Music

Fiddlers Three

Terry Teachout

Why is it that some musicians become famous and others are merely admired, even though they may be similarly gifted? Carl Flesch, a distinguished violin teacher who also had a solid but unspectacular career as a soloist, was intrigued by this question, about which he wrote at length in his posthumously published Memoirs (1957). After a lifetime of closely observing his better-known colleagues, Flesch concluded that the best ones were those who played with the "inner participation" of their personalities, and the ones who became most enduringly successful were those whose personalities were the most interesting.

This observation may sound obvious, even tautological, but in practice it turns out to be anything but that. In reflecting, for instance, on the career of Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987), the best-known violinist of the 20th century, Flesch put his finger on an aspect of Heifetz’s playing that has long puzzled critics:

Not only was Flesch an acute critic, he was also a shrewd amateur psychologist. Heifetz was in fact a deeply inhibited man, all but incapable of genuine intimacy, who concealed his interior turmoil behind an iron mask of stoicism. His playing, in which powerful emotions were kept on the shortest possible leash—as if he feared the consequences of giving them free rein—was the public manifestation of his equally rigid offstage personality.¹

Heifetz’s need for total control occasionally led him to settle for the "machine-tooled finish and empty elegance" that the composer-critic Virgil Thomson, in an oft-quoted 1940 review of one of his recitals, judged to be "more than just a trifle vulgar." But when his emotions were fully engaged, the results were fascinatingly personal, not least because of the contrast between his "hot" tone, produced with heavy bow pressure and heightened by an exceptionally fast vibrato, and the brisk, unsentimental tempos he invariably took, even in romantic music. The effect was underlined by his impassive platform demeanor, which seemed to contradict the intensity of his playing.²

Artists with such complex personalities rarely fail to excite the imaginations of their listeners, and thus it is no surprise that Heifetz became and remained so famous. Nathan Milstein (1903-1992), by contrast, is now remembered mainly by a dwindling band of connoisseurs. Yet his career was major by any definition of the word, and he was, like Heifetz, one of the half-dozen greatest violinists to make recordings.

Indeed, the two men had much else in common—on paper. Both were Russian Jews who emigrated to the West after the Russian Revolution, eventually settling in the United States; both were pupils of Leopold Auer, the most noted violin teacher of his generation. Both had conservative tastes in repertoire, though they played some modern music (Milstein recorded Sergei Prokofiev’s concertos and sonatas, while Heifetz commissioned concertos from Miklós Rózsa and William Walton). And both were highly "phonogenic" musicians whose recordings clearly suggest their essential artistic characters.

Yet Milstein, popular though he was, never became as big a celebrity as Heifetz, and the reason for this can be found in his personality. Unlike Heifetz, an introverted man with few passions outside of music, Milstein was both outgoing and wide-ranging in his cultural interests, and he embraced the act of public performance with an enthusiasm alien to Heifetz’s tightly wound nature. A gifted raconteur, he produced an engagingly opinionated memoir, From Russia to the West (1990, co-written with Solo mon Volkov), in which he described with frankness and charm his relationships with George Balanchine, Vladimir Horowitz, Fritz Kreisler, and Igor Stravinsky.

Milstein’s playing mirrored his temperament. Virgil Thomson captured some of its distinctive features in a 1953 review of a Carnegie Hall recital:

Milstein tempered his youthful ebullience in middle age, using his lean and focused tone to play the classics in a poised, patrician manner, not exactly restrained but not exhibitionistic, either. The adjective "aristocratic," often used to describe his mature style, is well suited to his forthright yet elegant recordings of the concertos of Mendelssohn (1961) and Tchaikovsky (1959). For many listeners, this one included, they are the definitive interpretations of these familiar masterpieces.³

Those who responded to Milstein’s playing did so wholeheart-edly, and there were more than enough of them for him to have a long and satisfying career. Still, he lacked, on the one hand, the enlivening touch of vulgarity—the common touch—that helps bridge the psychological gap between artist and audience. Nor, on the other hand, was his personality cloven by the kind of sharp fissure that made Heifetz so charismatic. Hence he is now known to a coterie of aging fans rather than to the musical public at large.

Even less well remembered is the American violinist Louis Kaufman (1905-1994), whose entry in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians is only one paragraph long. Yet Kaufman’s playing has been heard by far more people than that of Heifetz and Milstein put together—though few of them know his name.

From the 1930’s through the 1950’s, Kaufman was one of Hollywood’s top studio musicians. He played the violin solos on the soundtrack of Gone With the Wind, scored by Max Steiner, and was the concertmaster for the orchestras that recorded such other important film scores as Aaron Copland’s Our Town, The Heiress, and The Red Pony; Hugo Friedhofer’s The Best Years of Our Lives; Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo and Psycho; Erich Wolfgang Korn gold’s Adventures of Robin Hood and Kings Row; David Raksin’s Laura; Miklós Rózsa’s Double Indemnity and Ben-Hur; and Franz Waxman’s Sunset Boulevard.

Kaufman’s commitment to Hollywood put strict limits on his concertizing, and he made comparatively few solo appearances until the 50’s, when he scaled back his studio work. Yet he still managed to write himself into the history of classical music by making the first commercial recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in 1947, and his later performances of Vivaldi’s other concertos played a prominent role in the postwar baroque revival. In addition, he was deeply committed to modern music, performing and recording with such leading 20th-century com posers as Aaron Copland, Darius Milhaud, and Francis Poulenc; from the 40’s onward, he recorded extensively.

Why, then, is Kaufman all but forgotten? Because he spent his peak years laboring anonymously in the Hollywood studios instead of performing in major American cities. As a result, he failed to win the critical acclaim that a violinist of his quality might reasonably have expected to receive. Virtually all of his commercial recordings (including his historic Four Seasons) were made for small independent labels and have long been out of print. And his adventurous musical tastes drew him away from the standard repertoire that is the bread and butter of every classical-music soloist who hopes to have an international concert career.

In recent months, though, Kaufman has finally made his way into the spotlight. He left behind at his death a delightful memoir, A Fiddler’s Tale: How Hollywood and Vivaldi Discovered Me, co-written with Annette Kaufman, his wife and accompanist, and published last year to excellent reviews.⁴ Bound into each copy of A Fiddler’s Tale is a CD containing performances by Kaufman of Milhaud’s Concertino de Prin temps, Saint-Saëns’s Havanaise, a Vivaldi concerto, and shorter pieces by Copland, Korngold, Robert Russell Bennett, and the black composer William Grant Still (whose music Kaufman championed), plus solo transcriptions of two songs by Jerome Kern, "The Song Is You" and "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." Thanks to this CD, it is now possible for listeners who know nothing of Louis Kaufman other than his Hollywood work to hear for the first time his superb classical playing.

Kaufman also figures prominently in an exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. called Discovering Milton Avery.⁵ An art lover whose well-compensated Hollywood career eventually made it possible for him to collect on a small scale, Kaufman was the first person ever to buy a painting from Avery. (He paid $25 for it in 1926, about $250 in today’s dollars.) Over the years he acquired three dozen more paintings, drawings, and prints by his friend, who later came to be recognized as one of the leading American artists of the 20th century. All of the works Kaufman owned are now hanging at the Phillips, together with fourteen other Avery paintings and works on paper owned by Duncan Phillips, founder of the Phillips Collection, the first museum to acquire Avery’s work and (later) to collect him in depth.

Louis Kaufman, it turns out, was something of a renaissance man: a keen-eyed art collector, a stalwart advocate of modern music, even an accomplished memoirist. As the CD accompanying A Fiddler’s Tale reveals, he was also a violinist of high quality, sweet-toned and technic-ally fastidious. But he lacked the single-minded drive that turns gift-ed instrumentalists into full-time soloists, and he did not have the larger-than-life personality that makes a few of them celebrities. Despite its exemplary musicality, his playing was not quite individual enough to impose itself on the consciousness of concertgoers. In the end, he was too self-effacing to be a star.

Yet if Kaufman was troubled by his failure to become famous, he gives no hint of it in his autobiography, whose charm and verve, like that of Nathan Milstein’s From Russia to the West, are clearly an outward sign of its author’s inner contentment. The epigraph to the fifth chapter of A Fiddler’s Tale comes from the Bhagavad-Gita: "He who really does what he should will obtain what he wants." Those are the words of a man at ease in his own skin, as was the remark that Kaufman often made to his wife as they prepared for bed: "This was a great day and tomorrow will be fine too."

The world would be infinitely poorer without such untroubled, unselfconscious craftsmen as Louis Kaufman and Nathan Milstein. Theirs is an exalted place in the kingdom of music, and it is good to be reminded of their angst-free achievements—as A Fiddler’s Tale and Discovering Milton Avery do remind us. Yet for all the lasting pleasure their work gives, it is the Jascha Heifetzes who loom largest in our thoughts, and no doubt always will. In the realm of art, all things being equal, most people find unhappiness more interesting than joy.

Terry Teachout, COMMENTARY’s regular music critic and the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal, writes about the arts at http://www.terryteachout.com/. A Terry Teachout Reader, a collection of his essays about art and culture, will be published in May by Yale. Bach B000001H00

1 No full-length biography of Heifetz has yet been published, but Ayke Agus’s Heifetz as I Knew Him (2001), a memoir by the woman who served as his accompanist and companion during the last fifteen years of his life, provides a vivid and plausible description of his tortured personality.

2 Four of Heifetz’s most compelling recordings are his 1935 version of the Sibelius Violin Concerto with Sir Thomas Beecham and the London Philharmonic, rightly cited by Flesch as "transcendental" (Naxos Historical 8.110938); the 1937 performance of the Franck A Major Sonata in which he is suavely partnered by Arthur Rubinstein (RCA Red Seal 09026-63007-2); a 1950 performance of the Brahms D Minor Sonata, Op. 108, brilliantly accompanied by the American pianist William Kapell (RCA Red Seal 09026-68996-2); and the 1956 premiere recording of Miklós Rózsa’s Violin Concerto, commissioned by Heifetz (RCA Gold Seal 09026-61752-2).

3 The Mendelssohn, accompanied by Leon Barzin and the Philharmonia Orchestra, has been reissued on an imported budget CD (EMI Classics CD-CFP 4374). The Tchaikovsky, accompanied by William Steinberg and the Pittsburgh Orchestra, is part of The Art of Nathan Milstein (EMI Classics ZDMF 0777 7 64830 2 3), a six-CD boxed set that also includes concertos by Beethoven, Brahms, DvorE1k, Glazunov, Saint-Saëns, and Prokofiev; sonatas by Beethoven, Handel, Mozart, and Prokofiev; and a selection of encore pieces. Of comparable interest is his 1974 set of the Bach sonatas and partitas (DGG 457 701-2GOR2, two CD’s). From Russia to the West is currently out of print.

4 University of Wisconsin Press, 462 pp., $26.95.

5 The full title is Discovering Milton Avery: Two Devoted Collectors, Louis Kaufman and Duncan Phillips. It is on display at the Phillips through May 16.