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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
Stravinsky knew little about violin technique. It happens in the best circles. Schumann, on the evidence of his highly substantial string quartets, knew as much about string playing as I know about the cimbalom. Brahms and Tchaikovsky wrote great violin concertos against the violin. And Mahler's auditioning of violinists was a joke: ‘He attached the greatest significance to the steadiest possible bowing in sustained notes’, Carl Flesch recounts,
and therefore considered the beginning of the third act of Siegfried [Flesch means the beginning of Act III, Scene 3] a touchstone for the bowing technique of an orchestral violinist … He first asked me to play a Mozart Adagio, and then set the Siegfried passage in front of me. As my bow glided over the strings with the phlegmatic calm of a world-weary philosopher, he seemed greatly pleased, wanted to nail me down to the post of leader at once, and accompanied me himself to the administration building …
1 Memoirs, London, 1957, p. 187.Google Scholar
2 Stravinsky's Performance of ‘Agon’: a report, TEMPO 100, Spring 1972.Google Scholar
3 See Galamian, Ivan, Principles of Violin Playing and Teaching, New Jersey, 1962, pp. 81 ff.Google Scholar
4 See Flesch, Carl, The Art of Violin Playing, New York, 1924, Vol. 1, p.76.Google Scholar