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I have heard many violinists, among them Joachim, whom I heard when I was a boy. While on a ship in the East India Docks I obtained leave from the skipper for a Saturday afternoon off, and full of excitement went to Sydenham and heard the great violinist perform at the Crystal Palace. To tell the truth, I was disappointed. He played a Viotti concerto, stood like a statue, and his fingers and arms moved with the ease of machinery. His bearded face was raised toward the ceiling the whole time, as though he saw some beautiful sight in the sky above the palace roof. It struck me as a very refined and intellectual-looking face. His playing revealed perfection in the trained artistic sense, but lacked the fire and emotion born of the singing stars.
I heard Sarasate play at his villa near Biarritz. His nostrils dilated and pinched in as he played, and he had all that Joachim lacked (when Joachim played in public), for he was a spiritual player; you could have thought that the angels were wailing and fingering his own heart-strings. M. Ysaye played rather like Sarasate, but seemed more conscious of his own ability, which destroyed the atmosphere of the public performance which I happened to hear.
Kubelik I have heard twice, at Bournemouth and in New South Wales. He performed with Joachim’s machinery-like ease; his double-stopping revealed the perfection of the performer’s ear and the dexterity of the fingers that seemed to outdo the player’s own heart; but it struck me as cold playing, as if the player’s command over technique was greater than his musical temperament.
I have often heard it said that the marvellous technique of Paganini is to-day the technical equipment of all violin virtuosos. I doubt it. Certainly they are not mentally equipped with his way of playing. When you look at Paganini’s compositions you see something that is the outcome of one personality, the white heat of genius who first discovered the musical gold mines in the depths of the violin. What must the man have been whose genius was so intense that he invented that which all others imitate and call their equipment? Paganini could not leave his playing to posterity, but a true critic can look at those individual compositions and dream of the tremendous passion that inspired the maestro to leave us those fugitive echoes of his playing, for that is all they are. Paganini played like an inspired, deep-feeling barbarian; his style was not artifice and did not represent, by artistic bowing and phrasing, the niceties of polite emotion and the artistries of civilisation. We have no compositions as he played them. He stood before his awestruck audience and extemporised melodies, chords, sparkling arpeggios and staccato and cadenzas, that were all half forgotten when the intense musical fury of his heart ceased and the magic fingers were silent; and so we have only hints of his style. His imitators scrape out phonographic records of his published compositions and say they are equipped with Paganini’s art.
I heard an English violinist, Henley, in London. I was off to Jamaica next morning and only heard him by accident. A friend of mine said: “Come in this hall.” We went in, and I was astonished. I thought at first that the violinist whom I saw playing, with Joachim’s ease and Sarasate’s passion, must be some foreigner; but he was an Englishman. His double-stopping was superb, with a passionate fire in it alien to Kubelik’s temperament, I should think. Altogether he was really the most artistic and passionate player I ever heard, Sarasate excepted. While he played I realised that note that tells of genius, which makes you feel that the performer’s violin and fingers are imperfect instruments, are not as great as the heart that is trying to express its depth of feeling upon strings.
I went abroad after that. I have not heard since of Henley the wonderful violinist. He was English, and I suppose London’s fashionable musical world positively refused to go mad about an Englishman when so many German and Austrian violinists were about.