This week I am going to write a slight twist on the usual music article. This week the article will focus primarily about the performer, rather than the actual music. This week I feature Ittzhak Perlman who is generally regarded as the world’s best violinist. Perlman represents many aspects of Life which are very meaningful to me personally.
Perlman was born in Tel Aviv in 1945 so he just a kid, one year younger than me. In 1949 when he was 4 years old he contracted polio. There I also have him beat since I got polio in 1946. The picture you see above is from his performance on the Ed Sullivan show when he was 13. As you can see, the half crutch he uses with a band of metal around the forearm is the way he got around for most of his life. These half crutches are called Canadian Crutches ( a former brand name) and have been used by polio patients for decades. The regular crutches that are supported in the arm pit put too much pressure on the shoulders for extended lifelong use. Now that he is older he uses an electric wheelchair for mobility, as do I.
The particular music I will use to feature Perlman is his rendition of the music from the movie Schindlers List, by John Williams. Yes,the same John Williams of Star Wars fame. As you can imagine he music from Schindlers List would have very special meaning to Jewish Perlman whose parents fled Nazi occupied Poland for Israel. The movie is about a man in Poland who used his entire fortune to save Jews from a list he made of those who worked for him. Perlman started to play the violin at a very young age, basically when he could hold the instrument, and left for the U.S. when he was 13 to study at the famed Julliard School of Music in NYC.
So how did this little Jewish boy with polio learn to become the world’s best violinist? As I tell my students Practice, Practice, Practice. But it is more than that as I know from personal experience. When you have polio as a young boy, it is difficult to impossible to participate in all the usual play that kids do. Every kid needs an outlet for their usual excessive energy and their need to be good at something. Perlman selected the violin while I chose the piano. Being somewhat disabled ( it is really hard to play baseball on crutches, although I tried) means that as a kid you have more time since it is not being used in play activities. I can assure you that Perlman would never achieved his status as a violinist if he did not get polio. Perlman used that extra time wisely in order to become proficient with the violin, a very difficult instrument to master.
I know how difficult the violin can be since my grandfather (on the other family side) was a violin maker. He was also a very good violinist and he wanted me to play the violin in the worst way. All I could do is make the violin go sceetch, sceetch until he finally gave up. So here is Itzhak Perlman playing Schindlers List without the sceetch, sceetch playing his 2 million dollar 1714 Stradivarius violin along with a short interview of Perlman.
Perlman – Schindlers List