JASCHA HEIFETZ

Jascha Heifetz was the man who stabilised and consolidated the way most difficult of instruments was handled. He set the tone, and throughout his adult career, critics, fellow musicians and the public used him as their benchmark of good violinism. On a purely technical level, he has not been equalled, let alone surpassed. Yet even this quintessentially twentieth-century man sometimes harked back in style to an earlier age. He used certain tricks from the nineteenth century, especially little nudges of rubato and slithers of portamento, and when it came to giving a recital, he took his cue from his predecessors. He would generally schedule just one masterpiece, among a miscellany of other pieces including some of his own transcriptions, and he usually appeared with an accompanist, rather than a pianist of his own stature.

Heifetz was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, on 2 February 1900. His father Rubin, a competent fiddler, started him on the violin when he was three before passing him on to Ilya Malkin, a pupil of Leopold Auer. At six Jascha made his début and a year later he played the Mendelssohn Concerto in Kovno. To enable him to stay with his family when he entered Auer’s class at the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1910, his father was enrolled too. Heifetz became Auer’s favourite and made his St Petersburg début the following year; and in 1912 he performed the Tchaikovsky Concerto in Berlin under Arthur Nikisch, who promptly invited him to Leipzig. In Vienna he played under Vasily Safonov and he developed steadily through the early years of the Great War.

He missed the chaos of 1917 but caused his own October Revolution that year, making his historic New York début at Carnegie Hall. In 1920 he made his London bow with two Queen’s Hall concerts which were so successful that he returned the same year. In 1925 he took U.S. citizenship and in 1928 he married the film star Florence Vidor (that and a second union ended in divorce). During World War II he gave many concerts for the American forces. In 1947 he reintroduced himself to London with the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky Concertos at the Royal Albert Hall, before the Queen and an audience of more than six thousand. In 1949 he offered Londoners the Elgar Concerto. When he played the sonata by Richard Strauss in Israel in 1953, riot police had to be called, and Heifetz was attacked by a fanatic with an iron bar.

In 1959 he performed for the United Nations General Assembly but in the 1960s he began to confine himself mainly to the West Coast of America; chamber music also loomed larger in his life, through the Heifetz-Piatigorsky Concerts. Having given his last concert in 1972, he grew increasingly reclusive, and he died in Los Angeles on 10 December 1987. Heifetz did some teaching at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, but his influence was mainly disseminated through his playing and his many recordings. As a player he was known not only for technical perfection but also for his liking for faster speeds. He commissioned a number of new concertos, including that by William Walton. Although he had a 1731 Stradivarius, his favourite instrument was the 1742 ‘David’ Guarnerius del Gesù.

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