut — in front of the famed Tribune cartoonist, John T. McCutcheon.
Perlman had been deeply moved by McCutcheon’s much reprinted “Injun Summer” panel, which depicted a grandfather telling his grandson that, every year, when the leaves turn color, the spirits of the Indians return to long-ago hunting grounds. Perlman had composed a tone poem musically echoing that theme and arranged a personal performance for McCutcheon.
“When Mr. McCutcheon heard a 7-year-old playing `Indian Summer’ on the violin,” Perlman recalled, “he was deeply, deeply moved.”
Golan became a professional musician and is currently the principal second violinist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. When Golan’s son Lawrence expressed an interest in the violin, the father brought him to Perlman’s studio. Lawrence Golan is currently the concertmaster of the Portland (Maine) Symphony Orchestra. Whenever he concertizes, he invariably chooses “Indian Summer” as his encore.
“I’ll tell the story it represents and that my father debuted it at the age of 7, that the composer was my teacher, too, and that he still gives lessons at the age of 102,” Lawrence Golan said, speaking by phone. “Before my bow even touches the strings, the audience will be misty-eyed.”
Lawrence Golan has recorded a CD of “Indian Summer” and other Perlman compositions (Albany Records). On June 28, he will present a concert of Perlman’s music at New York’s Carnegie Hall, in a program celebrating the contribution teachers make to our musical culture.
Many of Perlman’s works were inspired by episodes from Jewish history, like his “Elegy and Habanera,” which evokes the Spanish Inquisition. Others of his pieces draw upon the alternately sweet and melancholy themes of Hebrew prayer chants.
“Today’s violinists are masters of technique,” Perlman said. “But they don’t play from the heart like Jascha Heifetz did. Nobody could tell a musical story like he did.”
Technique is not to be ignored, Perlman added, recalling his friend Jack Benny, who would drop by whenever he was in Chicago and who made playing a squawky violin part of his act. “He really was lousy,” Perlman recalled.
Yet technical proficiency can’t, by itself, reveal music’s deeper potential; the hint it can give us of our place in the order of creation. Some people, he noted, deny the existence of a supreme being, thinking this world but a matter of chance. But whenever he plays or listens to another performer, he’s once again convinced that there is more to life than material existence.
“Bach was a big, fat German whose only interest generally was in putting a plate of sauerbraten in front of his face,” Perlman said. “But then he would sit down at a keyboard and the heavens would open. A genius like his could only have been sent to us with a message that there’s a spiritual dimension to life.”
Yet Perlman never did succeed in convincing his own father of that proposition. An immigrant with a tiny clothing shop on the West Side, the elder Perlman desperately wanted to see his son enter a profession. He equated musicians with the klezmorim, the itinerant players who scratched out a thin living in the shtetls, or impoverished Jewish villages of Eastern Europe. He remained unreconciled to Perlman’s vocation even after seeing him play in the Auditorium Theater.
“He said: `You did pretty good,’ ” Perlman recalled. ” `Except at one point in the second movement.’ My father was from the school that didn’t believe in handing out compliments.”
Yet whatever he lacked in the way of support from his family must certainly have been made up for by now in the adulation of generations of students. One of them once sent Albert Einstein, who had a passion for the violin, some of Perlman’s sheet music. The great physicist sent Perlman a photograph of himself, inscribed: Mit herzlichem dank — With heartfelt thanks.
“Mr. Perlman is my inspiration,” said Kawalkowski at the end of his lesson. “He’s what keeps me going.”
And how long does Perlman expect to play that role? Just that morning, he noted, he had gotten a clue while eating a grapefruit.
“A little yellow seed flew out on the table,” Perlman said. “I called my wife over to see it, saying: `That seed is the Almighty’s way of preparing for spring. I think it must be a sign he intends to keep me around, at least for one more season.”
