Making Music With What Remains.

The Israeli violinist Yitzhak Perlman contracted polio at the age of 4. Ever since, he has had to wear metal braces on his legs and walk with crutches, yet he became one of the great virtuoso of our time. On one occasion, the story is told, he came out onto the stage at a concert to play a violin concerto. Laying down his crutches, he placed the violin under his chin and began tuning the instrument when, with an audible crack, one of the strings broke. The audience were expecting him to send for another string, but instead he signalled the conductor to begin, and he proceeded to play the concerto entirely on three strings. At the end of the performance the audience gave him a standing ovation and called on him to speak. What he said, so the story goes, was this: “Our task is to make music with what remains.” That was a comment on more than a broken violin string. It was a comment on his paralysis and on all that is broken in life.


Happiness, these lives seem to say, is not the absence of suffering but the ability to take its fractured discords and turn them into music that rescues from the darkest regions of the soul a haunting yet humanizing beauty.