Jascha Heifetz
Jascha Heifetz was a Russian-American violinist, widely regarded as one of the greatest violinists of all time. Born in Vilnius, he was soon recognized as a child prodigy and was trained in the Russian violin school in St. Petersburg. Accompanying his parents to escape the violence of the Russian Revolution, he moved to the United States as a teenager, where his Carnegie Hall debut was rapturously received. Fritz Kreisler, another leading violinist of the twentieth century, said after hearing Heifetz's debut, "We might as well take our fiddles and break them across our knees."
By the age of 18, Heifetz was the highest-paid violinist in the world. He had a long and successful concert career, including wartime service with the United Service Organizations. After an injury to his right arm in 1972, he switched his focus to teaching.
Early life
Heifetz was born into a Lithuanian-Jewish family in Vilnius. Reuven Heifetz, Jascha's father, was a local violin teacher and served as the concertmaster of the Vilnius Theatre Orchestra for one season before it closed down. When Jascha was an infant, his father conducted a series of tests to observe how his son reacted to his violin playing. This convinced him that Jascha had exceptional musical potential. Before Jascha turned two, his father purchased a small violin for him and began teaching him basic violin techniques, including bowing and simple fingering.In 1906, at the age of five, Heifetz began attending the local music school in Vilna, where he studied under Ilya Malkin. He was recognized as a child prodigy and made his public debut at the age of seven in Kovno, performing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. In 1910, he joined the violin class of Ionnes Nalbandian at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and later studied for six years with the renowned violin teacher Leopold Auer. Heifetz's education under Auer emphasized a rigorous, technical approach that prioritized scales, a clear sound, and mental discipline over natural talent. This experience informed Heifetz's austere performance style.
He played in Germany and Scandinavia, and met Fritz Kreisler for the first time in a Berlin private house, in a "private press matinee on May 20, 1912. The home was that of Arthur Abell, the pre-eminent Berlin music critic for the American magazine, Musical Courier. Among other noted violinists in attendance was Fritz Kreisler. After the 12-year-old Heifetz performed the Mendelssohn violin concerto, Abell reported that Kreisler said to all present, 'We may as well break our fiddles across our knees.'"
Heifetz visited much of Europe while still in his teens. In April 1911, he performed in an outdoor concert in St. Petersburg before 25,000 spectators; there was such a reaction that police officers needed to protect the young violinist after the concert. In 1914, he performed with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Arthur Nikisch. The conductor said he had never heard such an excellent violinist.
Career
To avoid the Russian Revolution, Heifetz and his family left Russia in 1917, traveling by rail to the Russian far east and then by ship to the United States, arriving in San Francisco. On October 27, 1917, Heifetz played for the first time in the United States, at Carnegie Hall in New York City, and became an immediate sensation.Fellow violinist Mischa Elman in the audience asked "Do you think it's hot in here?", whereupon the pianist Leopold Godowsky, in the next seat, replied, "Not for pianists."
In 1917, Heifetz was elected an honorary member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the national fraternity for men in music, by the fraternity's Alpha chapter at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. At 16, he was perhaps the youngest person ever elected to membership in the organization. Heifetz remained in the country and became a United States citizen in 1925. A story circulates that tells of an interaction with one of the Marx Brothers: when he told the brother that he had been earning his living as a musician since the age of seven, he received the reply, "Before that, I suppose, you were just a bum."
On April 17, 1926, Heifetz performed at Ein Harod, then the center of Mandatory Palestine’s kibbutz movement.
In May 1945 Heifetz played with his son for Ivan Konev and Omar Bradley in Kassel.
In 1954, Heifetz began working with pianist Brooks Smith, who was Heifetz's accompanist for many years until he changed to Ayke Agus as his accompanist in retirement. He was also accompanied in concert for more than 20 years by Emanuel Bay, another immigrant from Russia and a personal friend. Bay facilitated the commission of Miklós Rózsa's Violin Concerto, which Heifetz premiered in 1956. Heifetz's musicianship was such that he would demonstrate to his accompanist how he wanted passages to sound on the piano, and would even suggest which fingerings to use.
After the seasons of 1955–56, Heifetz announced that he would sharply curtail his concert activity, saying "I have been playing for a very long time." In 1958, he tripped in his kitchen and fractured his right hip, resulting in hospitalization at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital and a near fatal staphylococcus infection. He was invited to play Beethoven at the United Nations General Assembly, and entered leaning on a cane. By 1967, Heifetz had considerably curtailed his concert performances.
Technique and timbre
Heifetz was "regarded as the greatest violin virtuoso since Paganini", wrote Lois Timnick of the Los Angeles Times. "He set all standards for 20th-century violin playing...everything about him conspired to create a sense of awe", wrote music critic Harold Schonberg of The New York Times. "The goals he set still remain, and for violinists today it's rather depressing that they may never really be attained again", wrote violinist Itzhak Perlman.Virgil Thomson described Heifetz as being the master of playing "silk underwear music", a characterization he did not intend as a compliment. Other critics argue that he infused his playing with feeling and reverence for the composer's intentions. His style of playing was highly influential in defining the way modern violinists approached the instrument. His use of rapid vibrato, emotionally charged portamento, fast tempi, and superb bow control coalesced to create a highly distinctive sound that makes Heifetz's playing instantly recognizable to aficionados. Itzhak Perlman, who himself is known for his rich warm tone and expressive use of portamento, described Heifetz's tone as like "a tornado" because of its emotional intensity. Perlman said that Heifetz preferred to record relatively close to the microphone—and as a result, one would perceive a somewhat different tone quality when listening to Heifetz during a concert hall performance.
Heifetz was very particular about his choice of strings. He used a silver-wound Tricolore gut G string, plain unvarnished gut D and A strings, and a Goldbrokat medium steel E string, and employed clear Hill-brand rosin sparingly. Heifetz believed that playing on gut strings was important in rendering an individual sound.
Early recordings
Heifetz made his first recordings in Russia during 1910–11, while still a student of Leopold Auer. The existence of these recordings was not generally known until after Heifetz's death, when several sides, including François Schubert's L'Abeille, were reissued on an LP included as a supplement to The Strad magazine.On November 9, 1917, shortly after his Carnegie Hall debut, Heifetz made his first recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company/RCA Victor where he remained for most of the rest of his career. On October 28, 1927, Heifetz was the starring act at the grand opening of Tucson, Arizona's now-historic Temple of Music and Art. For several years, in the 1930s, Heifetz recorded primarily for His Master's Voice in the UK because RCA Victor cut back on expensive classical recording sessions during the Great Depression; these His Master's Voice discs were issued in the United States by RCA Victor. Heifetz often enjoyed playing chamber music. Various critics have blamed his limited success in chamber ensembles to the fact that his artistic personality tended to overwhelm his colleagues. Collaborations include his 1941 recordings of piano trios by Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms with cellist Emanuel Feuermann and pianist Arthur Rubinstein as well as a later collaboration with Rubinstein and cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, with whom he recorded trios by Maurice Ravel, Tchaikovsky, and Felix Mendelssohn. Both formations were sometimes referred to as the Million Dollar Trio. Heifetz also recorded some string quintets with violinist Israel Baker, violists William Primrose and Virginia Majewski, and Piatigorsky.
Heifetz recorded the Beethoven Violin Concerto in 1940 with the NBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Toscanini, and again in stereo in 1955 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Munch. A live performance of an NBC radio broadcast from April 9, 1944, of Heifetz playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with Toscanini and the NBC Symphony has also been released, unofficially.
He performed and recorded Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Violin Concerto at a time when Korngold's scoring of films for Warner Bros. prompted many classical musicians to develop the opinion Korngold was not a "serious" composer and to avoid his music in order to avoid being associated with him.