My First Love

During a recent trip to Beijing, I bought myself a violin.

This was a planned thing. I knew exactly where to go: to a shop located in the third floor of a building on the Wangfujing Street, seemingly only containing a sports equipment store. I had bought one violin there before, an instrument that I had sold away to somebody who seemed to need it more than myself.

This time, the master violin-builder was not himself there. When I bought the previous instrument, he helped me the make the choice. Although he had no English, and I have no Chinese, we understood each other very well. This time, however, I was helped with his assistant, who also contributes to building the instruments.

My prime interest was to find an instrument that feels (relatively) easy to play. I spent a couple of hours browsing through the various instruments, until I finally decided on one of the first that had been offered to me. I ended up spending a bit more on it than what I had planned, so I went back to my hotel with somewhat mixed feelings. Do I really need another violin?

Violin was my first instrument that I picked up at the age of 7. In my early teens, I was (relatively) serious about it, until I realised that several of my friends were more talented, more committed, or both. I switched to playing viola, and downscaled my music-related objectives to a more realistic level.

This worked out very well: I ended up playing a lot on amateur level, especially chamber music. I like the viola, and the instrument has served me very well. I also started the play the piano, and deloped another kind of a passion to it. But violin was my first love, a love that eventually failed to bloom. Thus it was with mixed feelings that I started to explore the new instrument, initially playing this and that, various pieces of music that I had learned at some time.

What led me to play Bach again, I don't know. For sure, I had played some parts of the Partita in D minor already in my teens, but I had never dared to attack seriously the monumental Chaconne that forms the final movement of the Partita. It felt too formidable, too wide in scope and expression, and technically too difficult to make it sound right.

Be it as it may, I am playing the Chaconne now. I am not making a good job on it yet, but I am making progress, and I think I have a found an angle of attack to it that might work. It's a steep climb, but I think I can make it, if not to the top, then surely higher from where I am now.

Frankly, I had forgotten just how intensive playing the violin seriously is both mentally and physically. That my fingers and my back are hurting is just a trivial part of it. It's the intensity of concentration, the strain of pointing one's mind totally to the music, the keen alertness demanded by the composition that I had forgotten. They are both painful and seducing.

So, in my advanced years, I have found a link to my first love, the sweetness and bitterness of it. But I am also making a proposition that I did not have the courage to make back then. Will this (hopefully) more mature and realistic passion be rewarded its price?