Mellotronists

On Nov. 18, 1995,  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 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 awesome 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. 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 then 
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,  re-composing 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 from  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."   What a powerful 
line that is. It has  stayed in my mind ever since I heard it. And who knows? 
Perhaps that is the  definition of life - not just for artists but for all of 
us. Here is a man who  has prepared all his life to make music on a violin of 
four strings, who, all of  a sudden, in the middle of a concert, finds 
himself with only three strings; so  he makes music with three strings, and the 
music he made that night with just  three strings was more beautiful, more sacred, 
more memorable, than any that he  had ever made before, when he had four 
strings. So, 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. AUTHOR 
UNKNOWN TO ME  
 
 
How powerful is that?