Last of a Breed

"The world," Violinist Fritz Kreisler once explained, "is a great child and tires easily. You cannot make friends for long with all the world." But Violinist Kreisler must have had second thoughts. No musician of his time carried on a longer musical friendship with the world--and none left behind a less jaded audience when he finally withdrew from the concert stage. Kreisler was not only the greatest violinist of his generation, but also the last of a once common breed: his death last week, of a heart attack, just four days before his 87th birthday, marked the end of the long succession of violin virtuosos who were gifted enough to write for the instrument they played.

Melodious Schmalz. Kreisler's technique was sometimes shaky (he had an occasional tendency to slip off key), but the tone was always glowing, the rhythms dynamic, the conceptions full of grandeur. A cultivated man who spoke eight languages and had a scholar's grasp of history, philosophy and mathematics, he brought to every performance a warmth and simplicity that spoke straight through the mind to the heart.

As a composer, Kreisler suffered a congenital Viennese weakness--a taste for melodious schmalz. But his most popular works--Liebesleid, Liebesfreud, Caprice Viennois, La Gitana, Schoen Rosmarin--have grace as well as sentiment. They are so well tailored to the violin that they are almost certain to survive as favorite encore pieces. "His arrangements brought out things for the violin we never dreamed of," says Violinist Nathan Milstein. "The violin was advanced by three persons--Bach, Paganini and Kreisler."

Mortal Fiddler. The advance began on a violin fashioned out of an old cigar box and played by Kreisler when he was four. Son of a Viennese doctor, young Fritz entered the Vienna Conservatory at seven, the youngest child ever admitted. His career was interrupted by World War I, in which he was badly wounded while serving in the Austrian army, and again by the anti-German sentiment of wartime U.S. audiences. In 1941, he was struck by a truck in Manhattan. He recovered after days in a coma, but for a time forgot all modern languages and could speak only Latin and Greek. After 1950, Fritz Kreisler did not play publicly and rarely played privately.

Long the world's highest-paid violinist,* Kreisler was famed for both his astonishing musical memory and his aversion to practice: sometimes he would go a whole summer without touching the violin on the theory that "if I played too frequently, I should rub the bloom off the musical imagination." In the mid-1930s, Kreisler astonished the musical world--and embarrassed critics--by confessing that for years he had been palming off a whole series of his own compositions as the works of such classical composers as Vivaldi, Martini, Couperin, Dittersdorf, Pugnani. Explained Kreisler: "I found it inexpedient and tactless to repeat my name endlessly in the programs."

Kreisler looked on Cellist Pablo Casals as "the greatest musician to draw a bow," and in his old age, he deplored the "fear of sentiment" among younger musicians. As for his own career: "I have achieved only a medium approach to my ideal in music," said Fritz Kreisler at 79. "I got only fairly near." Perhaps--but he got as close as any other mortal fiddler.

*One famous story has it that a supercilious hostess hired him at his usual $3,000 fee but instructed him not to mingle with the guests. "In that case, Madame," said Kreisler, "the fee will be only $2,000."

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