Itzhak Pearlman

USING ALL WE HAVE

On
November 18, 1995, world renowned violinist, Itzhak Perlman, 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 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 unforgettable sight.

When he reaches his chair, 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.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 find another violin or else find another string for this one.” But
he didn’t. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and 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 night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that.
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 — sounds 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. Everyone was on their feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything
they could to show how much they appreciated what he had done.  He
smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then 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. And who knows? Perhaps that is the way of life —
not just for artists but for all of us.  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.

https://www.inspirationline.com/EZINE/25OCT2010.htm