Hans Letz, the gifted Alsatian violinist, is well fitted to talk on any phase of his Art. A pupil of Joachim (he came to this country in 1908), he was for three years concertmaster of the Thomas orchestra, appearing as a solo artist in most of our large cities, and was not only one of the Kneisels (he joined that organization in 1912), but the leader of a quartet of his own. As a teacher, too, he is active in giving others an opportunity to apply the lessons of his own experience.
VIOLIN MASTERY
When asked for his definition of the term, Mr. Letz said: "There can be no such thing as an absolute mastery of the violin. Mastery is a relative term. The artist is first of all more or less dependent on circumstances which he cannot control—his mood, the weather, strings, a thousand and one incidentals. And then, the nearer he gets to his ideal, the more apt his ideal is to escape him. Yet, discounting all objections, I should say that a master should be able to express perfectly the composer's idea, reflected by his own sensitive soul.
THE KEY TO INTERPRETATION
"The bow is the key to this mastery in expression, in interpretation: in a lesser degree the left hand. The average pupil does not realize this but believes that mere finger facility is the whole gist of technic. Yet the richest color, the most delicate nuance, is mainly a matter of bowing. In the left hand, of course, the vibrato gives a certain amount of color effect, the intense, dramatic tone quality of the rapid vibrato is comparable on the violin to the tremulando of the singer. At the same time the vibrato used to excess is quite as bad as an excessive tremulando in the voice. But control of the bow is the key to the gates of the great field of declamation, it is the means of articulation and accent, it gives character, comprising the entire scale of the emotions. In fact, declamation with the violin bow is very much like declamation in dramatic art. And the attack of the bow on the string should be as incisive as the utterance of the first accented syllable of a spoken word. The bow is emphatically the means of expression, but only the advanced pupil can develop its finer, more delicate expressional possibilities.
THE TECHNIC OF BOWING
"Genius does many things by instinct. And it sometimes happens that very great performers, trying to explain some technical function, do not know how to make their meaning clear. With regard to bowing, I remember that Joachim (a master colorist with the bow) used to tell his students to play largely with the wrist. What he really meant was with an elbow-joint movement, that is, moving the bow, which should always be connected with a movement of the forearm by means of the elbow-joint. The ideal bow stroke results from keeping the joints of the right arm loose, and at the same time firm enough to control each motion made. A difficult thing for the student is to learn to draw the bow across the strings at a right angle, the only way to produce a good tone. I find it helps my pupils to tell them not to think of the position of the bow-arm while drawing the bow across the strings, but merely to follow with the tips of the fingers of the right hand an imaginary line running at a right angle across the strings. The whole bow then moves as it should, and the arm motions unconsciously adjust themselves.
RHYTHM AND COLOR
"Rhythm is the foundation of all music—not rhythm in its metronomic sense, but in the broader sense of proportion. I lay the greatest stress on the development of rhythmic sensibility in the student. Rhythm gives life to every musical phrase." Mr. Letz had a Brahms' quartet open on his music stand. Playing the following passage, he said:
