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.
Earlier
this year, 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 his 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 slow, 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 their 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.
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 front 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."