The Late Starters Orchestra (5 page)

ORIGINS

When I was five, string instruments were the farthest thing from my life. On the eve of my sixth birthday, my mother left my father in Hartford, Connecticut, and I began a new life with her and my two brothers in a small apartment in the Jackson Heights section of Queens, New York. Her leaving was the first salvo in a divorce proceeding that was to drag on for a good part of my childhood. For me, my parents' separation and eventual divorce meant geographic dislocation, emotional and financial hardship, and family dissention that, quite remarkably, lasts to this day, even though my parents are long gone from this earth.

The one bright spot in my young life was music. I sang. I sang on the streets and I sang in school and I sang on the subway and I sang in bed and I sang in the synagogue. I had a remarkably good, clear, and energetic voice, one with distinct timbre, flexibility, and range.

It was very important to my father that I sing in the synagogue. Music, the music of the synagogue, was a link that kept us close even as I moved away and saw him only on weekends and holidays. My father wanted me to use my gift for the glory of God. From the time I was very young, he trained me to sing the solos that a small child can lead, such as the concluding hymns of “Aleynu” and “Adon Olam.” And, most of all, he trained me for my bar mitzvah, the day that I would be able to lead the adult congregation in prayer.

On the weekends that I spent with my father in Hartford, we would rise early Saturday mornings to attend synagogue. As Orthodox Jews, we did not take the car, no matter how hot or cold the weather. We walked in winter snowstorms and in spring rain showers. In traditional Judaism, to ride in the comfort of your car is a violation of the Sabbath, but to walk in terrible weather is fine; a mitzvah, even. Outside of traditional Judaism, our walks might not make much sense, but I wouldn't have traded that time with my dad for anything. As we made our way to synagogue, about a ten-minute-long stroll, we held hands and sang. My dad would have me practice the special songs for Shabbat and we would talk excitedly about how we could innovate with extra melodies and vocal flourishes. Our voices resounded through the early morning streets.

I was loud for a little kid and could even project in Orthodox synagogues, which, in keeping with traditional Jewish law, did not use a microphone on the Sabbath. My bar mitzvah, held at the Orthodox Young Israel of Jackson Heights in Queens, New York, in late 1962, was a festival of song—with me as the star. Most bar mitzvah boys—there were no bat mitzvah girls in Orthodox synagogues in those days—read the Torah portion (a selection from the Five Books of Moses) and the Haftorah (additional selections from the Prophets). My voice was so good and renowned in our little circle that I was allowed to take over the whole service. I led the morning prayers,
Shacharit,
and the so-called “additional service,”
Musaf,
incorporating melodies both traditional and new. I sang songs inspired by the young State of Israel and by Hasidic melodies, especially as interpreted by the singing rabbi of that era, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. I even incorporated some of the vocal techniques and inflections I had learned from my folk heroes. One friend told me I sounded like I was auditioning for the Kingston Trio.

Without a banjo, of course. There were no musical instruments on the Sabbath either. No banjos and certainly no cellos. The Bible is sparing in its references to instruments, most of which were played to honor festivals and kings and to accompany the sacred service in the ancient Temple. The
Encyclopedia Judaica
lists nineteen instruments referenced in the Bible, including the lyre, the lute, the recorder, the harp, and a variety of horns, drums, and bells. Psalm 150 includes a veritable orchestra. “Praise God in his sanctuary,” the psalm begins. “Praise him with the sound of the shofar, praise him with the harp and the lyre. Praise him with the timbrel and dance, praise him with stringed instruments and the pipe. Praise him upon sounding cymbals, praise him with loud crashing cymbals.”

The harp and the lyre were used in the ancient Temple on the Sabbath, but after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and the dispersal of the Jews into exile, the rabbis forbade their use on the Sabbath and were even ambivalent about music during the rest of the week. The nation of Israel was in mourning, the rabbis declared, and celebrations should be toned down. Music was still played at weddings, but even Jewish weddings are famously muted, even to this day. That is why a glass is broken. Even at our happiest moments, part of us is still in mourning for the loss of the Temple.

And why not? Even the wedding scene in
Fiddler on the Roof
is broken up by the arrival of the Cossacks. It is a most happy day when, despite Tevye's initial plan, his daughter Tzeitel marries Motel the Tailor. The scene begins with the sentimental “Sunrise, Sunset” and ends with the exuberant “Wedding Celebration and Bottle Dance.” And then, at the height of the celebration, the Cossacks arrive and upend Anatevka. Unrestrained joy is not part of Jewish culture.

The “classical” music of my youth meant one thing: the music of the synagogue. I didn't know of Bach or Beethoven. I knew how to chant the Torah and Haftorah, ancient books that had their own musical notation and strict rules. Every word, for example, had an assigned note. Miss a note or, worse, miss a word, and the entire reading was flawed, so flawed in some cases the reading had to be done all over again. Folk music was my rebellion. It provided a relief from all that rigor and precision and allowed for easy harmonies and quick innovation. The folk musicians I loved—Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Tom Paxton, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell, early Bob Dylan and, above all, Phil Ochs—wrote and sang right from the headlines. Their music was fresh and inventive (even if it occasionally all sounded the same) and broke all the rules. It shaped not only my musical tastes but my social consciousness.

I attended an all-boys ultra-Orthodox high school in Brooklyn that did its best to wall us off from the corrupting influences of modern society, but the outside world inevitably seeped in. If I gave the Beatles little attention when they first came to America in 1964, it wasn't because I was so immersed in the study of Talmud. It was because the British imports seemed downright frivolous singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There” when there was a war going on in Vietnam and race riots in the South. I was captivated instead by the folksingers who were fighting for peace, racial equality, and the rights of workers. Soon after my bar mitzvah in 1962, I picked up a guitar, mindful of the words scrawled on Woody Guthrie's guitar, “
TH
IS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS
.
” I sang Ochs's “I Ain't Marching Anymore,” Dylan's “Blowin' in the Wind,” and Guthrie's “Union Maid.” My friend Marty, a fellow yeshiva rebel, and I would take our guitars to Washington Square Park and sing our hearts out, not for the coins people tossed in our beat-up guitar cases but to feel a part of the revolution happening all around us. Marty was by far the stronger guitarist, but I had the voice. He strummed and I sang.

And then something terrible happened. My voice changed. After my sixteenth birthday, I couldn't reach the high notes—or the low notes—and the middle range was uninspired. At first, I tried to ignore it and continued to sing my heart out, but others noticed. I was passed over for honors in the synagogue. And Marty found another singing partner.

I put down the guitar and avoided the synagogue spotlight. The voice that had given me so much pleasure—and earned me so much attention and approval—was gone. I put all my energies in high school and college into my next favorite thing: writing. While at college at Yeshiva University, I discovered the student newspaper and found I loved newspapers almost as much as I loved music. I read the daily paper voraciously. I dreamed about it at night, even imagining that I was scanning the columns of the next day's edition. Those were my rapid eye movements. I wanted nothing more in the world than to become a newspaper reporter. In college I wrote an article about the
New York Times
campus correspondent at Yeshiva, a senior named Harry Weiss. In the piece, I explained how the
Times,
eager to know what was going on on campuses around the country, had put together a network of campus correspondents, called “stringers,” and how Yeshiva became one of them. When Harry graduated, he made me the stringer at Yeshiva.

At nineteen, I had my toe in the door of the
Times
and I didn't let the door close for the next two decades. I went from being a stringer to a copy boy—the lowest editorial job in the newsroom and one that hardly exists anymore because of technology—to news clerk to news assistant to reporter trainee to reporter. I had numerous beats, but I hardly ever wrote about music, nor was it much on my agenda, that is, until one day, quite by accident, I ran into an irresistible musician who taught cello.

I was, at the time, a newly minted reporter in the newspaper's Long Island bureau and on my way to an interview in an old office building when I knocked on the wrong door. A short, stocky man with a beautiful shock of white hair came to the door rubbing sleep from his eyes. The room behind him was dark but the light from the hallway illuminated a most beautiful wooden cello case behind him.

Forgetting why I knocked in the first place, I asked, “Do you play the cello?”

“Yes,” he said in a thick German accent, “do you want to become one of my students?”

“Yes,” I responded without hesitation.

A week later I returned to his studio, a simple room with the wooden cello case, two cellos, a viola de gamba (an early music instrument sometimes called a “cousin” of the cello), an upright piano, a tea kettle, a full-length mirror, a table, two wooden chairs, and a mattress on the floor, which the cellist used for naps between student appointments. His name was Heinrich Joachim, but I came to call him Mr. J.

“Tea or coffee?” he said when I came for my first lesson. And that became our routine. We would talk at that table over hot drinks for a few minutes and only then would we play cello. Mr. J wanted to know about my life and my ambitions before we even touched the instrument. I told him about those special Saturday morning walks with my dad on the way to synagogue, about how I lost my voice and how, in writing, I found another personal expression. “I don't even give music much thought anymore,” I told him. “But when you opened your door and I saw you and I saw the cello, I thought this might be a way back for me.”

Mr. J was warm and reassuring. “The cello,” he said, “will give you back your voice.”

When I told him about my concern about my age—I was twenty-six at the time—he laughed gently and told me not to worry. “There is something inside you we will have to bring out. But it will take work. Many years of work. I promise you, it will be worth it.”

Mr. J was a great listener. It was harder for me to get him to open up about his life. He told me only bits and pieces. But over the years, and with the help of his children, I was able to assemble a realistic portrait of the man and his music.

HEINRICH JOACHIM WAS BORN
in Berlin in 1910, the son of a Jewish doctor named Georg and a Catholic seamstress named Bertha. Heinrich was the third of seven children, all of whom played instruments from a very young age. Georg himself played the violin and organized musical evenings at home for his children and friends. Heinrich, who began piano at five, took up cello a year later. According to family lore, one day when he was eleven, Heinrich, dressed in a suit and tie with his hair slicked back with pomade, announced to the family that he was giving all his playthings to his younger brother Gerhard. “From now on I am going to devote myself to the cello,” he said in utmost seriousness. “For me, there is nothing else.” A few years later, his parents sent him off to study with Adolf Steiner, one of the leading cellists of the day, and by the time Heinrich was nineteen, he became the principal cellist of a small chamber orchestra in Berlin that was an arm of the German Ministry of Culture. The year was 1929 and Hitler's rise to power had begun. By 1933, with Hitler firmly in control as chancellor, all members of the orchestra had to sign a loyalty oath to Hitler and the Nazi Party. Mr. J refused and lost his post.

Soon afterward, cello in hand, he boarded an ocean liner bound for Guatemala. He had no money and knew he would have to earn a living upon his arrival, so he spent the better part of the two weeks at sea learning Spanish. He was a quick study. By the time he reached Puerto Barrios, the main Guatemalan seaport on the Caribbean, he had serviceable Spanish.

Mr. J secured a job at the music conservatory in Guatemala City where he taught cello and music theory. He eventually became the head of the conservatory and made a name for himself as a chamber musician and orchestra soloist. In Guatemala, he ran into another German refugee, Ilonka Breitenbach, a singer five years his senior, whom he knew from the musical evenings in his home in Berlin. They married in Guatemala and had two children, Andrew and Dorothea.

Once again, however, Mr. J became the victim of a government decree. His job at the conservatory was a government post and, after World War II, Guatemala decided to purge foreigners from all government positions. He was without a job, and, by this time, his marriage was deteriorating. He divorced Ilonka and left her and the children behind in Guatemala to move to New York in search of work.

Before long, he set himself up in New York as a chamber musician and found a position as the principal cellist of the New York City Symphony Orchestra, which played at City Center under the leadership of a young conductor named Leonard Bernstein. The orchestra, which had been founded by Leopold Stokowski, was aimed at a younger classical music audience, offering more modern music and cheaper tickets than the New York Philharmonic. When the orchestra folded in 1948, Bernstein wrote Mr. J a letter of recommendation that said: “His tone is most pleasing, his musicianship sincere and sensitive, and his devotion to music unswerving.”