Efrem Zimbalist: A Life (review)

In the early years of the twentieth century, the violin studio of Leopold Auer at the Conservatory of Music in St. Petersburg, Russia produced some of the greatest violinists of the era. Among the many luminaries of the violin world that were to emerge from Auer's conservatory classes, perhaps the three greatest stars were Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz, and Efrem Zimbalist.

Efrem Alexandrovich Zimbalist, famed concert violinist, pedagogue, composer, and long-time director of the Curtis Institute of Music, was born in 1890 in the southwestern Russian city of Rostov-na-Donu. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1907 after winning a gold medal and the Rubenstein Prize, and by age 21 was considered one of the world's greatest violinists (Boris Schwarz, Great Masters of the Violin [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983], p. 431). In 2005, recordings are all that we have left of the sonic artistry of the giants of violin playing from the first half of the twentieth century, and comparisons of recorded performances of the major literature continue to spark lively debates among violinists as to whom was the best executant of any given piece. While many of the other great violin virtuosos of the first half of the twentieth century such as Heifetz, Elman, Joseph Szigeti, Nathan Milstein, and Fritz Kreisler bequeathed to the musical world a rich legacy of recordings of the major violin repertoire, the discography found in the present work contains no extant commercial recordings by Zimbalist of any of the standard concerto literature for the violin. Perhaps the dearth of recordings of the major sonata and concerto repertoire in Zimbalist's discography is one of the reasons that his name is no longer mentioned in the same breath as Heifetz, Milstein, Kreisler, or David Oistrakh, as being among the small group of contenders for the epitaph of the greatest violinist of the twentieth century.

Biographies of classical performers are often works of such esoteric character that they fail to find a readership outside of the milieu of the classical music professional or amateur musical enthusiast. Zimbalist: A Life is likely to appeal primarily to violinists, violin teachers, and individuals interested in the history of twentieth-century violin playing. Unauthorized biographies of contemporary artists, such as Joan Peyser's Boulez (New York: Schirmer Books, 1976) are not beholden to the subject of the biography and may offer critical and illuminating insights into the artist's work, behavior, and personality. Authorized biographies tend to be less critical and more laudatory in nature. Interestingly, one can readily discern the differences of approach in recent biographies of two of Auer's most famous pupils, Heifetz and Zimbalist. In Heifetz as I Knew Him [Portland: Amadeus Press, 2001], Ayke Augus, a former student, accompanist, employee, and confidante of Heifetz, paints at times a very unflattering portrait of her subject. By contrast, the present authorized biography of Zimbalist by Roy Malan is so laudatory and so lacking in objectivity that it is more hagiography than biography.

Based upon hundreds of hours of taped conversations with Zimbalist recorded in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Malan has produced a chronological retelling of the subject's life, often using anecdotes in Zimbalist's own words. The amount of detail in the anecdotes recounted by Zimbalist is quite astonishing; stories from seven and eight decades in the past are told replete with exact day and time of the remembered action, incident, or conversation. Unfortunately, the result of this approach is a work grossly overburdened with minutiae of detail. Important insights about Zimbalist as a man and artist are obscured or ignored in the avalanche of trivial information that is included in the book. One example: we learn that in the early years of Zimbalist's retirement at age 78 from the directorship of the Curtis Institute of Music, he began to compose an opera. Rather than being content with conveying to the reader that Zimbalist remained active after retiring...