VIOLIN DREAMS
Arnold Steinhardt
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston; New York, 2006
With audio CD of Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor played by the author
Recorded twice: Feb. 8-10, 1966 and March 23 and April 2006
Liner notes include interview of author with Alan Alda
This is an unusual book review submission to a psychoanalytic journal. "Violin Dreams" by Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet and soloist in recitals with orchestra, is more than the liner notes indicate, "a love letter to the violin". "Violin Dreams" reveals the violinist-author's natural analytic inclination to think deeply about himself and his music-making as integral to his inner life.
His book is a contribution to psychoanalytic thinking outside the box of the consulting room and the formal concert hall. Over the course of it's 255 pages, the reader is invited to eavesdrop on a process that feels as though he or she is privy to a series of quasi-analytic sessions. Steinhardt's previous book, "Indivisible by Four" (1996) chronicles the inception and history of the Guarneri String Quartet, retiring after its 2008-09 season and 45 years of music-making. The longevity and success of the Quartet suggests Steinhardt has experience in communicating as well as developing and maintaining meaningful relationships, a topic of interest to psychoanalysts.
Manifestly "Violin Dreams" is an account of Steinhardt's quest for the "ideal" violin and "ideal " performance of Bach's exalted Chaconne (the last movement of J.S. Bach's Violin Partita No. 2 in D Minor).
This reader believes the trio of performer- instrument - music hold latent meanings. The violin and Chaconne also serve as recurring themes that knit together, often through the author's reported dreams, a deeply personal and insightful commentary about Steinhardt's- and, by extension, every person's - quest for meaning. Steinhardt's evocative and reflective personal journey invites the reader to accompany him backstage, on stage, and off stage . Yet the strength of "Violin Dreams" is more than absorbing reading about a famous musician who is self-reflective and insightful; Steinhardt's reminiscences illustrate intersections between music, emotion, and mind - topics that are deeply psychoanalytic.
As I began Chapter I, "Survival of the Fittest", I viscerally felt myself joining Steinhardt backstage with the familiar, dreaded feeling of performance anxiety. It is an affect - and defense - that patients, both performing professionals and numerous others who are not musicians, apprehensively have experienced in life and reexperienced in analytic sessions.
For Steinhardt, "...Standing in the wings of Carnegie Hall, I felt my heart racing and the palms of my hands turning clammy. The stage door swung open slowly, framing the broad expanse of hardwood floor where, in a matter of seconds, I would play Johann Sebastian Bach's Chaconne for solo violin. Doubts rushed at me like a fetid wind. Would I play well? Would the listeners, music lovers with exacting expectations, be pleased? Or might I be booed for a less than stellar rendition of the great Chaconne? Then I thought the unthinkable: Just don't play.. ..." (p. 1). I was drawn into Steinhardt's mental world where any number of intrapsychic issues are evoked during the mental transformation that occurs when moving from back stage to center stage.
At this inopportune time, a performer privately copes in public with the vicissitudes of drives, defenses, and affects. These may include ambition, desire, competition, aggression, envy, grandiosity- any number of overdetermined intrapsychic dilemmas that become be activated in public situations. As such times, the audience represents projected earliest objects and their internalized approving and/or rejecting imagoes. One's entire self, much less Bach's great music, is on the line. Performing in public, be it music, giving a speech, submitting for publication , or exhibiting oneself in some other way that is open for examination and evaluation can be both exhilarating and terrifying. These intrapsychic dramas are heady stuff!!
Steinhardt continued: there was no audience in Carnegie Hall except a few people who were about to examine him about the history of the violin. He tried to comply with his inner tormentors to demonstrate his worth, " ...Without a vowel to move the consonants along, my tongue snagged on crwth as if I were afflicted by a speech impediment. My face flushed with shame." (p. 3.) Many performers vigorously fend off awareness of these painful affects. Steinhardt's temporary solution was "not to show up", but then he had another idea...."....I would simply play the Chaconne as planned. Let Bach's noble opening strains answer the criticisms of my tormentors and banish them for the hall" (p. 3).
He would master this dilemma through Bach's music, through aggression and virtuosity to banish the examiners " ...But when I tried to lift the violin onto my shoulder, it became unbearably heavy and the bow refused to move across the strings, as if a quick-setting glue had been applied to its horsehair.....only a croak came out of the violin" (p. 3). Steinhardt's account evoked my own memories about how often I have worked with patients on their internal battleground of fears which include loss of love, object loss, castration themes, and other intrapsychic punishments following shame and guilt for some perceived inadequacy or grandiose oedipal fantasy that has the power to propel revenge fantasies. Steinhardt continued, " From the corner of my eye I saw the man with the mustache collecting pads.
He mounted the stage steps slowly. A feeling of suffocating dread rose up in me, and then I awoke....the concert-exam was only an anxiety dream, one of dozens I've had over the years" (p. 3). I breathed a sigh of relief along with Steinhardt when he woke up. This was "only" a dream!!! I experienced the material that followed as though an analytic session had been in progress partly because Steinhardt continued with associations to his dream - and subsequently to others throughout the book.
Although Steinhardt is a member of a quartet and a soloist, he is in himself a trio. To paraphrase the title of his 1996 book, performer - music - violin are indivisible. Steinhardt weaves an interesting fabric of informational data about the violin, the music repertoire, and a fascinating travel log of experiences of a touring violinist. More importantly, all of these topics, appealing in themselves as manifest material, become metaphors for music as a point of entry into affect and the unconscious.
Steinhardt describes his formative years in Los Angeles and introduces us to his music-loving parents who had immigrated from Poland. Folk songs in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish and Russian were recalled as part of daily home life as were tender anecdotes about his mother, who at age 6, sneaked into a Jewish wedding in her Polish shtetel just to hear the Klezmer band. Steinhardt affectionately integrates his earliest experiences with his parents and music when we learn that at age 5 he heard a recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. "I stood there transfixed, having no idea that this disembodied sound possessed a name, violin, much less a size, weight, and material. If someone had shown me a real violin at that moment, I would have been amazed that such a small instrument, one no bigger than some of the toys I played with, could produce this array of intoxicating sounds.
(p. 44)..." The violin seemed independent, self-sufficient, and capable of so many different moods......the feeling of that Beethoven moment remains firmly etched. ...I am invariably transported to a shrouded place where one's deepest feelings reside, unnamed except as a lump in the throat, unseen except for a pair of moist eyes. That is the miracle of music and the power of the violin" (p. 45;46). Steinhardt's evocative accounts of his earliest musical memories of his family and violin teachers, as his parental surrogates/internalized objects, becomes the psychic foundation underlying the opportunities and dilemmas for his life-long trajectory in a music career. He importantly emphasizes the impact of early childhood and how one cannot decide on music as a career later in life. A career in music is shaped during the years of early ego development and involves intense relationships with teachers as well as relationships with instruments, the latter possibly serving as transitional objects (MacDonald, 1970). This is quite different than a career path for individuals who decide on careers at older ages.
Steinhardt reflects, "...how can he or she know that one has to begin young and practice daily, and that starting violin at the ancient age of , say, thirteen, will most likely be a losing battle? A child can't know this..." (p. 32). Steinhardt alerts us here to an important theme to be tuned into in the consulting room when patients, particularly musicians, talk about career choice. He also draws our attention to the momentous connections between music as a point of entry into affect and fantasy as he elaborates multiple creative possibilities between sounds and visual images, including another dream where a psychiatrist asked him, "in what key is the strawberry?"
Later in the book, we share Steinhardt's mortified reaction about dropping and breaking his valuable and beloved Storioni violin as he ran to catch the subway. We realize just how intimate the violin and violinist have become - an injury to one affects both. "...I tripped and fell as I ran for a train and my violin case flew from my hands and crashed onto the platform. ...I knew something bad had happened.
I opened the case to find a crack in the top of my violin. Staring at the wounded instrument ...the crack gaped at me cruelly" (p. 178). Clearly his violin, once belonging to Joseph Resiman, the renowned first violinist of the Budapest Quartet, now passed on to the first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, was much more than a wooden box!! The palpable relief he felt when the violin could be fixed caused this reader to connect Steinhardt's subsequent surgery to his left hand some years later. It was an injury to his body - his instrument - similar to a potentially unfixable violin, that could have ended his career. This crisis involved more than physical trauma -it was ego threatening and thus, for the musician, life-threatening. "...How cold a vital piece of my machinery (i.e., his left hand) , something I had taken for granted all my life, betray me like this?" (p. 201). This was not "only" an anxiety dream. While this reviewer does not and should not attempt to psychoanalyze the writer, psychoanalysts reading about these two events no doubt will be tempted to make any number of interpretations about the "accident" and hand injury.
I prefer to stay with the author's associations which lead to his own interpretation that allowed him to work through his trauma. " ... I felt as if I were dying. The violin, that sweet giant core of my life, was in danger of being taken away from me. ...Without it, what would I be? (p. 204). This thought of not being able to play the violin - to depend on it for his sense of self - forced Steinhardt to reflect deeply about what music meant to him and how playing music on the violin formed the core of his identity.
He confessed he "feared he was nothing without the violin". (p. 204). At the height of his despair, he was confronted by his violinist-friend, Shumel Ashkenasi who challenged him , "If you think you are nothing without the violin, then you are also nothing with the violin". (p. 205). That night he had a dream about playing heavenly music. Using his associations to the dream, Steinhardt reached a new level of self-understanding, "...an enormous gift....I knew that to be someone with the violin, I must also be someone without it" (p. 207). This realization was mutative for him.
To come to terms with what one can and can't be is at the heart of a transformative psychoanalytic experience. For Arnold Steinhardt, as for each of us, there is no perfect violin, no ideal musical or psychoanalytic interpretation, no miraculous pot of gold at the end of the rainbow if only we could find some omnipotent magic instrument or performance to capture it. Just as "Violin Dreams" opens with a dream, it also ends with one. Steinhardt dreamed he moved back to his birthplace in Los Angeles. He was shown the apartment he lived in as a child. The real estate agent told him that the rent was $350,000 a month, a staggering fee.
The agent opened a concealed door in the back which led to a huge area where one could build a factory or department store. She said the space had enormous potential. Steinhardt found the price outrageous and the dream puzzling until he actually revisited his old neighborhood not long after this dream. There was a "for rent' sign on the window, and he was allowed inside. There was no secret door. There was no special closet that led to an enormous space. Then he remembered he had stored his first violin in the small closet in this very house. This was the violin, no bigger than a toy, that had begun his dream to reach for his potential through music . "Violin Dreams" is more than anecdotes about a talented youngster, nurtured by parents, challenged by teachers, and who uses his ambition and dedication to scale the heights in the world of music.
Steinhardt's story reads much like a case history written by a psychoanalytically reflective man who is attuned to his inner life. He uses the power of reporting and reflecting upon his dreams to help convey his story. Steinhardt's paints his narrative in the colors of dreams and sounds of musical metaphors. A CD of Bach's D Minor Partita which concludes with the famous Chaconne is attached to the back cover of his book. The listener hears him performing the Chaconne at two different times during his artistic development (the second time the Chaconne is performed on his Storioni violin). The music adds wordless commentary. Ultimately, Arnold Steinhardt invites us to reflect with him about music as a "simulacrum of mental life" (Feder, 2004, unpublished manuscript).
REFEERENCES Feder. S. (2004) Music as Simulacrum of Mental Life. (Unpublished manuscript)Steinhardt, A. (1966) Indivisible by Four. Farrar, Straus, Giroux. New York.
McDonald, M. (1970) Transitional Tunes and Musical Development. The
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. 25: 503-520. Julie Jaffee Nagel, Ph.D.
400 Maynard Street
Ste. 706
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104
(734) 761-4764
jjnagel@comcast.net
A version of this review appeared in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA), 2008, Vol. 56, No. 4, pp. 1371-1376.