“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” – Anonymous

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst

20 January

Itzhak Perlman, one of a handful of preternaturally gifted violinists in the world today, arrives at San Francisco International; he’s contracted to do the Beethoven violin concerto tomorrow night with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra at Davies Hall. He flew first-class, of course, he’ll stay in a very nice hotel, and he’ll receive $40,000 for his troubles.

Two things: first, since the concerto only takes about 40 minutes, someone with a bitter, pinched imagination will calculate that his fee works out to $1,000 per minute. Not true, of course. Factoring in the practice time, which by rights includes his focusing on mastering this instrument instead of doing lots of other things since the age of, say, four, the hourly rate drops down to something like three cents a month.

Second, he doesn’t say to himself as he clears customs, “I’ve got to get to a practice room at Davies Hall right away to go over that bear of a third movement!” Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m sure that third movement IS a bear. But whatever other concerns he might have, he’s got that third movement down – after all, this is what he’s been doing since he was four, and he is supremely confident that when he gets to that third movement tomorrow night, as with the first and second movements, he’ll transport the entire audience to Beethoven’s own ethereal plane. Since everybody will win, $40,000 is cheap at the price.

On the other hand, I don’t think it’s really the money that drives Perlman, at least not the principal thing, any more than the ego validation that comes from the applause. More important than all that is the role he plays in the ethereal realm which is where he lives - what you might call the high that comes from being Beethoven’s go-between. For there are three components at work here: composer, performer, audience. And when the performer honors the composer, right down to the last sfortzando, the composer, dead though he may be, is marvelously, wondrously alive yet again. That is, the composer is siphoned through this artist and this orchestra on this night in the presence of this audience. The performer is integral to feeding the soul of every person in that hall with the richness of Beethoven’s very own genius.

Like I say, $40,000 sounds cheap at the price, right?