Heifetz As I Knew Him (Ayke Agus)

 

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Amadeus Press (February 15, 2001)

Language ‏ : ‎ English

Paperback ‏ : ‎ 260 pages

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 157467062X

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1574670622

Borrowed from Anne Potter Wilson Music Library at Vanderbilt University

Feedback ‏ : ‎ 

[Page 34] To be fair, Heifetz didn't expect a perfect note-for-note reading, only that I would recognize and play the essential parts of the score, but always in the proper tempo, using the proper dynamics, and always making music, never just reading notes. I felt good that I could take it all without complaint, for I soon realized that he recognized only two kinds of musicians: the ones who could do it and the rest who could not. The latter always complained, explained, and justified why something was impossible to do, which all amounted to nothing with him.

[Page 35] The proper attitude toward his demands was, in music and in everything else, to try the impossible and see if you could beat the odds. "Do it or else" was his principle in professional matters, and not everybody was willing to accept his rigid attitude. As he expected from himself the utmost and nothing less than the maximum of which he was capable, he applied the same almost brutal principle to all others.

[Page 46] Not long before Auer died, Heifetz visited him in his New York home as was his custom when he was in town. Already a famous violinist, he still came to the old man and played pieces he was preparing for a concert, perhaps seeking Auer's approval or maybe just trying to make the old man feel good. Just before Heifetz left this particular time, Auer brought out the cane, handed it over to him, and pronounced the famous words in his thick Hungarian accent, as Heifetz remembered them, "Jascha, some day you will teach, and you will be a good teacher."

[Page 50] He looked for mature students whom he considered young enough to be still pliable, but he rarely accepted prodigies. Having been one himself, he considered prodigies as suffering from a disease that required considerable luck to survive, but he knew well that luck was not on everybody's side. He wanted no pain in ruining and perhaps even emotionally crippling these children in the best years of their lives for the vague hope of a brilliant future. He wanted from his students a certain amount of maturity and willingness to devote themselves to the hard work he imposed on them.

[Page 55] After the student passed through the torment of scale playing, Heifetz sometimes wanted to hear an etude, other times a Bach partita or a Paganini caprice. All students had to be ready all the time with at least one movement from these pieces, from memory. For most raw recruits in his class, the idea of knowing something by heart meant that they could play the piece even in their sleep, mechanically, without giving it a second thought. To guard against such thoughtless knowledge, Heifetz often asked the student to play a recurring phrase with different fingerings, phrasing, or dynamics. For those who knew the piece only mechanically, so that it was in their fingers rather than their minds, such a request was impossible to fulfill, for mechanical playing does not allow thinking. To test the student and to help him or her break such mechanical habits, he sometimes stopped the performance in the middle of a phrase to request, "Go back four bars and try to play that passage again, but this time use different fingerings." Those who knew the piece only mechanically never could find that place. The acid test of knowing a piece was when he asked the student to go to just six bars from its end and play it again from there; surprisingly enough, even some of his seasoned students couldn't do it without a well-marked measure as a cue.

[Pages 57–58] To make amends and corrections, he first would try to explain verbally and vocally what improvements he wanted to hear, but if the student didn't catch on, and only then, he would pick up his violin and demonstrate a passage. His demonstrations never were in an arrogant "This is the way to play it" manner. I never ceased to be surprised at his humble approach to music. His and his students' egos were always secondary to the only important task of penetrating the depths of the piece under discussion. His demonstrations were those of a craftsman revealing all the secrets of his trade to his apprentice, showing the student how to handle the material he had to work with and teaching the student everything that he or she should absorb.

[Pages 107–108] My culture shock in this new country didn't come from whisky pouring out of the faucets, as my father had presumed, but rather from the laissez-faire way of life in my new family, which was in sharp contrast to ours in Indonesia. I was amazed that the food was never locked away, and that there was plenty of it. To my eyes plenty of it was wasted, too, but nobody seemed to care. The children were fearless; all had bold opinions of their own and freely expressed them to their parents. The parents, so it seemed to me, were scared of their children and anxious for their approval, rather than trying to discipline them. In Indonesia we were brought up from an early age with a great deal of anxiety over our future; these children didn't show the least concern over their own future, and neither did they seem concerned about their parents' opinion of how they should prepare for it. To my surprise, the word no had never been uttered in the presence of the family's youngest children, sever-year-old twins, and in case of emergency the older ones spelled it out among themselves. I heard some talk that the offensive word would cause irreparable damage to their psyche, which utterly baffled me. All in all, they seemed a wild bunch in comparison to my own family. Yet there was something that I had never experienced in my home life and upbringing: an emotional bond among children and parents, a demonstrative love and affection for one another. They generously shared their family feelings with me, and I quickly felt myself enveloped in hitherto unknown emotions. My parents never gave this kind of love to their children nor expected it from them. Love for them was something like obedience and respect for the elders, and they didn't seem to care how we children felt about one another. 

[Page 130] Heifetz loved to watch the sunset and the full moon. He kept track of the days when the full moon would appear and made sure he was at the beach when it happened. Those nights he sent me around to the neighbors asking them to turn off their outdoor lights so that he could watch the spectacle of the moonlight playing over the waves of the ocean without the interference of artificial lights. To the neighbors' credit, they usually complied. He spent hours in his teahouse on such nights watching the silvery moonlight dancing over the waves. I think these were the only moments when he felt content, much more so than in the limelight of the stage at the summit of his success. The lonely man, looking for company of his liking, found it in the setting sun and the rising moon.

[Pages 151–152] Auer, and Heifetz as well, maintained that besides strong nerves, one must have the proper mental attitude toward being successful. He who wants the end must also want the means leading to it. A certain mental toughness is an absolute necessity to persevere through endless hours of practicing. However, Heifetz often warned against mindless, uncritical practicing that may lead to bad habits rather than to fruitful results. There is also a point beyond which mental and physical fatigue makes practicing a waste of time. Interestingly enough, Heifetz was against recording one's own practicing and then using the recording to make corrections. He would rather have the student listen with critical ears to his own playing as he practiced and correct his mistakes immediately, for that's the only way to simulate performance conditions. Listening to recorded practicing could destroy spontaneity, as would too many markings in the score, and result in visual rather than aural knowledge of a piece which may easily lead to disaster. Even after a flawless performance Heifetz would often baffle a student by saying "Not ready" when the student thought he did his best and there was nothing more he could do. Heifetz was a master in detecting when music was becoming mechanical from over-practicing without becoming the performer's own.

Sometime in his early years Heifetz stated that he practiced, on the average, only three hours a day, but then he immediately added that mental preparation for each work took him a great deal more time. Memorizing a piece even before touching the instrument helps to prevent mental block, which may happen to any performer no matter how many hours he had practiced. However, under pressure the one not cut out to be a performer can forget practically everything he had learned. Even famous performers were not immune to bad nerves and mental block. According to Auer, Joachim was a nervous wreck on the stage, and Anton Rubinstein's most beautiful performances were not onstage but in friendly company where he felt more comfortable. Auer admired some of his students, including Heifetz, for having much less tendency toward stage fright than he and many of his famous contemporaries had.

Mental block can happen even to performers with excellent musical memory. Heifetz had an exceptionally accurate and lasting musical memory; he kept in evidence a very large repertory and remembered most of it without the slightest hesitation even late in his life. He usually played from memory and told me that he hadn't touched some of the pieces for several decades; yet he remembered not only the notes but even the performance markings and the fingerings, both his own and the ones printed in the score. He also knew quite well the piano parts and their performance markings. He admitted to me that he had had a memory lapse only once during his career, a veritable record, considering the enormous number of concerts he played.

[Pages 154–155] What makes a great performer? I would say that among the rarest talents in a musician is the ability to achieve a rhythmical coherence that fits the nature of the music performed. Quite a few performers and conductors can keep a steady tempo and rhythm, but few have the daring flexibility—the sense of freedom—to counterbalance the monotony that inevitably ensues. Heifetz had an ironclad sense of rhythm and could keep a steady tempo going forever, yet he endowed it with tiny, hardly noticeable changes within the measures, and even throughout whole phrases, to give the music a "lift", especially if the same rhythmical pattern continued for a long time. Such subtleties cannot be put into notation or dressed up in hard and fast rules; they are buried in the depths even of uninspiring scores for the performer to recognize and bring to life. "I feel nothing." Heifetz would say after a stiff, mannered performance, even one that was technically perfect, if it followed the printed score exactly. Nothing is more deadly than a "straight" reading of Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Schubert, or any music whose effect depends on not being metronomic. Only when the performer could rise above technical problems, to think and feel the music without showing the seams of technical preparation, would Heifetz grant him the distinction that he or she was ready.

Auer in his book on violin playing attributes great importance to nuances in interpretation. Using nuances means employing a host of different shades of dynamics, accents, tempo, rhythm, and color, varying the performance of repetitions, phrase endings, and cadences, playing with our without vibrato, changing the bowing technique, making the music move or holding it back; it also means paying attention to hundreds of details that may be lost on the general audience and perceived only by other violinists. Yet the global effect of nuances is not lost at all; a music lover might say of the performance, "It was beautiful and different from all other interpretations I have ever heard, but I don't exactly know what made it so different or how the musician did it." Nuances are rather on the craft side of music making, and a good master could teach any talented and perceptive student how to use them. What cannot be taught is to make musical sense of the details and to render the nuances freely and with taste in an inspired way without becoming mannered and mechanical. The way Joachim, Auer's master, taught nuances was to demonstrate a phrase and say with a benevolent smile, "That is the way you must play it." Heifetz would characterize such approach as "Going by the book," which he detested and considered a source of stiff mannerism.

Heifetz was one of those gifted musicians who could look at the a score and recognize a number of possible interpretations even before he played the piece. Composers are notoriously not the best interpreters of their own music; it takes a good performer to see beyond the composers' interpretative markings. Good examples are the Korngold, Goldmark, Conus, Vieuxtemps, and Spohr concertos and even the Strauss sonata; into these pieces Heifetz breathed the kind of life other performers attempted in vain. Being able to dazzle certainly helped, but he added to the interpretation of these pieces something that perhaps even their composers didn't see in them.

[Pages 159–160] He told me that once he played in the tropics while he had such a tremendous fever from an infection that he hardly knew where he was. During the performance he felt the auditorium swaying around him and his eyes were unfocused, yet he had such self-control and such an ingrained routine that he was able to go through with it, and nobody noticed anything unusual in his playing. "I had a concert to perform, and I did it, regardless of how I felt." He said.

[Pages 160–161] Heifetz often said, "Chamber music is as life should be, a matter of give and take," and chamber music players must develop an ability to listen to one another or the group falls apart and never makes it as a viable ensemble.

[Pages 176–177] That he was a family man gone astray I learned from his odd desire to have somebody in the house when he came home by himself at night. When he had a housekeeper, he asked her to wait for him in the kitchen or to come down from her apartment when he got home, whatever the hour. When he had no housekeeper and wanted to go somewhere alone, he asked me to come to his house at eleven in the evening, just to greet him at the door. Far from considering it petulant nonsense, I always obliged. Coming home to a cold hearth, for a man who had all the success one's heart could desire, is indeed a failure of a sort, regardless of why and how it happened. I always made sure that the fire was on in the fireplace when he came in, and a drink, fixed exactly the way I knew he liked it for a nightcap, was waiting for him on the bar.

[Page 178] I discovered from my conversations with Heifetz that the desire to see the wonders of the world must be implanted in most of us, just as the desire to hear good music is mostly a matter of exposure.

[Pages 179–180] When Heifetz stopped teaching on the USC campus in 1981, he continued his master classes in his studio at his home. He even gave private lessons to several young violinists who did not live in L.A. but made the trip once a month. I took care of the financial arrangements and rehearsed with them before their lessons. By 1984 this stopped as Heifetz began to lose interest, although practicing with me at the piano was never a chore for him. We would spend the major part of the afternoons playing through his violin repertory. His music library was organized into four categories: concertos, sonatas, short pieces, and his own transcriptions, all kept in alphabetical order. I accompanied him through the whole of this considerable collection several times in a period of about five years. He seemed to want to teach me everything I should know as an accompanist by getting me acquainted not only with the pieces he had played in his life, but also with other compositions he considered worth knowing. Whether we were playing an old warhorse or a completely new piece, we always played in the correct tempo, and he never let me just play the notes; he always expected the spirit and style of the piece to be there from the first reading even if some notes were left out. Heifetz often emphasized that a good sight reader should be able to pick out the essential passages in any kind of piece and give the impression of reading everything, and an accompanist should pick out all essential melodies that support, counter, or contrast with those of the violin. These sessions were a challenge for both of us. I think he was saying goodbye to all that he lived for and lived with, and I was soaking up from him everything that he was willing to part with in the twilight of his life. As an old man he still got all excited over minute details, shouted and screamed at me, called me "bloody no good," then rewarded my work the the praise "not too bad." Once he told me that only music could make him cry. Music rejuvenated him, passion sparkled in his blue eyes, and when he played the climax of a piece, it always gave me an electric shock. To build up the details toward a climax and then to finish with a feeling of satisfaction left behind was a specialty that came to him instinctively without the labor of cerebral calculations. Eventually he told me that at my first audition he had seen more in me than just a violinist from the jungles of Indonesia, even though my violin playing wasn't exactly at the level he expected from a progressive student. And once, after a session, he looked at me and said regretfully, "I should have been born later or you earlier; imagine, we could have spent our lives giving concerts together." I felt honored and deeply touched.

[Page 183] He told me that as a young man he had enough equipment to become a professional photographer. Photography has been his second passion, next to driving fast cars, but when I knew him he didn't even have a camera.

[Page 193] Once he showed me his own down- and up-bow staccatos in different tempos. He had perfect control over his bow no matter what speed he took, even when he was over eighty years old. I noticed that he never played the Hora staccato twice at the same speed; I played it with him several times and found this absolute control astonishing. He told me a small secret—though not an explanation—of this control: "Don't you ever let initial success, while playing a piece, get to your head, and congratulate yourself before the job is done; always remember, be it a one-minute or a twenty-five-minute piece, you have to concentrate on the mood and the character of it all the way to the last note without ever letting your concentration lapse."

[Page 204] He has always been a shrewd observer of human nature, but since he had a natural tendency to concentrate on everything that was bad, his observations made him bitter rather than tolerant and forgiving. As do many musicians who spend their lives practicing the minutest details, Heifetz tended to take everything seriously. He knew no measure of big or small, and that included even small talk. His wry humor was mostly derived from real-life situations, and he had no appreciation of or talent for wisecracks. As a true performer who considered it his job to make his audiences emote without showing his own feelings, Heifetz never laughed at his own jokes or stories, only sometimes cracked a crooked smile. It was difficult for him to adapt to the formulas and assumptions of society, and he didn't have to look hard to find the false notes and the insincerity in his fellow human beings. He always had to probe and find the brute beneath the thin veneer of civilization, then prick the balloons of inflated egos and generally make a pest of himself. In turn, society looked at this strange person with apprehension and a jaundiced eye, always suspecting that Heifetz really didn't belong there, yet kowtowing to him because he was a world-famous celebrity. In his younger years he liked to believe in the sincerity of this adulation, but he wasn't surprised when he found himself more and more isolated in proportion to his exit from the limelight. After he retired and retreated into his own world, he had to come to the realization that some of those who he trusted as his friends began to consider him a "has-been" and were reluctant to respond to his summons. In the past he had conditioned himself quite well to face the "two imposters," Triumph and Disaster, represented for him by success and failure, but he wasn't quite ready in his old age to face a new set of imposters, the most devastating ones, abandonment and despair.

[Page 208] Here I must say that he never talked about his own rank among violinists, never praised himself, and never fished for praise from others, yet he knew his own value without false modesty, as a true professional craftsman knows the value of his artwork in comparison to that of others.

[Page 212] Heifetz, in many aspects, remained the child who had missed the spanking, physical or figurative, when it was due. As he didn't play much with toys in his childhood, as an adult he played with people who were thrown his way by accident or necessity. His petulance toward his friends knew no limits; a last-minute invitation would be a command and declining it brought from him the caustic remark, "They are a stick in the mud." An excuse to get out of a previous engagement had a standard answer, "Ditch it." With this attitude he surely lost to attrition the number of people whom he could invite, because he rarely gave his friends a second chance; there were no rain checks if his invitation was once refused. Indeed, the word friend has to be understood, in his case, in the most superficial sense of the word. I don't know if Heifetz ever had a friend whom he could take into his confidence and with whom he could have passed the ultimate test of friendship—mutual tolerance for one another based on equality; tolerance between him and his "friends" seemed to be rather lopsided as he expected them to be subservient to all his whims.

[Pages 216–217] I explained to myself that Heifetz had spent the better part of his life, including his childhood, in an occupation that only people with the strongest will and determination can carry out successfully. He had an enormous talent and an enormous will to succeed on an almost superhuman level. When the object of this fantastic combination of talent and will was gone and he didn't concertize or teach anymore, this all-consuming will, looking for an object and not finding one, turned to self-destruction. This problem must be common in people of great drive and little education whose will cannot find another object to latch onto except the self and its immediate surroundings.

[Page 243] When he let himself be free from his accumulated burden, he was a warm and wonderful person who preserved his enthusiasm for playing music to the very end, for "Loss of enthusiasm is deadly for musicianship." As we played almost every day together, he would debunk the idea of the delicate, sensitive artist, for as he said, "I assure you that it takes the nerves of a bull-fighter, the digestion of a peasant, the vitality of a nightclub hostess, the tact of a diplomat, and the concentration of a Tibetan monk to lead the strenuous life of a virtuoso."

[Page 244] As he often said, "When I play a piece well I always hope that tomorrow I will play it even better." Just because Heifetz's performances are frozen in his recordings, one needn't hang onto them as the only authentic way to play these works. His message was just the opposite: be free to play as you feel, but feel sincerely and say something with your music, something that is your own.

[Page 245] Then he firmly stated that he could never think of a greater praise for a man than stating that "he had died in his boots." He rambled on about how envious he was of an artist who had died onstage, and if he wanted to be buried, which he did not, he would have ordered a tombstone for himself with the inscription, "He died playing flying staccato."