Sharing the Wisdom of a Lifetime

On a rainy summer afternoon, with a cool mist hovering above the gardens that surround his rural Connecticut home, Isaac Stern ascended a short flight of stairs and entered the practice room in his studio at the edge of his property.

The walls of dark-stained wood are lined with photographs of the musicians whose friendship has sustained him for over six decades on the concert stage: Pablo Casals, Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Rubinstein and many, many more. The room seems less a studio than a reliquary for the tokens of a staggeringly successful life in music, from an immigrant childhood in San Francisco, to countless triumphs on the world’s great concert stages as perhaps the most influential American violinist of his generation.

Guiding a visitor through the room, Stern paused before a gift from an old friend who recently passed away. He sighed deeply after telling the story of their friendship.

“In your life,” he concluded, “you learn what is treasurable in memories.”

Stern should know. This is his 80th year, and the violinist was in a reflective mood. There had been no shortage of celebrations and more were planned: the private dinner for 110 beneath a tent in his backyard, for example, or the full weekend of birthday events in Carnegie Hall at the end of this month, or the tribute concert that will kick off the Los Angeles Philharmonic season in early October. But along with all the champagne and merriment had naturally come an impulse to take stock.

Not that Stern lingered on the past. For him, taking stock was mostly a matter of looking at the here and now, at the singular role he has carved out for himself in contemporary American musical life. As the elder statesman of his instrument, he is among the last of the mid-20th century giants. He has welcomed his position as an eminence grise of the classical music world, having fostered the careers of many of the country’s leading string players. If all that sounds like a satisfying retirement, well, Stern had to agree.

“I’ve never been happier,” he said, looking grandfatherly as he tucked his glasses neatly into a breast pocket and sipped a frothy cappuccino. “I’m 80, but I don’t feel 80. I don’t even know if I feel 60 because I can’t remember it.” He offered a proud smile.

That was before late August, when Stern’s doctor told him he could wait no longer to have a heart valve replaced. Stern had the surgery immediately, canceled a scheduled appearance at the Lucerne Festival and called off his plans to perform at the Philharmonic event Oct. 5. The surgery went well, and beyond a slow-down for a period of recovery, Stern insists that he’ll be back at his elder statesman role shortly.

“I’m feeling wonderful, although I’m still weak as a kitten,” he said last week from his recovery bed in his New York apartment. “This gives me a physical base on which to extend all my interests. I look forward to no lessening of my commitment to the things with which I’m deeply involved.”

Those things have included Carnegie Hall, where Stern is president, having almost single-handedly saved it from the wrecker’s ball in the late 1950s. They have also included occasional solo performances, and more frequent chamber-music appearances with younger protegees and established colleagues such as Yo-Yo Ma, Emanuel Ax and Jaime Laredo. But most of all, Stern has focused on teaching. He has worked with as many as 70 students or young professionals in a year, traveling from New York to Jerusalem to Tokyo.

“He’s a force of nature,” says Ma, who first played for Stern when he was about 6 years old. “He’s the type of personality that is both highly intelligent but also never loses a sense of the primal forces.”

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Primal forces have always been present in Stern’s career. In the violinist’s heyday, he was lauded for his natural poise, his exciting interpretations and his unfaltering sense of the musical line. Today though, Stern will readily admit that his playing is a shadow of what it once was. And yet, what he may have lost in technical perfection over the years, the violinist has gained in wisdom about music.

“There are feats of derring-do, the flying-trapeze playing that I of course would not try to emulate,” he conceded last summer. “There are young people who can do it far better than I can now. But those same young people come and play for me, to learn how to play one note leading to another, which is the stuff I love.”

To help pass on the stuff he loves, Stern has developed what he calls an “encounter,” in which individual students and ensembles work closely with him over the course of about two weeks, often returning to the basics of how to shape a musical idea and communicate it effectively. The encounters are different from master classes, he said, because the point is not to break down old habits or teach new techniques, but rather to go more deeply into the music.

“What I can do best and what I think is most worthwhile is teaching the players how to think. I teach them how to listen to themselves and be honest, so they can become independent and go as far as their talent can take them, which is usually farther than they’ve gone at the time that they come to me. The main direction is teaching them not how you play, but why. Why do you want to be a musician?”

Stern has found that it’s a niche that needs filling. While conservatories around the world are producing skilled instrumentalists in unprecedented numbers, the musicians’ sense of the building blocks of musical style are often underdeveloped, he explained. The same player who can easily toss off the notes on a given page of music might know little about where that music comes from, the life of the composer, or the kind of contoured reading that makes up a compelling interpretation.

To help teach these skills, Stern invites leading soloists and chamber musicians to join him at his encounters. His standards are extremely high, and he is not averse to using harsh words to get through to someone. Ma never performed in an encounter, but he remembers well how intimidating Stern could be to a young person. “It took years for the terror to wear off,” he said, sounding like he was only half-joking.

For those who have participated in the programs, the results are often very rewarding. John Largess, a 28-year-old violist, is part of the Miro Quartet, a group that first played for Stern in a Jerusalem encounter in 1998.

“You really view him as one of the last people living from an older generation,” he says. “And yet, he doesn’t make you feel like his experience is remote from you, or like he’s handing down some old musty gems and we’re just carrying them on. The life of an artist is a process, and he’s climbed very high on that path. We want to get there. We want to think like that and communicate with audiences like that. It’s true what they say. He just has that aura around him.”

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Like all American dream stories, Stern’s history begins with humble roots. Born into a Russian Jewish family in 1920, he came to this country as an infant and settled with his family in San Francisco. He began playing the violin at age 8, and by the end of that year he stopped attending school, never to return. His days were filled with practicing, as he and others quickly began to fathom the dimensions of his gift. At 12, he began to study with Naoum Blinder, the concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony.

Stern was not a child prodigy, but he took to the instrument with the passion and tenacity of an immigrant son who quickly grasps that his talent--be it in music, scholarship or comedy--is a way out of the insular communities of the newly arrived, and into a vast and alluring America. While he was more than a generation younger than the Gershwins, Al Jolson or Irving Berlin, he pursued his goals with the same lust and determination. By 17, he had earned himself a debut recital in New York’s Town Hall.

“My parents wanted me to be an American as soon as possible,” he explained. “So being able to make music and be part of that whole world outside was a very big thing. I don’t remember ever having dreams of being a famous world figure and making lots of money. I figured that if I would ever get $100 a concert for 30 or 40 concerts a year, I’d be king of the world.”

Needless to say, he got a lot more than that. His concert schedule in his prime reached more than 100 performances a year. In the early days, there were plenty of recitals “in tiny towns you’ve never heard of.” It was through those travels that Stern first saw America and began to acquire the patriotic, Populist bent that has stayed with him to this day. “I met the people and I knew them well,” he recalled quaintly. “There was always a kind of clean strength about Americans.”

By his late 20s, Stern was enjoying a career as an international soloist. He collaborated with many of the great conductors of the mid-century, including Eugene Ormandy, George Szell and Bruno Walter. During World War II, in a stunt that displayed what would become his signature combination of idealism, naivete and chutzpah, Stern suggested to the U.S. Army that it assemble a special unit for classical musicians. What seemed at first a ludicrous suggestion--what need did the Army have for classical musicians overseas?--soon became a reality, and Stern went off to play for American GIs in Hawaii and the South Pacific. The performances not only helped Stern build his charisma on the stage, they also gave the violinist a sense of the musical tastes and impulses of the common man.

After the war, Stern vowed never to play in Germany. His memories of the war period, he said, made it impossible for him to give of himself deeply to a German audience. He has kept his pledge and did not set foot in the country until last year, when he came to teach but not to play.

Stern did make a groundbreaking 1956 tour of the Soviet Union, accompanied by his pianist and longtime collaborator, Alexander Zakin. The trip was a swap, brokered by the impresario Sol Hurok, in exchange for tours of America by the Russian violinist David Oistrakh and pianist Emil Gilels. Stern had a wry take on the cultural exchange, commenting to the press: “The Russians sent us their Jews from Odessa, and now we’re sending them our Jews from Odessa.”

Once there, however, Stern endeared himself to audiences not only through music, but also by speaking directly to them in the broken Russian of his childhood. The audience’s response, as he recalled in his memoir--”My First 79 Years,” published last year--was more than warm. “It was almost as though a physical force had assaulted us,” he wrote, “so concrete was the expression of sheer pleasure we heard and felt.”

It was the violinist’s first taste of musical diplomacy but certainly not his last. In 1979, not that long after China’s Cultural Revolution had made listening to Western classical music a grave and punishable crime, Stern traveled to the country to perform and teach. The trip was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary “From Mao to Mozart.”

Stern would also put his prestige as a soloist behind the nascent state of Israel in 1949, returning there often in later years, particularly to show support in times of upheaval. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, he played for wounded soldiers. He even performed in the Jerusalem Theater during a Scud missile attack in the middle of the Gulf War. As the air-raid siren sounded and panic began to spread, the violinist stepped alone onto the stage and began to play a movement of solo Bach. The audience donned gas masks, and calm was restored as the crowd sat listening in rapt silence.

Looking back on these dramatic experiences, Stern is quick to downplay his political and diplomatic intentions. Even if they sound “extracurricular,” he said, all of his activities “are connected to music in one form or another.”

Which only serves to illustrate the nature of Stern’s conception of music. It is always necessarily connected to broader ideas of social betterment, civic participation and humanitarian commitment. In his words, “artistic life can never be divorced from political life.”

And Stern has carried this mantra into yet another of his crusades: the battle for music education in the public schools. He believes it should not be “a sluffed-off little addition to suit a few people. It should be understood that it is a central force for the whole of life.”

To help drive home his point, Stern taught a violin lesson in May at Carnegie Hall to a hesitant group of New York City’s 43 school superintendents. They started off shaky but ended the half-hour lesson with an almost credible rendition of the tune “Did You Ever See A Lassie?” A more appropriate question might have been: “Who else but Isaac Stern?”

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At his Connecticut home, the violinist sat pensively on a patio overlooking his immaculate grounds. A brook tripped lightly in the background as a hummingbird looped delicately among some nearby flowers.

“This place has saved my soul, just by sitting here and looking at the trees that are three times older than I am,” he said. “But, as beautiful as this place is, it would probably be impossible for me to stop, turn off the world and just live here. I have an insatiable, ungovernable, constantly flowing curiosity.

“Look,” he continued frankly, “after seven decades of work, one gets accustomed to activity. And because you’ve been successful, you’re in the middle of things. And because you have wanted to help someone, then everybody comes to be helped. So you become kind of a center of knowledge and activity. You can’t do it all, and I have no magic wand. I never have. But I’ve gotten accustomed to being in the whirlpool of artistic life.”

Stern said he had recently purchased some property adjacent to his home, where he plans to build a guest house so that students can visit him for several days at a time. And there is little doubt that they will come. One chamber musician who has worked closely with Stern summed up the heart of the matter.

“Heifetz is gone. Piatigorsky, Casals, they’re all gone. They shaped classical music, and taught all the people I’ve studied with, but we can’t go talk to them anymore. Isaac is still around. And he’s probably the best teacher of them all.” *

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Isaac Stern tribute, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Oct. 5, 7 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., $15-$100. (323) 850-2000