Obsession with Heifetz Dept.: Here’s the Preface to Listening to Heifetz: A Biographical Survey of His Recorded Legacy, in which I very subjectively appraise the violinist’s vast catalogue of recordings.
MY VIOLIN LESSONS BEGAN AT AGE TEN, because I loved the sound of the instrument, the varnished box that in my hands emitted only godawful shrieks. Yet when played by accomplished artists, it became (to my young ears) the purest vehicle for emotional expression. And it still sounds that way to me.
The Mendelssohn concerto played on a portable radio as I sat in the dining room of my parents’ house. But this violinist was different. This one played with an urgency passion I’d never heard from the instrument before. This one took risks, dancing up and down the fingerboard like a tightrope walker. And when the lively third movement kicked into gear, I got chills down my back. The violinist was Jascha Heifetz.
I needed to hear more of his playing. I joined the RCA Record Club when I saw an ad that offered four Heifetz records for a penny, never mind the obligation-to-buy commitment and the need to send them a damn postcard every month to cancel the automatic selection. But now I had my own record of the Mendelssohn concerto – and Beethoven, and Brahms, and Tchaikovsky – and even a Prokofiev concerto that I found a little hard to take at the time.
And I returned the postcard every month, but I wrote on it my own selection, one not included in the catalogue. I asked for Heifetz records. I’ve since been told that those record clubs had a fixed inventory, but I got lucky. There was someone at the other end who sent me the records I asked for.
This obsession came as he was winding down his career. I never got to see him perform. Heifetz made a television special around this time, my first chance to see him in motion; otherwise, I was a slave to his records, poring over the Schwann Catalogue to discover discs I might have missed.
Soon enough I also discovered that some in the music world didn’t share my passion. Seeking to bond with any violinist I’d meet, I’d bring up Heifetz and – “He’s cold,” I’d hear. “There’s no emotion in his playing.” And worse: “If you want to hear a great violinist, listen to Oistrakh.” This book will set the record straight, revealing Heifetz as a most compelling interpreter.
He was the most influential violinist of the 20th century and, in many ways, the most critically polarizing. His technical brilliance remains undisputed. There was nothing in the challenging realm of violin-playing that he couldn’t master with apparent ease. After an initial burst of wild enthusiasm when he made his American debut, many critics seemed to conspire in haughtily dismissing his performances and recordings, and those opinions – based not, as we shall see, on considered analysis but rather in snobbish posturing – persist as hand-me-downs to this day.
We’ll examine his legacy through his many recordings, which offer the chance to observe his playing style across six decades. And we’ll trace the evolution of critical consensus to prove that many of the Heifetz detractors were playing a disingenuous game of follow-the-leader, seeking to protect their credibility in the small, rarefied world of classical-music criticism. But let’s start with some biographical notes to contextualize his recording career.
By the time Heifetz made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1917, he had earned a reputation throughout Europe as a virtuoso of unprecedented skill. And he was just sixteen. He began violin lessons at age three with his father, himself an orchestra player in Vilnius, Lithuania, where Jascha was born in 1901. Thanks in part to a rigorous practice regime, the young Heifetz’s ability quickly outstripped that of the parent. His lessons with another teacher led to a public debut at age seven, playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in nearby Kovno.
The youngster’s St. Petersburg debut took place when he was ten. With pianist Emanuel Bay (pronounced “Bye”), he again played the Mendelssohn Concerto, along with two movements from Wieniawski’s Concerto No. 2 and Paganini’s challenging Caprice No. 24. (Bay would later spend two decades as Heifetz’s accompanist.) According to the Petersburg Gazette, “one felt that before the public stood without doubt a future star.”
Soon after that, in May 1911, the boy made his first recordings, a set of six short pieces for the Zvukopis label, newly established in St. Petersburg. The pianist is unidentified (could it have been Bay?) and Heifetz soon dropped all but one of the pieces – Dvořák’s “Humoresque” – from his repertory.
A pattern of performance and acclaim followed as he interspersed studies with concerts throughout Russia and Europe. In 1912 he appeared with the Warsaw Philharmonic; later that year he made his Berlin debut, an event followed by a reception where he met his idol, Fritz Kreisler. He recorded again in November, during a return visit to Germany, this time playing into Julius Block’s portable cylindrical machine.
The Heifetz family fled Russia as the revolution there began in 1917. With a war already raging in Europe, they made an arduous trip through Siberia and Japan, landing in San Francisco but postponing the boy’s American debut until he arrived in New York.
Not surprisingly, the violinist’s reputation preceded him. Carnegie Hall was flush with violinists for that October 27 event, and nobody was disappointed. “A few strokes of a flame-tipped bow over strings become vocal with a fabulous sweetness sufficed to tell the story of a triumph that will reverberate through the extent of the land these months to come,” read the review signed “H.F.P.” in Musical America, October 1917
Added the anonymous critic for The American, also reviewing the event: “To dilate upon the mechanical proficiency Jascha Heifetz has obtained on his instrument – to discuss in detail the extraordinary dexterity and precision of his slender fingers, the lightness, elasticity, and supple firmness of his bowing – seems almost superfluous, when it can be described by one word: perfection.” I think I need a seat!
His first American recordings were made two weeks later, when he and pianist André Benoist cut five sides for the Victor Recording Company, later to become RCA Victor before disappearing into a blur of corporate acquisitions. Those were the days of single-sided acoustically recorded platters that spun at 78 r.p.m., the quality of which sounds terrible to our ears but which were lauded at the time as practically indistinguishable from a live performance. Heifetz recorded some four-dozen short pieces over the ensuing eight years, fitting each into the 78's playing time of less than four minutes a side on a premium, 12-inch disc. (See Appendix 2 for a chronological list of Heifetz recordings.)
In 1925, electric microphones entered the studio, improving sound quality exponentially. Heifetz continued to champion the short pieces he loved (they never left his repertory), but in 1934 he added full-length, multi-disc concertos to his catalogue, teaming with conductor John Barbirolli and the London Philharmonic to record concertos by Mozart, Glazunov, Vieuxtemps, and Wieniawski.
Being a child of the LP era, I didn’t discover that Heifetz had cut any 78s until I found a few in a neighborhood junk shop. One of them was the finale of the Mendelssohn concerto, with a crack down its length but still playable. He took the movement at a rousing clip, but that nasty click sounding 78 times a minute is still burned into my ears even when I hear a clean version of the record.
Snagging the rest of his 78s got easy when RCA put out a six-volume Heifetz Collection, each volume a four-record set. Trouble was, I couldn’t afford them all. So I called RCA and, posing as a journalist, requested an interview with Heifetz’s producer, John Pfeiffer. For me it was cheaper to travel to the city than to buy those sets, so we met in his Manhattan office on Sixth Avenue on November 5, 1975. He was very proud of this achievement, especially with Volume One, which contained all of the acoustically recorded sides. This was long before digital editing made noise reduction comparatively simple. As Pfeiffer explained, the much-needed tick editing to remove those annoying clicks was done by marking and then splicing out a tiny piece of the magnetic recording tape, all by hand.
The first-ever recording of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto was made in 1934, with Leopold Stokowski conducting, but Heifetz refused to okay the result and ordered the masters destroyed. He kept a test pressing for himself, however, and it was this that his family allowed to be released after his death. In 1935, a Heifetz performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto was broadcast as part of a New York Philharmonic Brahms series conducted by Arturo Toscanini. It’s a white-hot reading that shines through a recording that needed some clever restoration to mend a gap in the first-movement cadenza (the patch came from a later recording with Serge Koussevitzky conducting, which probably would have infuriated both conductors were they around today).
“Stripped to its essentials,” wrote Deems Taylor in a 1940 profile, “'his career has inevitably been one of practice-travel-rehearse-play-sleep, repeated, with slight variations, year after year.” Even as a relentless schedule of concerts kept Heifetz on the go – he estimated that he’d traveled around the world four times before he reached 40 – he churned out recordings. Among them were sonatas by Beethoven and Brahms as well as (then) lesser-known ones by Grieg and Fauré. He also made his first venture into Bach’s solo violin sonatas, recording three of them while he was touring Great Britain in 1935. Although the pianist for most of the sonatas and short pieces by this time was Emanuel Bay, Heifetz teamed with Arthur Rubinstein for a 1937 recording of César Franck’s Sonata in A Major, a repertory mainstay.
Heifetz enriched the concerto repertory with a number of works, both as champion and with commissions. The violin concerto written for him by William Walton in 1939 has enjoyed steady popularity, but Louis Gruenberg’s challenging Violin Concerto from 1944 has fallen off the map. After he moved to Los Angeles, Heifetz got to know several film composers, and commissioned works from Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Miklos Rozsa. Korngold’s concerto premiered in 1947, prompting this from Olin Downes in the New York Times: “This is a Hollywood concerto ... the melodies are ordinary and sentimental in character; the facility of the writing is matched by the mediocrity of the ideas.” Fear not: we’ll be exploring the social mechanics of classical-music criticism in the Prologue that follows, where we’ll deflate Mr. Downes’s phony hauteur. And the Korngold has since been rediscovered by a younger generation of violinists, adding more excellent recordings to the catalogue.
Heifetz recorded most of the mainstream concertos more than once, generally to replace his monaural recordings with stereo versions once that technology became the norm – and RCA won acclaim for the innovative recording techniques that characterized their “Living Stereo” imprimatur. You can find the Beethoven concerto conducted by Toscanini and then Charles Munch; the Brahms with Koussevitzky and then Fritz Reiner; the Mendelssohn with Sir Thomas Beecham and then Munch; and two mono Tchaikovsky concertos (Barbirolli, then Walter Susskind) before the stereo version with Reiner.
Some concertos he visited only once, such as the one by Elgar, Wieniawski’s second (in a distressingly shortened version), Bruch’s second, the Spohr No. 8, and Lalo’s “Symphonie Espagnole.” He recorded the Walton concerto twice, but never in stereo. In late 1946, he stepped into the studio to make the wackiest of his concerto recordings: the Bach Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor. As film composer Franz Waxman conducted an RCA house band, Heifetz played against the playback of a magnetic film track he’d recorded earlier, thus setting him into both solo parts. The hubris of it sent some of his critics into near-apoplexy.
As noted above, his affection for short works (“encore pieces,” as they’re sometimes termed) never waned. He called them his “itsy-bitsies,” and his recital programs typically finished with a series of such delights. Like his hero Kreisler, he made many transcriptions for violin and piano. He introduced “The Flight of the Bumblebee” as a stand-alone piece; he had a minor hit with “Estrellita” by Manuel Ponce, at least when the sweet dance bands got hold of it, and a major hit with Grigoras Dinicu’s “Hora Staccato,” especially when Harry James got hold of it (featured in the 1944 film “Bathing Beauty”).
Most enduring are the Heifetz transcriptions of Gershwin’s Three Preludes and six songs from “Porgy and Bess.” Gershwin and Heifetz became friends while the violinist was still based in Manhattan and eagerly socializing with Algonquin Round Table wits. He wanted Gershwin to write a violin concerto, but the composer died before getting a chance to do so. Heifetz recorded the Gershwin pieces twice, first during a brief stint with the Decca label, later in a stereo RCA recording paired with itsy-bitsies by French composers.
As the U.S. went to war in 1941, Heifetz embarked on a punishing schedule of entertaining troops abroad and broadcasting on the radio at home. He believed that the producers of radio fare talked down to the audience, so he sought to improve the airwaves with music just this side of out-and-out highbrow. Soon he seemed to be on one concert program or another every week. Many of them were recorded; none was ever sanctioned for commercial release, but selections can be found online and in select CDs.
The Budapest Quartet (two of whose members also were born in Vilnius) began recording for His Master’s Voice in 1925, and those recordings were distributed by Victor in the U.S. Their contract was to run through 1940, but they grew unhappy with RCA Victor’s lackadaisical release schedule. So they grabbed an offer from Columbia Records to jump ship. Faced now with the lack of a significant chamber-music group, RCA producer Charles O’Connell took a long shot. “There was no one at Victor sufficiently expert to choose such a group, and for this reason I asked the aid of Jascha Heifetz,” he wrote in his 1947 memoir, The Other Side of the Record. Heifetz chose top artists: pianist Rubinstein, violist William Primrose, and cellist Emanuel Feuermann, among others, and recording sessions in May and September, 1941, produced an impressive output of works. “I think it is extraordinary,” wrote O’Connell, “that a group of virtuosos, men of such extraordinary individuality, force, and diverse temperaments could come together, even in music, and so completely submit themselves to ensemble.”
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| Piatigorsky, Primrose, and Heifetz |
In his entertaining autobiography Cellist, Piatigorsky describes an evening in 1935 that “was spent with Vladimir Horowitz and Jascha Heifetz in Jascha’s palatial penthouse on Park Avenue. It was a veritable orgy of chamber music, with no one else present. We played until an early hour of the morning and paused but once – to fortify ourselves with delicious little Russian chicken cutlets, of which the thin and poetic Horowitz consumed fifty-six.”
When Heifetz and Piatigorsky first recorded together, in August 1950, the pianist was Rubinstein, and the group was dubbed “The Million-Dollar Trio” by Life magazine. There were concerts as well, but the ensemble soon disbanded, apparently, over billing. The pianist’s name traditionally comes first, but Heifetz thought that he should get the top spot from time to time. According to Rubinstein’s memoir My Many Years, it got to the point where “I began to see red. ‘Jascha,’ I shouted, ‘if God played the violin, it would still be printed Rubinstein, God, and Piatigorsky.’” And that was the last time he and Rubinstein worked together
But he and Piatigorsky continued to socialize and perform and, in 1957, they entered the studio again. Alongside William Primrose, they recorded several Beethoven string trios. In 1960, the Heifetz-Piatigorsky Concerts was established to present chamber works not necessarily in the mainstream, and found the pair collaborating with a number of different artists in concerts and on recordings through 1968. Notable releases included a lavish box set of LPs issued in 1962, featuring Schubert’s sublime String Quintet in C Major, the Mendelssohn Octet, and the stormy piano quintet by César Franck.
In 1970, Heifetz agreed to a television appearance. He previously had been on educational channels with a series of films of his master classes, but this time it was Heifetz as centerpiece, opening with a handful of “itsy-bitsies” and closing with Bruch’s “Scottish Fantasy.” His recording career ended with his only live-appearance record set, capturing a 1972 concert at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. The performances are admirable, but he clearly was no longer at the top of his game.
Had he recorded for another decade, he would have entered the digital age. When CDs were introduced in 1982, RCA (and all the others) saw the dollar signs in mining their back catalogues for re-releases. A substantial portion of Heifetz CDs hit the stores, and then RCA (at this point BMG Music) upped the ante in 1994 with a lavish 65-CD set of . . . everything. The Decca recordings. The late-career Columbia releases (actually RCA recordings, but, like the Budapest Quartet three decades earlier, Heifetz had grown impatient with their proposed release dates). Even a souvenir medal was included to commemorate the set’s limited-edition nature.
BMG Music was subsumed into the Sony empire, and in 2011 the company put out “Jascha Heifetz: The Complete Album Collection,” a set of 103 CDs containing all of Heifetz’s RCA discs, presented with the brief playing times and cover art of the original LPs. Some rejected recordings still in the vaults received premiere releases, but none of the Decca sides were included because the rights had reverted back to Universal Music. You can find them in CD sets from Deutsche Grammophon and Naxos, if not online.
The two Naxos CDs also contain a bonus of the five recordings issued as V-Discs (for “Victory Discs”), produced during wartime in the 1940s to circumvent a recording ban that essentially halted the domestic recording industry for two years, but never intended to be available in the U.S. Taken from radio broadcasts, they are among the over 900 78s sent to military personnel overseas, who obligingly smuggled them back home.
But CDs are in a shrinking market now (try to find a new car with a CD player!), nudged out by the convenience of streaming. I searched for those V-Discs for fifty years, and just after the Naxos discs arrived I discovered the same titles online at archive.org. Much of the recorded repertory of this great artist, once obtainable only through record stores and junk shops, now waits at your favorite streaming service. So however you choose to listen and, perhaps, collect, let this book guide you through the history of Heifetz recordings.
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