Playing A Violin With Three Strings

On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the violinist, came on stage to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City.

Perlman was stricken with polio as a child, and so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. He walked painfully, yet majestically, until he reached his chair.

Then he sat down, slowly, put his crutches on the floor, undid the clasps on his legs, tucked one foot back and extended the other foot forward.

Then he bent down and picked up the violin, put it under his chin, nodded to the conductor and proceeded to play.

But just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke.

You could hear it snap - it went off like gunfire across the room.

Many in the audience figured that he would have to get up and limp his way off stage to find another violin or gesture to someone to bring him another one.

But he didn't.

Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes and then signaled the conductor to begin again.

The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off.
And he played with such passion and such power and such purity as the audience had never heard before.

You could see him modulating, changing, re-composing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before.

When he finished, there was an awesome silence in the room.

And then people rose and cheered.

There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. The crowd was on its feet, screaming and cheering, doing everything they could to show how much they appreciated what he had done. P

erlman smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet the audience, and then he said - not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone - "You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left."