Jascha Heifetz, photograph by the Bain News Service, late 1910s. Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Saturday 27 October 1917, Carnegie Hall, an afternoon too hot for the season. A sixteen-year-old boy who has come from Russia walks onstage with André Benoist at the piano. In the hall sits half of New York’s violin world, come to see whether the rumours were true. In a box sits Mischa Elman, a pupil of the same teacher and ten years older, and beside him the pianist Leopold Godowsky. With the concert under way, Elman complains about the heat. Godowsky replies that for pianists, no, it isn’t hot. The quip was in the newspapers the next day, and has never left.
That afternoon the audience saw what it would see for more than half a century: a young man almost motionless, the bow working high and clean, the face without a ripple. No swaying of the torso, no grimace on the long notes, no glance at the ceiling. Musical America called him a transcendentally great violinist, and the reviews were so enthusiastic that his agent reprinted them in full pages of advertising. Since then Heifetz’s stillness has become a theme, at times a reproach: coldness, detachment, the poker face. Even today, when The Strad reconstructs his legacy, it puts the absence of showy gestures and the fixed expression among the limits that some observers held against him. At bottom the accusation is always the same: the public wanted to see emotion, and he denied it to them.
Heifetz answered with precision, and without defending himself more than necessary. In 1971 he recorded Heifetz on Television, an hour in colour in which he played, among other things, Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy and the Chaconne from Bach’s Second Partita. In an interview released for that broadcast he said he did not feel at all impenetrable, cold or distant on stage; that he did not even notice looking serious. If he did not smile, he explained, it was because playing absorbed him so completely that he forgot everything else. And he added the sentence that closes the question: if a smile does not come spontaneously, “why resort to an artificial grimace?”
The reason, then, was not a glacial character, and not a stage trick either. It was a refusal to act. The violinist who contorts himself on the high note is adding theatre to the music: he shows effort and emotion so that they may be seen as well as heard, and turns the hall into an audience of spectators. Heifetz considered that second performance a fake, and removed it. The stance had roots in a specific school. In 1911 he had entered Leopold Auer’s class at the St Petersburg Conservatory, where the work was on scales, purity of sound and mental discipline before natural talent. From there came an austere style, in which the body serves the sound and does not comment on it.
The result is the paradox that still disorients anyone who watches his films. The face says nothing, and the sound says everything: a fast, warm vibrato, attacks that seem to snap from a spring, a rubato stretched to the limit. Whoever listened with eyes closed found no trace of detachment. The coldness lay only in the gaze of those who expected to see the music before hearing it. Heifetz had chosen to leave all the work to the ear, and demanded that the audience do its part too.
On Godowsky’s line the legend of that debut has been built for a century. But the quip says something else as well. On 27 October 1917, at Carnegie Hall, the ones who were sweating were in the hall. On stage the sixteen-year-old already had the face he would keep until his last concert.