This Suspended State
by Laura Newey
“Tartini's Dream,” Louis-Léopold Boilly (1824)
I was home-schooled between the ages of seven and ten, ostensibly in order to make more time for violin practice. Only a minimal amount of actual schooling ended up taking place, and since we lived in the Scottish countryside without a TV, I spent most of my time reading pretty much whatever and the next largest share playing the violin. We did have some DVDs, which I sometimes watched on a grown-up’s laptop in the evenings. Without the omnipresence of television, moving images took on the status of a somewhat rare and special treat.
One of these DVDs was a documentary called The Art of Violin, tracing the so-called ‘golden age’ of the violin virtuoso from Paganini to Yehudi Menuhin. I have watched it probably fifteen times over the years, and can more-or-less recite or hum along with sizable chunks of it. It opens with a composite rendition of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, stitched together from archive film and recordings: David Oistrakh, icy and ferocious, jowls trembling; Fritz Kreisler, warm and sentimental, smiling into the camera; Menuhin, young and old; Isaac Stern, Christian Ferras, and on.
The Mendelssohn mashup is meant to demonstrate the uniqueness of each violinist’s sonic personality. Ida Haendel declares this individuality of tone quality unquantifiable, although in the same breath she assigns a host of physical causes: ‘No one can say what makes one sound differ from another. This is in my opinion the individuality of the person, the pressure of the bow on the strings, the pressure of the actual fingers on the violin, the whole position.’
Watching as a child, I remember being vaguely worried by my failure to focus purely on timbre, to filter out my other senses. I could hear the interpretive differences in dynamic, tempo and articulation, but I was also preoccupied with what I could see, by each violinist’s distinctive repertoire of postures, gestures and expressions.
Schumann once observed, not entirely as a compliment, that ‘if Liszt played behind the scenes, a great deal of poetry would be lost’. Musicians and musicology have often marginalized the visual and the physical. Virtuosity makes it clear that seeing and feeling do matter, and has been correspondingly derided as flashy and superficial.
Of course, timbre is vitally important. At the same time, however, the listener is not merely an ear in a jar. Sensory channels bleed together in the brain; ‘I can hear this picture’ has become an online commonplace. You taste mostly by smelling, you can see by touching, and you often hear by seeing.
Despite classical music’s proscription against listening with your eyes, everyone does it. In this video of Ray Chen playing Eugene Ysaÿe’s second sonata, it’s his postures and facial expressions, as much as anything in the sound, that distinguish the Bach quotations from Ysaÿe’s elaborations. Chen’s gurning may be too extreme for some tastes. Some players try to suppress any movement not directly involved in the production of sound. Heifetz was famously impassive, and so is Hilary Hahn, who stays mostly still during even the most heated passages of the Ysaÿe sonatas. Her cool exterior performs its own kind of visual gloss upon the near-supernatural cleanness of her tone; it is interpretation.
Virtuoso violin music hinges on sight and touch, restoring the collision of flesh, wood, metal and horsehair to the centre of music’s supposedly immaterial realm. It conjures the body, albeit an extraordinary one, boasting various accessories to the standard human model: an instrument (probably old and expensive), ten thousand hours of practice, the battle scars of fingertip callouses and neck sores, and perhaps also innate physical advantages, or even pathologies. Paganini may have had Marfan syndrome, and his powers were rumored to have come from a deal with the devil. The Art of Violin enlists Alexander Markov to resurrect the image of Paganini, casting the pursuit of virtuosity in a strangely occult light; the violinist, through playing the Caprices, rehearsing their postures and movements, comes to inhabit the body of their long-dead composer.
Virtuosi are somewhere between superheroes and magicians, reveling simultaneously in the tangible and the illusory. On the violin, any chord containing more than two notes is technically fictional, because the bridge is curved. Despite this, most virtuoso violin music is highly polyphonic; three or four strings can only be made to sound simultaneously by squashing them down with the bow, and since this is usually not expressively appropriate, the chord is almost always played as a succession of individual notes. In his third sonata, Ysaÿe goes a step further, ending the second movement with six-note chords, two extra strings apparently invented out of nowhere. The violinist acts as mime, sketching out a huge imaginary cathedral of sound.
I started playing the violin when I was three and stopped at twelve, after an ill-fated encounter with a teacher at music school. Piano is now my main instrument. Although I haven’t touched a violin in almost ten years, my memories of it remain acute and persistent. Watching or listening to violin music still provokes a kind of sympathetic physical resonance in me; somehow it is imprinted on my psyche or my body. Every few months, I have a dream that involves playing the violin. Almost invariably, these dreams re-enact the last months I spent on the instrument, characterized by feelings of musical failure and ineptitude, physical discomfort and powerlessness.
Unlike the pianist, the violinist has a variety of places and methods for producing a given pitch: on a high string in a low position, on a low string in a high position, as a stopped note, a harmonic or an open string. Of course, different options produce different timbres, and there is a logistical component, but these are not the only considerations. The opening of Ravel’s Tzigane is marked ‘sul G’: all on the lowest string. Playing high on the G string produces an unusual, hoarse sound quality, but it also deforms the left arm into a distinctive, twisted posture. This visual impression of strain is as important as the aural component.
In general, the violin involves more physical contortion than most instruments. To play the piano all you have to do is sit down and move your hands at elbow height. On the violin, you need to orient your head and arms to the left around the instrument; in a way, it is hostile to the human body. Virtuoso violin music communicates different meanings because of this difficulty. A string of parallel tenths would be an inconsequential detail in a piano or ensemble piece, but a solo violinist attempting the same passage needs steely intonational precision and gymnast-like strength and contortions in the left hand. Virtuosity is not only spectacle; like elite sporting performance, it provokes a kind of imaginative bodily identification in the ordinary observer.
I’m trying to explain why the violin still has such an outsize impact on me. My present-day fixation contains a little kernel of old disappointment. I felt a great deal of pressure, imposed both internally and externally, to succeed on the violin. That I ultimately failed to live up to this pressure was devastating. This was not just a childhood hobby. It was the core of my life, something I traded much of my childhood for; maybe not as much as some people, but more than most. This makes it matter, disproportionately. My violin is still sitting in the corner of my room at home. Even now, I can’t bring myself to pick it up. In part, I’m afraid of the gap between imagination and reality: between the freedom, facility and potential I had as a ten-year-old, and the dust and creaks that have accumulated since.
When I was about eight, my dad and I went to see Maxim Vengerov play live. The concert was a two-hour drive away, in Glasgow, and by the time we got into the city we were running late. Panicked about missing the start, my dad drove the car straight into the closed barrier of the car park. I don’t remember now which pieces were on the programme, or how they sounded; just the pre-concert shunt, Vengerov’s magnetic, extrovert movements onstage, and that for some reason I was tremendously excited to clap at the end.
In this video, after a concert we have not heard, Vengerov is getting ready to perform an encore. He stands in the centre of the room, flanked by unsounded forces: on one side the orchestra, seated with their instruments idle, on the other the audience.
His left-hand fingers test their position. He tilts the bow away, so that only one edge grazes the string. Out of the fizzing hush of the auditorium, an augmented triad cautiously emerges, not yet varnished by vibrato. It flourishes into a whole-tone scale, discovering the upper register of the violin, compelling everything physically upwards, Vengerov’s shoulder, elbow, eyebrows, violin scroll held as if with threads.
Ysaÿe’s music itself seems to take place entirely in this suspended state. It adopts the elliptical yet demonstrative language of a concerto cadenza, but its wandering is unconstrained by the inevitability of the orchestra’s re-entry, completing the cadence and reinstating formal logic. As the movement’s frenzied conclusion approaches, a tremendous centrifugal energy builds around the belly of the violin: Vengerov’s bow-strokes are concentrated in the lower half, his left hand inches up the fingerboard, his head strains inwards to the source of the sound. At last, he releases the strings, flinging his bow arm outwards, and the onlookers break their silent stillness with applause.
Laura Newey is reading Music at Keble College, Oxford
