Books › The violinist, 1900 › scan 15
Scan 15
The violinist, 1900
12 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1and by teaching, playing the organ in churches, arranging and composing music, etc.
3The solo branch of violin playing is what seems to interest our young American violinist most. He reads of the fabulous sums earned by Kubelik, Ysaye, Kathleen Parlow and other famous artists, and his ambition is fired to emulate their success. He may be possessed of talent, and energy, and may possess sufficient technic to play many of the compositions that these artists play. He attends their concerts, hears them play the same pieces that he himself plays, he hears the applause, hears their names on everyone's tongue. "Why," he asks himself, "cannot I duplicate their fame?" Alas, he does not know the vast gulf which exists between real genius and merely well developed talent. He has yet to learn that in regard to real success in solo playing many are called and few are chosen.
5Whenever I talk with a violin student destined for the profession, who tells me that he will be a concert solo violinists or nothing and who turns up his nose at the idea of ever descending to playing in an orchestra or teaching, I always advise him to hang up the fiddle and the bow, and to study civil engineering, or medicine, or the grocery business, or to enter some calling where the chances of success are greater. Such a student is treading on dangerous ground, he is staking his all on a lottery ticket in a lottery where the number of really great prizes are infinitesimally small. Take our own country for instance with its 80,000,000 or 90,000,000 population; how many violin soloists are able to keep continually employed with really paying solo engagements—possibly one or two native and five or six foreign violinists. In addition to this there is, of course, a much greater number who obtain positions in minor concert companies which do lyceum and Chautauqua work, play engagements in the smaller towns, etc. This work is not any too well paid, engagements are precarious, and the traveling, especially in the smaller towns, where hotel accommodations are poor, is not any too pleasant. I saw a letter from a young Ohio violinist who went out with a concert company, which said: "We missed railway connections at a junction; it is Christmas Day, and we are eating our dinner in a box car."
7So I would say to every ambitious young violinist: "Aim high, that is laudable, but make up your mind to the fact that the chances are enormously in favor of your having to do much teaching and playing in orchestras in your future musical life. To be on the safe side, it is also not a bad idea for the student studying for the profession to study the piano as well as the violin, and also to give an hour daily practice to the study of some wind instrument. Theory, harmony and composition he should study as a matter of course.
9Never have the ranks of the solo violinists been so crowded as today. In Europe violinists who have sufficient technic to play most of the great violin concertos are as the sands on the seashore. In a city like Berlin you could drag probably fifty violinists from their beds any night who could play for you a dozen of the greatest violin concertos ever written from memory, without stopping, but who are practically unknown outside their own cities. Fritz Kreisler, one of the greatest solo violinists now before the public, once said: "I could name quite a number of violinists in Europe who are really great, but who are practically unknown, because fortune did not seem to offer them a chance to become famous. A few of us have been fortunate in winning international fame, but there are many equally deserving who have been less successful."
11Of course men of real genius like Ysaye or Kubelik or the late Joachim or Sarasate are as rare as ever. The violinist with a great nature, burning temperament, and the soul of a poet, will ever be a man picked out from the common herd of talent, just as is the case in any branch of literature or art. And right here is a remarkable fact, notwithstanding the immense increase in the number of really excellent solo violinists since the days of Paganini, there is probably not in the world today a violinist who bears such universal fame as did such men as Paganini and Ole Bull during their day. There are violinists living today who are probably the equal in point of tech-
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