Dad tells the story of his violin-from-hell. I remember seeing that violin in the closet when I was a kid, as well as Dad looking like he was going to throw up any time someone asked him if he was ever going to play it again. – Bob
THE CURSE OF THE KLOTZ
I first came into contact with the Klotz violin when I was ten. Its scanty history before then was obtained thirty years later at a dinner party to which I’d invited a violin historian.
Joseph Klotz was a well-known violin producer in Germany around the middle of the nineteenth century. Upon examining the interior markings of my violin, our visiting connoisseur determined that it was one of the last that Mr. Klotz produced before his death. The violin had been brought to America by a violinist who subsequently died. (How soon after he’d taken possession of the Klotz, my historian couldn’t say.)
The violin was sold at an estate auction, where Mr. Kessel, my violin teacher, put in a bid and acquired the Klotz for me for the price of $75. He thought that at age ten I could manage a full-size violin. By then, I had come to hate practicing the violin, but my mother was determined that I was to become a second Heifitz, and she avidly pursued that goal by fainting whenever I’d refuse to practice. By the age of eleven, I had become able to jerk the violin from its case and begin the first few notes of Czardas before she reached a horizontal position– I probably became the fastest violin draw in my home state of Texas. (My memory is that she could be down 45 degrees and actually levitate back up once she heard my tones.) Actually, I did have very nimble fingers, and could go through the Flight of the Bumble Bee like a whirlwind; but I had one major problem: the tremῦlo. On slow movements, the tremῧlo, which adds feeling to the music, should involve only a shaking of fingers of the left hand on the strings. With me, my whole body would shake along with my hand, giving the appearance of early onset Parkinsonism. That worked well when I played before a gathering of mothers at the temple on Mothers’ Day; they thought my shaking was a display of filial emotion, and one could hear the sniffling of tearful women, but it hardly would take me to the Heifitz category.
Mr. Kessel, I remember, was a short man with moist, voluminous lips. He would kiss me at the end of each violin lesson, and his large lips created suction marks on my head as if they were produced by a toilet plunger. As I grew taller, the suction imprints struck lower and lower on my forehead and eventually my nose. At the age of thirteen, before the suction imprints went any lower, I gave up the violin.
But I held onto it. It found a place in every closet where I subsequently lived. At the age of 44, when I was having a tortuous and prolonged recovery from a back operation, I became convinced that the central factor impeding my recovery was the presence of the Klotz violin. In a moment of determination, I took the Klotz from where it was buried in the hall closet and began a slow hobble to the trash area to dump it. At that time, my sister, who used to accompany me on the piano, arrived. She listened with horror to my intentions, and insisted that she take the violin with her. A Klotz was too valuable to discard.
From that moment, my back began to improve. On the way down our front yard stairway, however, while clutching the violin my sister stumbled on a stair and wrenched her knee. Six months later, when she was almost disabled by her painful, swollen knee, surgery was recommended. She then suspected the true cause of her disability and gave the violin to her friend Pearl. My sister’s knee soon recovered without surgery.
Pearl’s daughter was an accomplished violinist, and was delighted to obtain a true Klotz. The last I heard in the travels of the Klotz was that Pearl’s daughter had recently undergone her second back surgery.
The further history of the Klotz now rests in obscurity. Sometimes I still think of it when I glance through an obituary column. Sidney Spies