It is daunting to be the very best anyone ever saw, capable as no other, of  a unique skill.  The rarified achievement at this level, and the difficulty maintaining it,  does strange things to people, and is often associated with at times somewhat bizarre or aberrant behavior.  Michael Jordan for the brief years he was a professional basketball player, was without peer and everybody knew it.  Yet when he was giving his acceptance speech for the national basketball hall of fame, surrounded by his family,friends, and teammates, he lambasted everybody for not recognizing in real time his standard of performance or contributing in any way towards the outcome he achieved.  Tiger Woods self destructively blew apart his unrivaled capabilities.  Albert Einstein spent the rest of his life trying to live up to his unequaled productive decade of olympic mathematical genius from 1905 to 1916 defining his special and general theories of relativity, forever injected into the strange world of academic celebrity.

Jascha Heifetz was one of the best anyone ever saw, or in his case, heard, and unlike the others, it was clear from the first time anyone ever heard him play until the last time he performed in public – he was unrivaled, the best ever, and everyone including Heifetz knew it.  At age 12 in a private concert the renowned violinist Fritz Kreisler attended, Kreisler remarked, ” That’s it. The rest of us might as well break our fiddles across our knees.”  Heifetz’s teacher, the famous Leopold Auer, was once asked to name his greatest students.  Auer proceeded to name many of the most famous violinists of the twentieth century he had helped mold, but conspicuously left out Heifetz.  When it was brought to his attention that he had forgotten perhaps his most famous client, Auer replied, “Heifetz was not my student; he was God’s Student.”

Jascha Heifetz was born in 1901 in Vilna, Lithuania, in the Russian Empire still ruled by czars. His father was a violinist with the local orchestra, but he was nondescript, as the jewish family was  not capable of being part of the  societal nomenklatura.  But young Jascha, from the moment music was revealed to him, glowed with an otherworldly level of brilliant talent, that the prejudices of society were  helpless to suppress. Russia of the early twentieth century was still in the grip of czarist totalitarianism and societal hierarchy, but since Peter the Great, the classical arts and the spectacular Russian talent in the humanities were venerated by the Russian elite as Russia’s answer to the West, that looked down its nose upon Russia’s feudal societal retrenchment. Greatness in Russia’s society, when recognized, received expert attention, and by age 5, Heifetz was under guidance of Leopold Auer, the St. Petersburg’s Music Conservatory’s renowned violin instructor, and by eleven in front of a St. Petersburg concert audience estimated at 25,000. The mystique associated with Heifetz prodigious talent was revealed for good.

Talent supplied from the heavens above.  Heifetz toured Europe and then at age 17,  a Carnegie Hall debut that made his celebrity as a performer international.  1917 was the year of Russian upheaval, and Heifetz determined to stay in America, the land of safety and boundless opportunity.  Heifetz was one of a number of spectacular Russian performers, such as Milstein, Rubinstein, and Rachmaninoff who read the Russian Revolution as antithetical to classic western civilization and musical expression, and sought  their future in the West.  Heifetz had an additional advantage in that he understood presciently the power of the media, and the new vehicles of recording, radio, and film, as projecting to millions, what was once the provence of the few thousands of a concert hall.

Across the world, the twin towers of Heifetz’s unparalleled technique, the precision and speed of his left hand on the stringboard of the violin, and the spectacular control and sonority of his bow, projected as no other performer, as an peerless, brilliantly hued perfection of performance. His sound was like no other – tight, precise, intense, olympian – delivered perfectly each time while maintaining an almost serene, relaxed expression in his face, seeming  to project that what others found difficult or challenging, Heifetz found effortless.  The visual appearance of control was so overwhelming that observers often reflected that Heifetz’s playing was lacking in passion, too cool in temperature for some listeners.  The semblance of cool was however easily removed by simply closing one’s eyes and resorting to the world of sound, where the brilliant fire of his play became immediately apparent, and absolutely unique. Gorgeous waves of interacting sounds reflecting incredible depth of knowledge of the composer’s intent, the capabilities of the instrument, and at a pace, intensity, and precision few could hold for a moment, much less with each and every performance for fifty years.  He was the best, he knew it, and everyone else knew it, too.

We are thankful that Heifetz was sufficiently of the modern age during the zenith of ability, where there were opportunities to perform significant visual recordings of his technique to layer on his sound, securing his position in musical history.  Absorb the whole of a concert from over seventy years ago, caught on film, of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.  Projecting as imperious and unflappable, Heifetz plays to cool perfection, but the sound is nothing short of fiery abandon, and the technical virtuosity out of this world.

Later in life near his retirement from performance, the intimate greatness of a solo performance was thankfully caught on television, and though Heifetz was visually much older, performed Bach, still sounding like no one else.

Heifetz was considered an extremely difficult personality to live with, struggling with family interactions and several divorces, and reflecting to his fellow performers as bordering on misanthropic. I suspect that such perfection may have contained a thin thread of autistic clarity that allowed him to grasp and reproduce perfect musical moments, but little capability  for human interaction when not listening to his internal muses.

The muses however they dominated him, gave him the vehicle of expression that fills the rest of us with awe, from the casual music listener to the most talented musical performers that had to perform in constant comparison.  Heifetz died in 1987, the world that produced him and his extraordinary Russian compatriots long gone, but the cool flame of perfection lives among us still.

Heifetz – the best ever.  He knew it, and so does everybody else.