The Reckless Violinist: Principles of Performance
Or, The Perils of Flawless Execution
In the studio of a great violin teacher, you will learn to disregard the audience.
The Great Teacher will tell you that if you blow a big chromatic run, no one will notice. Further, she will say, the audience needs to believe that the performance is perfect. Let them believe it.
So you forget the audience.
With a video camera, you can’t forget. The advice that gets you through a live performance — that if you blow it, the moment will disappear — does not apply. The moment will last forever.
I learned about the vicious intrusion of the camera recently when I tried to play a song from “La Traviata,” the much-loved opera by Giuseppe Verdi.
The story swirls around a courtesan named Violetta. In the opening, after recovering from an illness, she throws a party to let all the men in town know that she’s feeling better. Alfredo, a young gentleman, is “inspired by a passing glance” from Violetta. He sings about the eye that “aims straight to the almighty heart,” and he expresses a wish to take her away from her life of dissipation. She cynically declines, on the grounds that these passions are fleeting.
The song is a waltz, written in three. It looks simple, but, like the characters themselves, the notes have a complex relationship. It’s not as easy as it looks.
When I played the song for the camera — for posterity, rather than for a fleeting moment — I ended up doing 20 takes in two sessions. After the first session, my fingertips came out black from the fingerboard. My mood was black, too.
I decided to come back after three days and duplicate the conditions of rehearsal — not the conditions of performance. I decided that the trappings of performance — the full dress, the stance, and the camera — had worked against me.
For the second session, I modestly settled into a chair, with flat hair, bland makeup and a shirt that could have taken a turn in the pajama drawer. I played three more takes — 18, 19 and 20.
Take 20 was good. I didn’t select it for the final video, however.
Take 20 had perfect tempo and precise phrasing, and it displayed the kind of technical proficiency that makes a music teacher willing to continue working with you. Take 20 would have been very good to play for an audition, or for a jury of music professors for a final grade at the end of a semester.
It was an incredibly dull performance.
To me, although it was closer to perfect, it fell short of performance level.
In the end, which take did I settle on?
Take 4.
It had a rough landing, but it was much more interesting to watch than the highly proficient execution of Take 20. On YouTube, a medium where you fight for every second, it was much more likely to earn a minute of the audience’s time.
In the version I selected, I was well-warmed-up, the piece flowed, and I had not started to yell at the score yet.
What did the camera show me?
That I can be relentless, which I knew, and that I still don’t know when to walk away, which I didn’t know.
When I watch these imperfect performances, a voice will say to me, “You did 20 takes, and you should have done 50 — whether anyone is watching or not.” I’m grateful that I’ve learned to ignore that voice.
In “La Traviata,” Violetta learns that your time will tick away, whether you seize a moment or not. Yet when you freeze time through the eye of a camera, you can learn to do a better job at shaping the moments to come.
