your bow rehaired!' or 'These new strings are very trying,' or 'It's the
weather that is against you again, is it not?' or something of the kind.
Examinations were not so easy: we had to show that we were not only
soloists, but also sight readers of difficult music.

A DIFFICULTY OVERCOME

"The greatest technical difficulty I had when I was studying?" Jascha
Heifetz tried to recollect, which was natural, seeing that it must have
been one long since overcome. Then he remembered, and smiled:
"_Staccato_ playing. To get a good _staccato_, when I first tried seemed
very hard to me. When I was younger, really, at one time I had a very
poor _staccato_!" [I assured the young artist that any one who heard him
play here would find it hard to believe this.] "Yes, I did," he
insisted, "but one morning, I do not know just how it was--I was
playing the _cadenza_ in the first movement of Wieniawski's F{~MUSIC SHARP SIGN~} minor
concerto,--it is full of _staccatos_ and double stops--the right way of
playing _staccato_ came to me quite suddenly, especially after Professor
Auer had shown me his method.

VIOLIN MASTERY

"Violin Mastery? To me it means the ability to make the violin a
perfectly controlled instrument guided by the skill and intelligence of
the artist, to compel it to respond in movement to his every wish. The
artist must always be superior to his instrument, it must be his
servant, one that he can do with what he will.

TECHNICAL MASTERY AND TEMPERAMENT

"It appears to me that mastery of the technic of the violin is not so
much of a mechanical accomplishment as it is of mental nature. It may be
that scientists can tell us how through persistency the brain succeeds
in making the fingers and the arms produce results through the infinite
variety of inexplicable vibrations. The sweetness of tone, its
melodiousness, its _legatos_, octaves, trills and harmonics all bear
the mark of the individual who uses his strings like his vocal chords.
When an artist is working over his harmonics, he must not be impatient
and force purity, pitch, or the right intonation. He must coax the tone,
try it again and again, seek for improvements in his fingering as well
as in his bowing at the same time, and sometimes he may be surprised
how, quite suddenly, at the time when he least expects it, the result
has come. More than one road leads to Rome! The fact is