ODE TO THE MIGHTY VIOLIN

ODE TO THE MIGHTY VIOLIN

Jacques Wiesel

         

          My wife Carole and I just returned home from a Sabbath service at the Chai Temple in Margate. My head was still humming from the beautiful sounds which emanated from a corner of the temple. The notes came from a trio of players, comprised of Mel Olman, age 70, playing a Roland keyboard. Accompanying him was Mike Gold, age 73. who played a trio of instruments, including the flute, clarinet and saxophone. Finally, my fellow Holocaust survivor and friend Saul Drier, age 88 manned the drums. Rabbi Dov Forman, at 63 the new kid on the block, completed the musical group for an exhilarating 90 minutes.

          These Klezmerians needed only 1 more instrument to elevate their renderings into a new dimension. I’m referring to the mightiest of all the musical instruments, ergo the violin, called the most versatile of all. Since its sound many times echoes the mournful notes of the Shofar, used for almost 6,000 years by the Jews. It quickly became a part of the Jewish arsenal, as many of the world’s greatest violinists will attest to. The current list includes the following but is not limited to them: Joshua BELL, Fritz KREISLER, Julia FISCHER, Yitzhak PERLMAN, Isaac STERN, David OISTRAKH, Glenn GOULD, Mischa ELMAN and Nathan MILLSTEIN 

          First introduced in Northern Italy by Andrea Amato of Cremana in 1564; he melded 3 string instruments into one; the Rebec, the Viola da Braccio and the Lira da Braccio.  In 1716 the first Stradivarius made its debut, followed by Guarneri.

          My first exposure to it came soon after my family and I landed in America in April 1943 from Casablanca, where we lived as refugees, having escaped from both Belgium and France during WW2. My aunt Goldie took my brother Irving and I to see Walt Disney’s “FANTASIA”. We heard the works of the classicists Schubert, Mussorgsky, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Paul Dukas and Ponchielli. They accompanied cartoons. It was the first time in 3 years that my eyes and ears had been assaulted in such a pleasant way.

          I first fully discovered the joys of the violin through Miss Ruth Schaefer, my Music Appreciation teacher in Public School 16 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1944. She introduced me to the 4^th Movement of “Scheherazade” by Rimsky Korsakov. These days, as I type my essays and lectures I constantly listen to classical music. My favorites include violin and piano concertos. Speaking of pianos, and the ability to influence millions through great music, here is a current example. World class Chinese pianist Lang Lang first heard the instrument played when he was 2 years old. He was watching a “Tom & Jerry” cartoon while the background music was Franz Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody”, which they called the “cat concerto”. In the year 2008, at the summer Olympics in Beijing he played the piano with over 1 billion people worldwide listening. As a direct result over 60,000 Chinese children signed up for piano lessons. There are no figures for the rest of the world. Thus the enduring power of classical music.