Violin Mastery - JASCHA HEIFETZ - Part 5
A DIFFICULTY OVERCOME
“The greatest technical difficulty I had when I was studying?” Jascha Heifetz tried to recollect, which was natural, seeing that it must have been one long since overcome. Then he remembered, and smiled: “Staccato playing. To get a good staccato, when I first tried seemed very hard to me. When I was younger, really, at one time I had a very poor staccato!” [I assured the young artist that any one who heard him play here would find it hard to believe this.] “Yes, I did,” he insisted, “but one morning, I do not know just how it was—I was playing the cadenza in the first movement of Wieniawski’s F? minor concerto,—it is full of staccatos and double stops—the right way of playing staccato came to me quite suddenly, especially after Professor Auer had shown me his method.
VIOLIN MASTERY
“Violin Mastery? To me it means the ability to make the violin a perfectly controlled instrument guided by the skill and intelligence of the artist, to compel it to respond in movement to his every wish. The artist must always be superior to his instrument, it must be his servant, one that he can do with what he will.
Violin Mastery
Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers
by Frederick H. Martens
Published 1919
