Erick Friedman
(August 14, 1939 - March 30, 2004) is considered by many as one of the greatest
American born violinists of the past century. Erick Friedman's
illustrious career took him to many of the great concert stages of the world
appearing as guest soloist with most of the great orchestras throughout
the United States and abroad: the New York Philharmonic and the National Symphony, the
orchestras of New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Miami, Detroit, Indianapolis, the Berlin
Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris and many other major orchestras throughout the
world. Karajan, Stokowski, Steinberg, Leinsdorf, Previn, and Ozawa are some of
the celebrated conductors with whom he collaborated with. Mr. Friedman's
recordings for RCA earned him accolades including the prestigious Grammy Award.
Mr. Friedman has been featured playing the Bartók Violin Concerto in an A&E Television
Production on Bartók which was released worldwide. His tribute to Fritz Kreisler is available on VHS at online vendors
including Amazon. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Isadore Freed, Ezra Laderman, and
Laurent Petitgirard are some of the internationally celebrated composers who
wrote and/or dedicated compositions to him. Erick Friedman studied at The Juilliard School with Ivan
Galamian. At age fourteen he began studies with Nathan
Milstein and later worked with the legendary violinist Jascha Heifetz with whom he recorded the Bach Double Violin Concerto for RCA. In the early
1970s, Mr. Friedman was on the violin faculty of the North Carolina School of
the Arts. He later held faculty positions at the Manhattan School of Music, Southern Methodist University, and the Yale School of Music.
Friedman was the
recipient of the 2000 Ignace J. Paderewski Award for Distinguished Contributions
to Society and Culture.
Mr. Friedman
died of cancer on March 30, 2004
● Peaks and Pitfalls
Dennis D. Rooney looks at the career of
Erick Friedman, past, present, and future.
Dennis Rooney bringt ein Portrait Erick Friedmanns, der über
seinèn Unterricht mit Jascha Heifetz spricht, über seine widersprüchlichen
Erlebnisse beim Tchaikowski. Wettbewerb in Moskau und seine Laufbahn als Lehrer,
als er aufgrund eines Autounfalls keine Aufführungen mehr geben konnte.
Dennis Rooney dresse le profil d'Erick Friedmann, qui se
souvient de ses études avec Jascha Heifetz de ses moments controversés au
Concours Tchaïkovsky à Moscou et de sa carrière de professeur suit à
l'interruption forcée de sa carrière d'exécutant après un accident
automobile.
Portrait of Erick Friedman
If in 1957 Erick Friedman had taken the advice of his early
mentor and first manager, Arthur Judson, and passed up the opportunity to study
with Jascha Heifetz, his career might have followed a very different course. 'He
was very much opposed because he knew that Heifetz would insist that I stop
giving concerts and at that time I was playing about eighty concerts a year.
Judson - with some validity, I might add - felt that a career could not be
stopped and restarted successfully.'
Friedman's decision to ignore Judson's warning and the three
years that he spent as Heifetz's pupil and protégé would provide not only the
most profound influence on Friedman's playing but also led to the future
difficulties that he would encounter both in escaping the Heifetzian shadow and
becoming a pawn in Cold War musical politics. In 1957, however, such
consequences could scarcely have been imagined. Indeed, the events of the
several previous years suggested that Friedman was well on his way to the
forefront of the younger American- born violinists whose accomplishments spread
the renown of Ivan Galamian.
Erick Friedman with his first teacher, Samuel
Applebaum.
Born in 1939 in Newark, New Jersey, Eric (the final k was added
later by Heifetz) Friedman was drawn to music early. ‘I loved it. I was always
listening to the radio, only to classical music. The only reason that I started
to play the violin was because my father played it.’ The elder Friedman, a
musical amateur who played by ear, started the six-year-old Eric, who was big
for his age, on a three-quarter sized instrument (‘It was cheaper than a piano’,
his son recalls with a smile). His first teacher was Samuel Applebaum, - ‘a warm
and wonderful man who got me started’ - whose son is the violist, Michael
Tree.
At ten, Friedman began to study with Galamian. Their six years
together were punctuated by ‘some intensive upheavals’. ‘I made rapid progress
with him, but even at ten it was all I could do to keep from giggling when he
played the violin. He would pick it up a lot during lessons. His bow hand held
the inevitable cigarette, so ashes would fly all over the place. His fingers
looked like S's on the strings. I concluded that I had better not listen too
literally to this man if he plays like that, because he doesn't really know how
to play!’ For Friedman, Galamian attained greatness as a teacher by default. ‘If
you didn't play in time, in tune, with a singing tone, you didn't study with
him; he threw you out. He wasn't a very knowledgeable violinist himself and he
told his students a lot of things that weren't always pertinent to each
individual, but he knew what was right, how you should sound, how to put a piece
together. He understood what the violin was supposed to sound like, and
if you didn't sound like that, you had real problems with him. He was a master
of this; he was weakest when it came to specific directives.’
‘He taught something that was absolutely crazy: that the bow
should describe a figure-eight across the strings. I don't know why other than
that this dictum sounded good because it didn't address what the hair does on
the string, since when the hair is perfectly perpendicular on the sounding point
with the right pressure, you will get a perfect sound. He always - again by
default - taught one to play close to the bridge. Of course, you don't play
close to the bridge, but rather as close as you can get away with! As soon as
you get past the sounding-point, you must do something to protect the string,
otherwise you get a squelch, an uncomfortable sound. That's why all of us used
to say that you could always tell a Galamian student, because they all
scratched!’
‘He was organized not by the day, but by the week, month, year
and decade! He had an incredible sense of responsibility to his art and to
himself. He felt that he had a certain number of years in which to do what he
had to do. He often talked to me about his mortality, to which he alluded by
saying: “When I go somewhere else”. He had developed a reputation for being
extremely unforgiving; you disappointed him once, not twice.’ For Friedman,
Heifetz's unique way of playing resulted from his unique approach to the violin,
but one grounded in tradition. ‘Heifetz did not play intuitively but very
deliberately. He had a concept of his hands, of what he did with the bow and his
left hand in relation to the bridge. What he searched for always was complete
command of the instrument so that he could make it do exactly what he wanted
expressively. And he found a way of playing that had no risk at all, or minimal
risk. From that vantage point he would “hum in the shower”. He could never have
a bad night, the way he played. He always shot for 105 per cent, which is why he
stopped at age 54, because there was no way that he could accept even a slight
falling-off from that standard. Little things that most performers accept as
inevitable blemishes weren't tolerable to Heifetz, which is why there were
minimal risks when he walked out on stage. He would turn over in his mind every
phrase that he played, living with it and shaping it with both mind and hands
until it emerged exactly the way that he wanted it. When he succeeded, he never
changed it.’
Erick Friedman and Heifetz
Such deliberation, Friedman believes, was for Heifetz a
liberating rather than an inhibiting factor. ‘The genius of Heifetz was that
every phrase that he ever played said something. He engaged the
audience's imagination. The perfection of his playing was simply necessary in
his view to get as close to the composer's intentions as he could. He always
said “Aggrandize the music and it will aggrandize you.” I've never known anyone
who was more interested in music - more moved by music - than he was. He wasn't
one to engage in serious philosophical discussions. Not that he couldn't, but he
felt that he was neither sufficiently gifted nor accomplished in it. Thus he
tended to explain everything in parables, often spiced with a quip. He would
always say to me: “Don't think so much, just play.” As he wouldn't get into a
discussion that he didn't think would mean anything, so he wouldn't play music
that didn't mean anything to him. I remember him telling me that he had
purchased the score of the Bartók Concerto No.2. “I looked at it and worked on
the first two or three pages, then I got angry, tore it up and threw it away.
Then I began to think that perhaps I had been too hasty; so I bought another
copy, but the same thing happened. Again I thought that I had been too hasty and
purchased still another copy, and again, after playing the first three or four
pages, I tore it up. I didn't buy it again.” What he was saying by this
elaborate - and, I'm sure, fictitious - anecdote, with its characteristic quip,
was that he couldn't play what he couldn't identify with. Heifetz was
essentially an opera singer. He understood drama and found a way to dramatize
everything in his playing. He understood the relationship to music of upward
thrust and vibrato, and how to hold onto a note so that it seemed never to end.
He had also learned how to project these qualities a great distance but because
he was a horizontal player, not a vertical one, he could only play with complete
understanding of and thorough conviction in a line. He didn't understand Bartók,
but he certainly never thought of him as anything other than a major figure in
the music of his day.’ Friedman remembers that Heifetz told him that he had been
corresponding with Prokofiev about a Third Concerto - ‘But he up and died
on me’, said Heifetz.
Through these years of close association (earlier discussed by
Friedman in The Strad, February 1986), Heifetz was never effusive with his
compliments. ‘Strangely enough, he never really considered that they were
necessary from him.’ This attitude, says Friedman, arose from Heifetz's fierce
honesty. ‘He was never aware of his effect as a person and he never inflated his
importance as a violinist, although he was certainly aware of his value.’ His
eyes, recalls Friedman, were another manifestation of that honesty. ‘He had the
most penetrating blue eyes. He didn't look at you much, but if he felt that you
were honest in talking to him, he would look at you directly and you would see
that he was really interested.’
Erick Friedman, (left) recording the Bach “Double Concerto”
with Jascha Heifetz (right) and Sir Malcolm Sargent, 1960
If Heifetz's compliments to his pupil were rarely spoken, he
praised Friedman in far more important form when he invited him to record the
Bach Double Concerto with him in London in 1960, the only one of his records to
present him in a duet with another violinist. At the same time, Friedman began
to make other recordings for RCA. This instance excepted, Heifetz refrained from
any active effort to advance Friedman's career. ‘In fact, he once told me that
he would not because he didn't want to give me “an unfair advantage”. I believe
that he was happy to see me develop my own concert career, but I think that he
felt that I was not fulfilling my responsibility to pass on what he taught me.
After teaching me for several years I think although he never said so - that he
expected me to stay with him and teach; but I couldn't. I hated California - the
smog and the tinsel town atmosphere of Los Angeles especially and I also felt
that if I stayed I would lose myself, become completely under his thumb.’
When he returned to active public performing, Friedman found
that his connection to Heifetz could he a liability as well as an asset.
‘Heifetz's attitude toward style was that it was the performer's prerogative to
play music in the way that was most moving and dramatic without losing either
rhythm or pulse. He presumed that one used a string for colour, and he used
positions only for colour. For a while, I myself used to use those devices but
in my own way. I also liked to make changes on the spur of the moment. Sometimes
it would come off, sometimes it wouldn't. People who identified me with Heifetz
would be upset by this. I couldn't win. If I played like Heifetz, I was a carbon
copy; a clone; if I didn't play like him, I was less. I recorded the First
Paganini concerto, which Heifetz never did. I even wrote my own cadenza for it.
When Irving Kolodin reviewed it in The Saturday Review, he wrote that I
played it “like Heifetz would have played it”, as if that was somehow a fault.
But how could he have known? Heifetz didn't play it as an adult!’ Critical
estimates of Friedman's playing during the early sixties are perhaps best
summarized by Henry Roth (Great Violinists in Performance, Panjandrum
Books, 1987):
Erick Friedman in the early 1960's.
‘In his early career, Friedman's ... entire musical personality
was practically an extension of the Heifetz muse. As he matured he shed the most
obvious reverberations of this influence ... The soprano character of his sound,
the nature and application of his vibrato, his articulation in both hands and
his stylistic inclinations as heard in those early recordings, link him to
Heifetz in a startling degree. He has the equipment of a daring, top- level
romantic virtuoso. While the body of his vibrant tone is somewhat lean, his
overall delivery is almost invariably suave. If one is willing to overlook these
similarities, the recordings are exceptionally brilliant in every respect.’
By 1965, Friedman's career seemed once again set on a path of
steady growth. His catalogue of recordings for RCA had grown impressively - a
recording of the First Prokofiev Concerto with Erich Leinsdorf was a virtual
best-seller. Then, suddenly, a series of seemingly unconnected events conspired
to cause Friedman's career suddenly to lose way. ‘Sol Hurok offered me a
contract on condition that I sever my relationship with CAMI. I proceeded to
obtain a release from my contract with them, but not without some animosity on
their part. However, within a few weeks, I suddenly lost all contact with Hurok
who, without giving any reason, refused either to see me or answer my telephone
calls. Now, mysteriously out in the cold with him and at odds with my previous
management, I suddenly began to be encouraged to go to Moscow.’
Portrait of David Oistrakh, drawn from life by Erick
Friedman, 1963/4
The encouragement came from David Oistrakh, with whom Friedman
had established ‘a very intimate and friendly relationship. He would drive my
car, even once to Philadelphia for an appearance (his driving scared me to
death!). When I mentioned my desire to perform in Russia, he then suggested,
since he was head of the jury, that I enter the next Tchaikovsky Competition. I
told him that I thought that such a move could be risky, considering my career
and recording activity at that time. He smiled encouragingly, replied simply
that he knew my playing and said that I should come.’ At a distance of almost
twenty-five years, Friedman blames both his own naïveté and Oistrakh's apparent
duplicity. If his invitation was sincerely motivated, Friedman now believes that
sincerity to have been largely subliminal. ‘I wanted to think that he was closer
to me than he was, because he was a great violinist and a great artist. I
idolized him and I was extremely trusting. Until I was 30, I don't think that I
had ever written a cheque. I knew nothing about banking or finance; all I did
was play the violin. If anyone showed me love, affection or caring, I responded
wholeheartedly.’
At worst, Friedman now believes, Oistrakh had been officially
‘instructed’ to persuade him to enter the competition, and may have somehow
managed to disrupt his relationship with Hurok in order to further this end. The
possible reasons, he believes, are twofold. ‘In 1965, I was probably the
youngest artist ever to be named as a member of the jury of the Long-Thibaud
Competition in Paris. With the reckless idealism of youth, I had been outspoken
to the press there in my criticism of the tactics of the Soviet-bloc judges to
promote their own contestants: they simply would vote in the early rounds, in a
meaningless gesture of impartiality, for some Western contestants who clearly
had no chance. When I went to Moscow, I discovered that the same individuals who
had been my peers in Paris were now to be my judges. Needless to say, my
intemperate remarks the previous year had not endeared me to them.’ The other
possible reason for getting him to Moscow may have been a desire to embarrass
Heifetz through his most celebrated pupil. ‘Heifetz was very anti- Soviet, and
he and Auer were at that time still considered defectors. Oistrakh, a patriotic
Soviet citizen, may have hoped to lend additional lustre to Soviet violin
pedagogy by discrediting that of these internationally acclaimed emigrés.
Heifetz called me and emphatically advised me not to go. “You'll see what will
happen there,” were his words.’ Friedman also would not rule out the possibility
that Oistrakh had some other deep motive related to the not-yet-solidly based
career of his son, Igor, who might profit somehow from a poor showing by
Friedman.
Hoping to duplicate the success of Van Cliburn, and thus get
his management back again, Friedman journeyed to Moscow, where he tried without
success to meet Oistrakh. ‘Suddenly, he seemed not to know me.’ Soon afterwards,
Friedman received a surprise visit in his hotel room. ‘A Soviet contestant in
Paris, who had not done at all well there, but who later became well-known,
turned up unannounced and proceeded to go into the bathroom and turn on all the
faucets. He then asked me to exchange fifty dollars for fifty rubles, claiming
hardship. I didn't want to refuse to help a struggling fellow musician, even
though I would lose money on such an exchange, given the Ruble's actual value
and it never occurred to me how he had gotten up to my room in the first place,
so I followed him outside into a park, where we exchanged the money.’ This was,
Friedman now believes, a deliberate set-up. ‘From that moment on, I felt myself
watched: furthermore, another Soviet musician with whom I was friendly was
removed from my hotel.’
After the first round, when it became generally known that
Friedman's placement was around sixth, he began to regret his decision.
‘Considering how questionably the competition was being conducted (e.g. members
of the jury teaching their student competitors during the competition,
inadequate rehearsal facilities for the Western contestants, etc.) and the
placement of some student-level Soviet entrants ahead of me, I decided that I
could not receive a fair hearing and consequently would leave on some pretext.’
But he had been indiscreet enough to mention his plans to several persons.
Again, he received a sudden visit from the same Soviet violinist with whom he
had exchanged money. ‘His story now was that, at the very least, I was to tie
for first place. Given my emotional stress, I very much wanted to believe him
and I stayed, having already had second thoughts anyway. I couldn't lie. I
couldn't be in that position.’ Despite his eventual tie for sixth place,
Friedman believes that for once he made the right decision. ‘If I had tried to
leave, I think that I might have been arrested.’
‘At the winners' concert, each of us was to perform for
approximately fifteen minutes. I played for an hour and fifteen minutes -
the only one to do so - until I was followed back on stage by some official who
announced to the audience that I wished them to stop applauding, which was
untrue, of course, but was understood by the audience. Later, Joseph Szigeti,
who had been a fellow juror in Paris, told me that he had given me a top score
in all the rounds.’
When he returned home, Friedman was approached by Time
for an article. ‘I refused; sour grapes could all too easily be inferred. And I
was hardly able to subpoena the KGB for corroboration!’ Friedman was content to
let the matter rest. ‘Frankly, the music world pretty much knew of the political
nature of the Tchaikovsky at that time, although not the general public.’ only
after he learned that the episode had been recounted in detail in a 1982 novel
(Pape and Aspler: The Music Wars, New York: Beaufort Books) did he feel
that the time was ripe to set the record straight. Friedman is inclined to
underplay the effects on his career. ‘The fact is that it was not harmful at
all, since my career became larger and I appeared with conductors such as von
Karajan and Steinberg. But Henry Roth (in his book cited earlier) described it
as ‘a cruel blow that temporarily sidetracked his career.’
An even crueler blow would strike Friedman two decades later,
when his left arm and hand were damaged in an automobile accident. As a result,
his performing career has come to at least a temporary close. ‘I can no longer
perform,’ he says simply, quietly and without qualification. For someone who
decided upon a violinistic career at age 10, such an injury is unimaginably
catastrophic. Not being able to play the violin is like having a stroke. He
readily admits to having sought psychiatric help to deal with serious
depression. ‘I've been very, very low on one or two occasions.’
Denied the ability to perform, he has now focused on teaching,
having joined the faculty of the School of Music at Yale University, having
previously been artist-in- residence at Southern Methodist University in Dallas,
Texas, and holder of the Mischa Elman chair at the Manhattan School in New York.
Despite his disability, he can call on his own career and his training with
Heifetz and Milstein to bring to his students the performer's unique insights,
especially at a time when teaching has become dominated by non-performers.
‘Performing is like giving birth. No one outside the profession
will ever know what it feels like to go out on a stage and play the Beethoven
Concerto. Not even the greatest players are exempt from that feeling of complete
exposure. Most string teaching has no awareness of what performing is.’ To have
a successful performing career, he says, one must ‘play well, play well in
public, play well over a period of years. It's not difficult to teach someone to
play well; that comes from talent and an ability to imitate. The problem is to
teach how to do it under pressure and over a period of years. Some careers only
last three years, not from lack of desire or even of opportunities; it's simply
too difficult. The nervous strain is too great, and that comes from now knowing
the instrument. Unlike tennis players, violinists don't have either coaches or
trainers to help them practice and protect their musculature. That's something
that Auer and Heifetz knew about.’
‘There is a standard of medical practice that is accepted by
the profession, but a violin teacher can teach anything he pleases. Teachers,
often with the best intentions, will teach their students things that they have
never really thought about, e.g. “you have to round your fingers”, “you have to
see your elbow”, “hold the violin in the centre”, “hold the bow so you don't
lose it”. They might as well be giving them an infection. They're teaching them
problems! There isn't a great violinist in history who automatically
rounded the fingers. I wear a 37-inch sleeve. Does that mean that someone who
wears a 32-inch sleeve has to manage his arm and fingers the same as I do?
Fingers are equally disparate. Most violinists with any degree of security play
the same way: with their palms; not their fingers. The fingers fall. Perlman's
great security comes from his enormous hands, well- developed arms and long
fingers. Heifetz and Milstein and Stern had this too - knowing where the hand
is. You don't find notes with the tips of the fingers!’
‘If you were studying with me, I'd tell you that your elbow
must be under the violin, which seems natural. But what if I hang you by your
feet? Now your elbow would be over the violin! All of which is to say
that consideration must be given to the angle of the violin. People with short
necks tend to hold the violin flatter. I have a very long neck, so I hold the
violin at a considerable angle and my elbow has to reflect the difference in
angle. once there was a publicity photo of Heifetz playing with a lowered bow
hand elbow, when in fact he held that elbow very high. It seems that the
photographer had asked Heifetz to lower his elbow because he couldn't see his
face, but the pose was slavishly imitated.’
‘Being taller than Heifetz, I was always a little afraid of
breathing on him too hard for fear of blowing both the fiddle and the bow from
his hands, that is how effortlessly he held them. He was like a great fighter
who just floats. His violinism sounded at white heat, but if you looked at him
he seemed very relaxed. The intensity of what he did had nothing to do with
tension.’
Despite the injury to his left hand, Friedman can still
demonstrate the use of the bow. ‘Violin playing is all bow. The left hand is a
vehicle to protect the bow. Most students play backwards. They usually try to
play notes, tensing their left hand in order to make sound. The bow becomes
secondary. How one handles the bow is fundamental. I like to ask a student why
the bow is the length that it is. Why isn't it much shorter or much longer? At
first they have no idea - one student even suggested “Because it fits in the
case”. It only slowly dawns on them that the length of the bow is geared to the
average arm.’
‘One of the reasons that I wanted to study with Heifetz was to
learn vibrato in its relation to the bow. In my own teaching, I avoid the term
“vibrato” because it has become meaningless or else has taken on extraneous
implications. Vibrato is intrinsic to the production of sound. Violinists learn
from a very young age to wiggle the fingers divorced from what the bow is doing;
vibrato becomes a character trait. As concert halls grew in size during the
nineteenth century, violinists like Wieniawski needed to make themselves heard
in them, so they began to vibrate more in order to raise the threshold of
pressure. They could then press harder with minimal impact on intonation and
quality of sound. Later, vibrato began to be used more for its colouristic
value.’
Calling the voice ‘the focal point of all music’, Friedman
confesses a preference for bel canto rather than cantorially inspired
violin playing. The former, he says, is not likely to win great success in
today's 'visual- audio' music world. ‘It's not physical enough; it doesn't have
visceral excitement. Nowadays it is very important for a performer to give the
impression of effort and even tension in order to create intensity for the
public.’
Erick Friedman teaching in his Yale studio
For the past several summers, he has been able to put some of
his performance ideals into practice on the podium, conducting the orchestra of
the Garrett Lakes Festival in Maryland. For a few weeks each year, the festival
operates as a ‘vehicle to promote young talent.’ As its musical director,
Friedman hopes eventually to enlarge its teaching activities as well. This
remains his primary concern. ‘One of the great stipulations that Heifetz imposed
upon me was that I would teach and thus carry on the little bit of tradition
that he gave me.’ The same had been wished of Heifetz by Auer, and Heifetz
himself said that he always hoped that he would be ‘good enough to teach’. As he
reviews his career, Friedman muses: ‘Maybe I was in some way anointed to carry
on a tradition that goes from Heifetz and Milstein, through Auer, back to
Joachim. Because I know what it is.’
©1996 - 2007
Joseph Curtin Studios
