With Strings Attached

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Joseph Szigeti KNOPF

ONE reason Joseph Szigeti is so great a musician is that he is so much more than a musician. Starting as a precocious Hungarian lad in a forcing-house of violin virtuosi, he was thrust on the concert stage before adolescence, and by contact with the cultivated world was made to feel the defects in his formal education. So he strove to remedy these, and the result is an artist, a social equalitarian, and a man of breadth and depth. Is there anything which does not interest Mr. Szigeti or in which he cannot interest his reader? The mechanics of a virtuoso’s career, his problems of repertoryventures on tour, encounters with historical figures not alone in music but in literature and politics — all these of course we expect, and with them shrewd insights into the puzzles of contemporary music and such related questions as the impact of phonograph recording on the progress of musical understanding. In addition we get something quite unexpected — sociological observation schooled by a lifetime of travel and study in the lands he has traversed so often and so thoroughly, including the Orient.

He likes the people of the world’s tank towns. They strike him as probably quite as prophetic of our worldto-be as those of the big cities, and perhaps more so. He plays hookey to correct his vision by immersing himself in common life. The United States he has seen from back-stage as well as from the concert platform, and he writes of it with evident affection. Soviet Russia, too, which he has seen often and intimately, has his sympathetic understanding and deep respect. One grows to like him immensely. In the course of his pages he progresses from the estate of admired violinist to that of a warm personal friend.

And how do these musicians, — Bruno Walter, Albert Spalding, Joseph Szigeti, whose trade is something other, write so well? They are of course multilingual; then too their musical ears keep them from penning awkward sentences; and finally, the musical form which lias become so much a part of their very tissues teaches them how to construct in noble proportions. Mr. Szigeti writes easily within the American idiom, even in journalese when he chooses. This gives to his pages the flavor of intimate conversation, including a merry wit, for he can see himself on occasion as a comic character. And yet for the graver problems of life, creativity, and sociology, he commands an English style well at those levels. World citizenship thus begins in the arts and sciences, but most of all in music, and Mr. Szigeti writes, as he plays, like a good citizen of the world.

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