Vera: Dispassionate Violinist
Story Four
Six-year-old Vera sat with her parents in the magnificent lobby of the Leningrad Conservatory, waiting to hear if she would be accepted into the school. She, along with hundreds of other children, had been herded into a room for an audition that afternoon. The children sang a group song while the instructors circulated the room, listening. This was followed by an instructor touching her fingertips.
This wasn’t the first time that she had joined, along with hundreds of other children, in an audition process hoping to be singled out of the crowd. In Russia, at this time, you couldn’t just take a class for the fun of it. You had to be selected and placed into a specific program of study. Early on, Vera had hung her hopes on being a ballerina, but that hadn’t happened. She had been overlooked for anything that required physical movement.
On this particular afternoon, her mother had rushed her to the conservatory when she discovered that it was holding auditions. And now, they waited expectantly to see if she would be chosen.
Finally, the top string instructor of the Leningrad Conservatory came up to her parents and congratulated them on their daughter being one of the three children chosen to enter the conservatory. Vera looked up at him expectantly and said, “Piano?” “No, violin,” was his reply. Vera was crushed. If she couldn’t be a ballerina she was hoping to at least be able to bang around on the piano.
Vera broke into tears, saying that she didn’t want to play the violin. Her parents, horrified by her outburst, rebuked her for being ungrateful for this amazing opportunity.
From this day forward, Vera would be a child without a childhood. She became a six-year-old girl with a full-time career. Sundays became her only day of respite when she could do what most girls her age did, play dolls with her best friend.
For the next four years, Vera would leave school, go home to an empty apartment, grab her violin and take the trolley to the conservatory. At the conservatory, she would complete her regular school homework in the hallway in between her music classes and practice sessions.
When her classes at the conservatory ended, she would hop on the trolley, arriving home at 9:00 p.m. She was required to practice 4–5 hours a day. If she hadn’t managed to get all of her hours in on a particular day, she would have to practice before she went to bed.
She recalls getting off at her trolley stop in the dark and having to go through an alley to get to her family’s apartment. The alleyway was known to be littered with drunken men. Vera would clutch her violin to her chest, take a deep breath and run through the alley to get to her building.
The personal sacrifices may have been fine, welcomed even, if playing the violin filled her with joy. If it had fueled a passion deep within her being. But it didn’t. Vera hated the violin. Despite hating it, Vera excelled at the violin. Her perfect pitch and ability to adjust her fingers in such a way as to stay on key resulted in her, the youngest member of the orchestra, becoming the first violin.
Vera’s mother never praised her playing. She only pointed out what she did wrong. This contributed to Vera’s belief that she “stunk” as a violinist. For years Vera wasn’t aware that she was the first chair. Her mother told her that she was sitting in front so the conductor could watch all of her mistakes.
When Vera was ten years old, her parents left Russia and immigrated to Queens, New York. She was enrolled in the Queens public-school system where she didn’t speak or understand the language. Because she was far ahead of her math class from her schooling in Russia, she began bringing her violin to school to play during math class. This helped Vera to get in her hours of practice for the day. The demand that she continued to practice hours each day didn’t end with leaving the conservatory.
Playing her violin in the empty gymnasium one day, she looked up to see that a crowd had gathered to hear her play. One of the people in attendance had a mother who was a committee member at Julliard. Vera auditioned at Julliard and received a scholarship to attend the school.
However, shortly after she gained entrance to Julliard, her mother landed a job in her field in the Boston area. After relocating, her mother still required that she take lessons and practice every day. Vera did this, hating every minute of it, until one day in high school when she was finally able to tell her mother that she had had enough. She shut her violin case, and with one brief exception, has never played again.
In retrospect, Vera is grateful that she never attended Julliard. If she had, Vera believes that she would have been funneled into a career playing the violin. Still, for years Vera sometimes wondered if she had made a mistake not going on to become a professional violinist. She was in her thirties when she confided this to a friend. This wise person told her that she had indeed made the right decision, and playing the violin was simply one of the things in which she excelled.
Just because you excel at something doesn’t mean that you need to do it. Vera knows that life as a professional violinist would never have brought her joy. Instead, she would merely have joined the ranks of those who are very good at their job, yet drive home in the evening with a sense that something is missing and asking themselves, “Is this IT?”.
With Love & Energy by the Pond,
Laurel
