“It is very lonely at the top. In order to get there,
you have to sacrifice an awful lot.” (Jascha Heifetz to
violin maker Hans Benning)
“He was a very private man who, to the world, seemed remote
and hard to know. And, I think, maybe he didn’t know who
he was either - except when he was holding his violin.”
(Ayke Agus, Heifetz’s former student and accompanist)
“Sometimes people go on stage and maybe they hide what
they feel through their art. Their art is the way they communicate.
Maybe their art is the way that helps them, rather than a normal
social way of communicating.” (Itzhak Perlman)
“Born in Russia. First lessons at 3. Debut in Russia at
7. Debut in America at 17. That’s all there is to say.”
(Heifetz, describing his career)
The last of Peter Rosen’s films that I reviewed, If
I were a rich man: the life of Jan Peerce (see
here), was essentially a piece of hagiography. Peerce was,
by all accounts - or, at least, all the ones that were cited
in the documentary - a warm, good-natured man of whom no-one
had a bad word to say.
However, the subject of this new film, Jascha Heifetz, professionally
hyped and still widely accepted as The Violinist of the
(twentieth) Century, was a much more complex and interesting
personality whose profile on film - from which the above quotations
and others below are taken - leaves us with a great many issues
to ponder, not all of them specifically about music.
Put simply, Heifetz seems to have been the product of an upbringing
that was so starved of family affection and so solely directed,
from the earliest age, towards fulfilling his father’s
ambition for him, that he was left with deep psychological scars.
These had a huge impact on the way he lived his personal life
thereafter.
He seems, indeed, to have been rendered virtually incapable
of sustaining normal human relationships. His two marriages
ended in divorce and it appears that he never developed warm,
loving relationships with any of his children, all three of
whom were ultimately excluded from his will. Plenty of witnesses
appear on film to offer testimony that shows him behaving in
distinctly asocial ways - whether refusing to speak normally
on the telephone, summoning his staff by honking a bicycle horn
in their general direction or dropping in on his acquaintances
unannounced and expecting to be fed, watered and humoured. The
person he seems to have been closest to in his final years,
his ex-student Ayke Agus, speaks extensively on camera and provides
some interesting anecdotal material. Even she, it seems, can
offer few real insights into the way in which his mind worked.
Heifetz’s notorious personal froideur, his impeccably
groomed stage presence and his physical and apparently emotional
impassivity during performance led many commentators to go on
to describe his music-making as cold and unemotional too. The
man himself was clearly bemused by that assessment, observing
that “The way my violin sounds is the way I feel inside.
It is a very personal feeling. Most of the time my emotions
are turbulent underneath.” This film does great revisionist
service, in fact, by the emphasis it places on the sheer passion
of Heifetz’s playing. We hear from such expert judges
as Itzhak Perlman, who describes him as a “very hot player”,
and Ida Haendel (“It was fire! Absolute fire!”).
Perhaps it was simply a mistake for Heifetz to allow himself
to be filmed so often. He loved cameras - his home movies provide
Mr Rosen with rich pickings. He also enjoyed appearing in such
Hollywood productions as They shall have music (aka Melody
of youth) in 1939 and Carnegie Hall eight years later.
It is arguable that, to make a fair assessment of his playing,
one should divorce it from those accompanying - and musically
misleading - visual images of that Buster Keaton-like poker-face.
This fascinating documentary film is full of unexpected material.
We are so used to the stern image that the later Heifetz projected
for promotional purposes. The early, informal photographs and
cine-film showing him having fun (driving fast cars, playing
tennis, shooting home movies, throwing parties and getting to
know girls) come as something of a surprise. He later offered
the explanation that “I had to wait until I was a young
man before I could act like a child.” We are also usefully
reminded of the glamorous pose, complete with Clark Gable moustache,
that Heifetz cultivated in the 1930s. Then again there are his
ventures into popular music in the following decade, whether
accompanying Bing Crosby or penning songs of his own under the
pen name Jim Hoyl - it appears thus on a piece of sheet music
we’re shown, but the end credits prefer “Hoyle”.
It’s also fair to point out that Heifetz could, when he
chose, be rather nice. His students, by all accounts, found
him completely intimidating in class (one refers to it as having
been a “scary place”). On the other hand he also
contributed anonymously to their medical bills and invited them
to his home for end-of-term parties. Perhaps the period of Heifetz’s
life that showed him in the best light was World War II. He
toured extensively for three years while entertaining troops
in the field. A particularly vivid vignette is of the time when
a violent tropical rainstorm meant that only one soldier turned
up and took a seat far off in the back row. Heifetz insisted
on going ahead and playing the recital just for that lone soldier
and said later that it had been his best performance ever.
Learning the truth about Jascha Heifetz’s life is, overall,
a rather depressing experience. On screen, his personal lawyer
ruminates “Was he lonely or unhappy? I can’t call
him unhappy … I can’t call him happy … He
was perfectly stoic at almost all times.” Meanwhile, cellist
Nathaniel Rosen offers an even more downbeat verdict: “I
don’t know if he really had friends. There were people
that called themselves his friends and behaved as if they were
his friends, but there was an atmosphere of fear around him
quite often.”
Unless, as seems highly unlikely, Heifetz ever consulted an
analyst and the reports ever come to light, it’s probable
that this film will offer as good an assessment of the man
that we are ever likely to have. God’s fiddler
doesn’t, it is true, tell us very much about Heifetz’s
music-making that we couldn’t discover equally
well from listening to his rich recorded legacy. Film-maker
Peter Rosen clearly had another aim in mind entirely and has
succeeded in his purpose very well indeed.
Rob Maynar d
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