Fast forward the years ten through thirteen, through ever-enlarging violins and bows, through lessons in the Bach Unaccompanied, Dies Irae as well its code, Vitalli Chaconne, Beethoven’s Romanza, the Bach Unaccompanied, Bach Double Concerto (Cerf as my double) and maybe forty of the canon, successfully taught…until I reached…you guessed it: Ysaÿe. I couldn’t. I had plateaued and soon Raymond Cerf had an Idea. I would go with him to the Meadowmount School of Music in the Adirondack’s—run by the world’s greatest violin teacher at the time, Ivan Galamian. Legendary. And why should he let me in with the world’s greatest young talent? I will never know. But Cerf arranged it. Both of us would study from Galamian. And so it came to pass that I took a few trains and joined Cerf in Elizabethtown.
And was astonished. Master lessons, a note taker in the window seat (always, for every student); twenty sets of young ears peeled to the curtained French doors as Colombian discovery, Jaime Laredo, played Ysaÿe, tenderly, passionately, Galamian once shouting the rhythm; ten of the happy few standing on a little hill playing the Bach Double (no pianist as the double), as if a single giant fiddle were trying to ascend alone its calls to God; waking to hear Leonard Rose practicing solo cello before breakfast; Galamian at night, speaking Russian, patrolling the grounds with the boxers Mischa and Bébé, on the hunt for fornicators (sex and violinism were antigonic, he insisted…to no one’s appreciation); Turkish Aïla Anderand (who knew how old?) dressed by her mother in flouncy dresses, blond hair in pigtails, her cheeks so over-rouged she looked like a clown—her mother’s invention to make her look ten; Eric Friedman grandstanding at quartet practice, getting a slap in the face from teacher Joseph Gingold (concert master of the Cleveland), a slap as boisterous as Erick’s domination of the G string (Erick subsequently died, a suicide); Erick’s mother occupying two lawn chairs at outdoor recitals, her girth requiring them; and me, watching, practicing patiently in my room, darkened to make the session more dramatic, preparing for my next lesson by the light of a single bulb over the music stand—listening not only to the large music I, imitator of Friedman, sought to make, but to mother (now with me here) in the next room discussing my sexuality with Mel Ritter, a journeyman orchestral violinist. “Keep him from it as long as you can,” Mel told her. “There’s no going back once you…” and hearing “start” saddened me at the sacrifice THAT I WOULD MAKE TO BE A CONCERT VIOLINIST.
My female progenitor, too, was a stage mother. Wherein? Shall I count the ways? Getting me to the Chicago Symphony (I think I won a prize with her aid; then losing the musical thread, the orchestra stopping, the effect of a GP (Grand Pause), in this case not orchestrally dramatic; rather, personally traumatic. Then, somewhere in Kansas, some sonata in an unairconditioned hall, playing, suddenly forgetting the next passage, having to stop, speak to the audience (the great musical taboo offended), telling the lie that the muggy weather had messed up the player’s finger work. And, colossally, at my age ten, talking our way into the dressing room of one Jascha Heifetz, in KC for a concert. In fact, we were forty minutes or so from his eight o’clock entrance onstage. You see, my mother’s mother, Ida, had said to my mother that Ms. Ida was related to Maestro Heifetz—why? Because both had come from Vilnius (then part of Russia), where, Ida told mother, all his relatives had lived. This, my mother told Heifetz on the telephone—“Yes! Your grandfather!…that’s right! In Vilna!…well, my…yes, that’s right!…was my great-grandmother’s”—and that is how we two got in, the young star and manager/mother. But Dorothy hadn’t been able to remember the first name of her great-grandmother in Vilnius; so when we entered the dressing room the lapsus annoyed the maestro—
—who was very annoyable. His face, I remember, was livid, matching his honeycomb concert shirt. In those days of course we hadn’t computers, and, besides, I had not done my research on him. But I could sense his strangely Waspish retirement. Later (too much later) I would read that in 1939, a year after I was born, he told a critic: “Born in Russia, first lessons at three, debut in Russia at seven, debut in America in 1917. That’s all there is to say, really. About two lines.” The artist repudiating reason as a lower order. As he had repudiated his two wives, bitter divorces. Debut at seven?: that was my debut—in the imaginary of an orchestral conductor, promoted by mother to a soloist to the side of the conductor!
—the lapsus annoying the maestro, who said, “I cannot listen to the boy, it’s almost stage time.” He was dressed in black tie, his jacket hanging from a walnut valet. I noticed how crisp under his chin his bow tie was and the green sofa and easy chairs in the room. There was another man in the room with him, annoyed looking also. But mother and I would have nothing of their pique and, please note, I had prepared for the encounter; the Czardas by V. Monti (a piece later to become famous when Montovani (who?) recorded it with an all-string orchestra). It (need I say, an encore for a second- or better third-tier concert performer) called for the encorist to hop up the fingerboard like a rabbit running across a field. I had to play harmonics that, as the boy practiced it, made him think of factory workers whistling their way home after dark. There were passages of spiccati that made peasants, in shoes with pointed toes, dance across his mind. And quadruple stopping that previously had brought tears to his mother (sitting on the bed in his room, listening) and a sensation of traveling across the world and tack back to the ten-year-old. All in all, he thought, it was a bravura piece admirably suited to showing the master his several talents. “No doubt of it,” the mother assured him, “when Heifetz hears—“
It was a strange procession outside the door with the little star on it…the female fist, raised to strike again, followed by the mother who belonged to it (orangey red of hair and someone had drawn a single red crayon line across the face to signify the mouth)...the arm of the fist covered in Persian lamb, coming out of it the nail-bitten hand…the boy, then, attached to the apparatus…and behind him, holding his hand tightly with its small plastic handle, the violin case, held behind the boy’s back as if to protect the occupant (protected already by a diaper) from the fury behind the door that was opening…
Maestro Heifetz said curtly, “What will you play?” and when the boy told him, Heifetz said, “Well…” and then “uh” and then: “Would you first play—let us warm up—one faultless scale in A major.” In A major…an open and honest scale…without caviling flats…calling for the fingers to broadly stride up the fingerboard, like the steps of men without guilt…a scale of the beef stews they ate, made of lean and large cubes of meat, a scale without pathos and perfectly suited for this lad of ten who liked to think of working men whistling.
I had wanted to ask if the assistant or whoever he was could leave us alone, but the person was tapping on his watch and I didn’t dare. Stupefied (stupidly, I hadn’t practiced my scales and arpeggios), I tried—do-re-mi-fa—and suddenly Maestro gestured with his golden Strad stop. “That was not a perfect A-scale.”
Heifetz said, “Well—again,” Little Mister Ten drawing the do in the form of a sustained slow bow, and next thing the boy knew, he was in the corridor hearing mother talk about the fine Czardas, by V. Monti the boy—
“Yes…well, perhaps anoth—“
—and then all three of them were in the corridor, Heifetz saying “GOODbye,” and mother petitioning for a rehearing the next time he came through.
Such was my story before Galamian heard my Monti and Vitalli. The choice, you see, was the following. And requires saying that Galamian, upon first hearing me play in that summer of thirteen, told Cerf that he would need another summer at Meadowmount to take a decision. Which? To accept me either at Juilliard or Curtis as master pupil. In that interval, in the winter in Kansas City, waiting for the second summer to come, a junior in a high school I barely attended, I was visited (the Superintendent of Schools, whom my mother lobbied, arranged it), first by recruiters from Harvard—“You’re not a Harvard man, Mr. Blonsky,” they told me at interview’s end; and a month later by Yale recruiters to whom I very shortly said: “You’re not going to want me. Harvard was here already and they told me I’m not a Harvard man.”
“Why don’t you let us be the judge of that,” one of the recruiters said. “Besides, we’re assessing you as a Yale man.”
And Yale man I was designated; early admission Ford Scholar. I had no idea (nor would I have cared) that diversity was beginning, that the recruiters had a Jewish quota to fill. I was, I think, ecstatic. I had insurance.
But little did I know that Yale insurance policy would turn our to mean nothing to me. For (it was summer now, my fifteenth year) and I was taking my lesson with Galamian when afterward, as I sat on this very different greensward, next to a huge old oak tree, who should approach me—“May I sit down with you?—but Cerf himself.
What he told me made me cry. And do things I never dreamt I would.
I could not remember his exact words, but luckily he wrote my mother immediately, in hand, in a green ink, and this is what he wrote, which is not what I was supposed to see and which I liberated from my household (it sits on my Roland Barthes shelf where I sit and write this, on a Saarinen table, calacatta white oval top on oval bottom, otherwise called statuario, the substitute for what I wanted once—to be a standing person, a solo performer in front of the community of cellos, double basses, oboes, tympani, my mother’s dream for me…
But I really don’t want to show it and thus show it again to myself. It’s a death sentence. And I felt and maybe knew it at the time. I had practiced so diligently, climbed so high, entranced the deer…only to be dropped right at the lip of the mountaintop by the monster that would not let me walk on his plateau. I even knew the Narcissus myth then, but I never thought to apply it to be. I was wounded, so deeply wounded, in what I didn’t have the language to call…my narcissism. Let me just speak on, around the missing letter…
In my amnesia, I do remember one thing Cerf told me Galamian told him. “Don’t encourage him to join me; let him go to Yale and join the ruling class. Do you want him in an orchestra the rest of his life?”
Di-es I-rae il-la sol-vet_ se-clum__in fa-vi-lla te-ste_ da-vid__ cum sy-bi-lla. The day of wrath, that day, shall dissolve the world in ashes, as foretold by David and the Sibyl. And now, Mr. G. My day had come, I sat in ashes; I never knew, alas, of David and Sibyl, they might have prepared me. Mr. G., God, my Judge.
I was left alone. And I also remember this other thing: grabbing my arms as best I could around the trunk of the oak tree and praying to God (for I was then religious): “Please, God, return me to my seven-year-old body with my fifteen-year-old head so I can have the brains I have now and the flexibility for technique I didn’t have then. I promise that I will…” I forget what. I had also forgotten that technique was the second of Galamian’s negative conclusions. I forgot that I didn’t have the spark to be an immortal. You see, I am remembering the letter. I cannot let it rest in its shelf behind me.
An immortal—that is what Galamian wanted from us. And that is what I wanted to be—or was trained to want to be—at three. And what I strove to be all my young life. But it wasn’t young to me. So much performing, so many encores, so many smiles and bows to the audience that I felt adult, fully formed, even old. I remember as a child—I never had a childhood: let’s say child violinist—once waking up crying. A nightmare, some figure or words telling me I would die someday. My mother rushed into the room, soothing me, telling me, “No, no, Marshall. Yours is a destiny for immortality. I laughed in her arms. She had banished tragedy, turned my life into comedy. I could perform and smile again.
And at the time, so many years ago, hugging the tree for dear life, for dear immortality, weighing on me as I waited for God to respond, was an entire stack, a Ziggurat of paters: there was the pater in the form of mater, Dot, my mother; there was the prompt patriarch, father, who stood up to the bat, bought me the fiddle, the bow, when required; there was the deer above him; and above the deer's antlers, the Great Father, Mr. G…. and you know what that stands for. What a tower pressing on a basement. Impossible not to be a bug there.
Di-es I-rae il-la sol-vet_ se-clum__in fa-vi-lla te-ste_ da-vid__ cum sy-bi-lla. The day of wrath, that day, shall dissolve the world in ashes, as foretold by David and the Sibyl. And now, Mr. G. My day had come, I sat in ashes; I never knew, alas, of David and Sibyl, they might have prepared me. Mr. G., God, my Judge.
I can’t stop myself, I have to show the letter. 
So there it is. I pulled it from the bookshelf. And I know, as I too read it now, that Cerf had betrayed me, never told me his negativity. The deer had run from me
And at the time, so many years ago, hugging the tree for dear life, for dear immortality, weighing on me as I waited for God to respond, was an entire stack, a Ziggurat of patriarchs: there was the patriarch in the form of matriarch, mother; there was the prompt patriarch, father, who stood up to the bat, bought me the fiddle, the bow, when required; there was the deer above him; and above the deer's antlers, the Grand Patriarch, Mr. G…. and you know what that stands for. What a tower pressing on a basement. Impossible not to be a bug there.
I am blessedly amnesiac about the letter as I age. If I do not write about it. And I have never written about it save now.
Even in my amnesias, however, I almost always remember one thing Cerf told me Galamian told him. “Don’t encourage him to join me; let him go to Yale and join the ruling class. Do you want him in an orchestra the rest of his life?” In an orchestra… that was the abyss, that was Sheol, the Netherworld. Impossible!
But it was possible. In fact, it was certain. My fatum.
Di-es I-rae il-la sol-vet_ se-clum__in fa-vi-lla te-ste_ da-vid__ cum sy-bi-lla. The day of wrath, that day, shall dissolve the world in ashes, as foretold by David and the Sibyl. And now, Mr. G. My day had come, I sat in ashes; I never knew, alas, of David and Sibyl, they might have prepared me. Mr. G., God, my Judge.
I was left alone. And I also remember this other thing: grabbing my arms as best I could around the trunk of the oak tree and praying to God (for I was then religious): “Please, God, return me to my seven-year-old body with my fifteen-year-old head so I can have the brains I have now and the flexibility for technique I didn’t have then. I promise that I will…” I forget what. I had also forgotten that technique was the second of Galamian’s negative conclusions. I forgot that I didn’t have to spark to be an immortal. An immortal—that is what Galamian wanted from us. So there, weighing on me as I waited for God to respond, was an entire stack, a Ziggurat of patriarchs: there was the patriarch in form of matriarch, mother; there was the prompt patriarch, father, who stood up to the bat when required; there was the deer above him; and above the deer's antlers, the Grand Patriarch, Mr. G…. and you know what that stands for. What a tower pressing on a basement. Impossible not to be a bug.
And since the bug sat and waited for God to send him back, aand…nothing, I went to…
I was Erick Friedman's teaching assistant and manager from 1994 to 2004 when he died of cancer.
In the anecdote on this page you are confusing him with Michael Rabin. Michael's death being a suicide is only a rumour.
Posted by: Stephen Redrobe | June 21, 2005 at 11:18 PM
I don't think my father had ever done anything like this before, nor did he ever do it again. You should know, Marshall, that telling you this was a watershed event for him and my mother never forgot its importance. (Of course, considering your subsequent career, she thought it was extremely fortunate for you.) One difference in her retelling of the story and yours is: she emphasized that he would never have gone out of his way to communicate this negative message without having been asked point-blank, I believe by you, whether you had the makings of a solo violinistic career.
Charlie Cerf, Washington DC
Posted by: Charlie Cerf | February 25, 2007 at 05:13 PM
I was perhaps one of the most fortunate listeners of Raymond Cerf's violin, as I worked in his home watcing his grandchildren, Colin and Aaron when they were 1 and 3.....a long , long time ago. This was in Westport on the lake....I think I was about 14 and I am now 58 so that was many years ago......I can still remember listening to him play every day and thinking it was the most beautiful music in the world.....having spent my whole life at the time in Westport did not afford us "locals" much of an opportunity to hear such music.....I am blessed to say I have a special appreciation for the violin.......undoubtedly because I was afforded this experience....thank you!!!
Donna Sands
Posted by: Donna Sands | July 16, 2007 at 07:50 AM