The Performance Style of Jascha Heifetz

Dario Sarlo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472444233
• eBook ISBN: 9781317021636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The violinist Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987) is considered among the most influential performers in history and still maintains a strong following among violinists around the world. Dario Sarlo contributes significantly to the growing field of analytical research into recordings and the history of performance style. Focussing on Heifetz and his under-acknowledged but extensive performing relationship with the Bach solo violin works (BWV 1001-1006), Sarlo examines one of the most successful performing musicians of the twentieth century along with some of the most frequently performed works of the violin literature. The book proposes a comprehensive method for analysing and interpreting the legacies of prominent historical performers in the wider context of their particular performance traditions. The study outlines this research framework and addresses how it can be transferred to related studies of other performers. By building up a comprehensive understanding of multiple individual performance styles, it will become possible to gain deeper insight into how performance style develops over time. The investigation is based upon eighteen months of archival research in the Library of Congress's extensive Jascha Heifetz Collection. It draws on numerous methods to examine what and how Heifetz played, why he played that way, and how that way of playing compares to other performers. The book offers much insight into the 'music industry' between 1915 and 1975, including touring, programming, audiences, popular and professional reception and recording. The study concludes with a discussion of Heifetz's unique performer profile in the context of violin performance history.

PART I
Case Overview

Chapter 1
Heifetz and the Bach Solo Violin Works

Biographical Introduction

Jascha Heifetz was born in Vilnius on 2 February 1901. He took his first violin lessons from his father Ruvin, a professional violinist. Heifetz’s mother Anna was a housewife, and he had two younger sisters, Pauline and Elza. In 1906 Heifetz enrolled in the Imperial School of Music in Vilnius where he began lessons with Ilya Malkin. He entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory a few years later, studying first with Ioannes Nalbandian, and then eventually with the famous pedagogue Leopold Auer, teacher of Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, and other famous violinists. Heifetz learnt a considerable amount of repertoire during these years in St. Petersburg, and he also studied the viola and the piano. Heifetz debuted in Berlin in 1912, playing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Artur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic. He also played at a private event in Berlin, attended by Fritz Kreisler and other famous violinists. Concert tours around many European countries followed, as did a flow of lucrative invitations from American concert promoters, all of which were turned down. The Heifetzes eventually accepted an American offer in the summer of 1917. They left Russia, and on 27 October, Paganini’s birthday, Heifetz made his American debut at Carnegie Hall in New York City. The concert was an unmatched success, and over the next few months Heifetz began touring the United States and made his first American recordings.

Heifetz subsequently toured Europe, Australia, Asia, and South America, all with equal success. He was naturalised as an American citizen in 1925, and fully embraced his adopted country, performing many benefit concerts for domestic causes. In 1928 Heifetz married Florence Vidor, a star of silent films, and they had two children, Robert and Josefa. This marriage ended in divorce in 1945. Heifetz married Frances Spiegelberg in 1946, with whom he had a son, Joseph (Jay). This second marriage also ended in divorce in 1962. During World War II Heifetz volunteered to perform for the Allied forces stationed in the United States and Europe. He played hundreds of times in army camps and hospitals. In 1946, Heifetz wrote and released the popular song ‘When you make love to me, don’t make believe’ under the pseudonym Jim Hoyl. It went to the top of the sales charts and was recorded by Bing Crosby and Margaret Whiting. Heifetz took a 20-month sabbatical in 1947. In 1953 the violinist toured Israel, during which he programmed one of his favourite sonatas, that by Richard Strauss. Owing to the political sensitivities at the time, the press and government pleaded with Heifetz to omit the piece. Heifetz refused, and during the tour he was physically attacked after one of his recitals.

Heifetz curtailed his concert appearances significantly from the mid-1950s onwards, preferring to dedicate his time to teaching, recording, and chamber music performances with friends and colleagues, including Gregor Piatigorsky and William Primrose. In 1958, Heifetz began teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles, and in 1961 at the University of Southern California. Heifetz taught a number of prominent violinists, including Erick Friedman, Eugene Fodor, and Pierre Amoyal. Heifetz gave his final solo recital in 1972 and his final public appearance in 1974 at a chamber music event at the University of Southern California. He continued to teach both at the University of Southern California and privately at his home in Beverly Hills. Heifetz’s student Ayke Agus became his personal accompanist and companion for the last fifteen years of his life. Heifetz died on 10 December 1987 in Los Angeles.

Heifetz was one of the most successful recording artists of his generation. He worked with Emanuel Feuermann, Sergei Koussevitzky, Gregor Piatigorsky, Artur Rubinstein, Arturo Toscanini, William Walton, and many others. He also performed and recorded with many of the world’s great orchestras. Heifetz played himself in a Hollywood movie entitled They Shall Have Music in 1939 and in 1946 also appeared in Carnegie Hall. Heifetz made a series of masterclass films during the early 1960s. Over the course of his career, Heifetz completed over one hundred transcriptions for violin of a wide variety of pieces, one of the most popular being the Dinicu-Heifetz Hora Staccato. The ‘Horrible’ Staccato, as Heifetz eventually nicknamed it, became popular with audiences and other violinists, and was published in no fewer than fifteen arrangements. Heifetz completed approximately one hundred hours of recordings, including many works that he himself commissioned, such as concertos by Walton and Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Heifetz recorded dozens of his own transcriptions of short pieces including a number of Gershwin miniatures. Heifetz’s fees were reportedly larger than those of his colleagues. By the early 1920s he received around US$2,000 per appearance, and for his first radio broadcast in 1930 he received US$14,250. This extensive career has positioned Heifetz among the most important musical figures of the twentieth century.

Heifetz owned a number of notable instruments during his lifetime, starting with a 1736 Carlo Tononi violin which his father bought him in 1914 and on which Heifetz played his Carnegie Hall debut and his earliest recordings.¹ Heifetz left this instrument to his student Sherry Kloss. Later instruments included the 1714 ‘Dolphin’ Stradivarius and Heifetz’s favourite, the 1742 David/Heifetz Guarneri del Gesù, purchased by Heifetz in 1922.² Kenway Lee provides a summary:

The true ‘voice’ of Heifetz and his ‘del Gesù’ were first recorded in 1925. Thereafter Heifetz made some 180 recordings of short pieces, approximately 45 of sonatas, 47 of concertos, 33 of chamber music, and over a dozen showpieces with orchestra using this instrument – making it the most recorded violin in history. A handful of records were, however, made on his Strad of 1731 and the famous ‘Dolphin’ Strad of 1714. But he eventually sold his Strads and performed only on the Guarneri, preferring its more robust and richer tonal qualities.³

Heifetz owned many bows by different makers. The ‘four good bows’ referenced in his will included examples by four of the most famous makers – Kittel, Tourte, Peccatte, and Vuillaume.⁴ Lee explains that the ‘Kittel was presented to Heifetz by his beloved Professor Auer in the early 1920s. As with the Guarneri, Heifetz was very attached to this bow and did not permit anyone else to use it’. In an article about Heifetz and his bows, Joseph Gold posits that the Kittel bow can be identified in the majority of Heifetz’s publicity photographs and in all of his movie appearances. The Kittel, dating from around 1860, is described as ‘a veritable ne plus ultra, fashioned of the most lustrous pernambuco with an intense translucency’.⁵

Documentary Sources Relating to Heifetz

Biographical accounts of Heifetz’s career are few in number and limited in scope. Herbert Axelrod published Heifetz in 1976, with expanded editions appearing in 1981 and 1990. Heifetz is not a complete biography, but it does present many primary documents such as photographs, letters, and other such items from private collections. The author Artur Vered published Jascha Heifetz in 1986. It is commendable in its attention to key aspects of the Heifetz phenomenon, such as his difficult personality and the significance of his childhood. Given that they were written more than two decades ago, neither of these books constitute exhaustive and updated biographical studies of the violinist.

Books by two of Heifetz’s former students published in the last decade provide a more personal insight. Jascha Heifetz through My Eyes by Sherry Kloss and Heifetz As I Knew Him by Ayke Agus both reveal with comprehensive detail the inner workings of the Heifetz masterclass. The Russian scholar Galina Kopytova published a 600-page Heifetz childhood biography in Russian.⁶ With the assistance of Albina Starkova-Heifetz, the violinist’s daughter-in-law, Kopytova conducted fifteen years of research in archives around the world, and conducted interviews with Russian family, friends, and acquaintances of Heifetz. This is by far the most comprehensively researched of Heifetz biographies. I co-edited an English translation edition of this book for Indiana University Press; Jascha Heifetz: Early Years in Russia was published in late 2013. Various articles in publications such as The Strad and The Gramophone have appeared in recent decades, but much of that covers the same areas as Vered and Axelrod. Some original research has come from a father-and-son team of Heifetz researchers, John and John Anthony Maltese, who in 2005 wrote about Heifetz concertising for the troops.

Heifetz was one of the most recorded violinists in history. This is in part due to the timing of his arrival in the United States, when the recording business was already out of its infancy. David Patmore, in an article about recordings and the record business, explains that while the rest of the world’s record sales were adversely affected by the outbreak of World War I, ‘in America, however, no such negative effects were felt’. While there were already sales of 18.6 million units in 1915, by 1920, the significant level of 100 million units had been broken.⁷ This period coincided neatly with Heifetz’s arrival in the United States. It was long believed Heifetz first recorded in November 1917, but examples from 1911 and 1912 have been discovered. In 1994 RCA released the Heifetz Collection, a 66-CD collection of almost all commercially available Heifetz recordings from 1917 to 1972. The set does not include many live recordings, unreleased studio recordings, nor any of the early recordings from 1911 and 1912. Sony Classical released a new edition of the Heifetz Collection in 2011; it contained 103 CDs and 1 DVD. At the time of release, the set received the Guinness World Record for the highest number of audio discs of a single instrumentalist in a classical box set.

Various independent record labels have released other Heifetz recordings in recent years, including Doremi and Cembal d’amour. There are also many recordings available on pirate discs, including recordings of concerts and radio broadcasts. A set of LP recordings that were thought to be of Heifetz have recently been shown to be by another violinist entirely.⁸ Heifetz was known to be fond of imitating bad vi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Studying Performance Style
• PART I: CASE OVERVIEW
• PART II: REPERTOIRE AND PROGRAMMING
• PART III: INTERPRETATIVE APPROACH
• PART IV: HISTORICAL CONTEXT
• Coda: Performance Style and Performer Profiles
• Appendices i–xi
• Selected Bibliography
• Index