Insights on an icon, an oddity, and a talent to watch

July 03, 2011

“JASCHA HEIFETZ: GOD’S FIDDLER’’ A Film by Peter Rosen(Kultur DVD)

It’s been a good few months for Jascha Heifetz fans. Sony has released a 103-CD collection certified by Guinness World Records as the largest box set ever devoted to a single classical player (affordably priced at less than $3 per disc). And Peter Rosen has made a feature-length documentary film, to be released on DVD this month, about the wunderkind of wunderkinds from Vilna who for many still represents the apex of violin perfection.

From the movie’s title alone, it sounds like a standard-issue classical music hagiography - but this film is more interesting than that. Of course, there are the requisite interviews with famous violinists searching for superlatives to describe the thrill of his playing, and old anecdotes are dusted off to bring color to the story of his phenomenal rise. But adding unusual visual interest, especially in the first third of the film, is Rosen’s extensive use of Heifetz’s own home videos (he was a self-described “camera fiend’’) and the shots lend a much more personal gloss than the typical assortment of archival footage.

Rosen also explores the chief complaint from Heifetz detractors: that his playing was cold. In strictly sonic terms that was rarely true, but as many have suggested, the misimpression was fueled by his exceedingly solemn and reserved stage demeanor. Even today it’s hard to watch footage of his hyper-detached performances without wondering about the seemingly vast distance between the notes and the mind behind them. Could great playing really involve - or even necessitate, if one buys the argument that his manner was a corrective to Romantic distortions - this state of temporary self-exile?

The film also suggests it may not have been so temporary. Heifetz’s offstage personality, it turns out, was no less enigmatic even for those involved in his daily life. Rosen turns up plenty of former students, colleagues, and employees who speak with relative candor about his severity as a teacher, his obsessive need for privacy and formality (almost no one could use his first name, the classic Gershwin lyric notwithstanding), and more generally his stunted emotional growth. A couple of details give you the gist: He would summon his secretary into his studio every day with a bicycle horn, and, we are told, he wrote his three children out of his will.

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