Three strings of a violin

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. 

If you have ever been to a Perlman concert, you know

that getting on stage is no small achievement for him. 

He was stricken with polio as a child, and so he has

braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. 

To see him walk across the stage one step at a time,

painfully and slowly, is an awesome sight. 

He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his

chair. Then he sits down, slowly, puts his crutches on the floor,

undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends 

the other foot forward. Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts it under his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play. 

By now, the audience is used to this ritual. They sit quietly

while he makes his way across the stage to his chair.They 

remain reverently silent while he undoes the clasps on his

legs. They wait until he is ready to play. 

But this time, something went wrong. 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. There was no mistaking what that sound meant.

There was no mistaking what he had to do.

We figured that he would have to get up, put on the clasps

again, pick up the crutches and limp his way off stage – 

to either find another violin or else find another string for

this 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 they had never heard before. 

Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible to play a

symphonic work with just three strings. I know that, and you 

know that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that. 

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. We were all on our feet, screaming and 

cheering, doing everything we could to show how much

we appreciated what he had done. 

He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow

to quiet us, 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." 

What a powerful line that is. It has stayed in my mind ever

since I heard it. And who knows? Perhaps that is the definition

of life - not just for artists but for all of us. 

Here is a man who has prepared all his life to make music

on a violin of four strings, who, all of a sudden, in the middle

of a concert, finds himself with only three strings; so he

makes music with three strings, and the music he made that

night with just three strings was more beautiful, more sacred,

more memorable, than any that he had ever made before,

when he had four strings.

So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering

world in which we live is to make music, at first with all that

we have, and then, when that is no longer possible, 

to make music with what we have left.