My friend Daniel Heifetz can stand on the stage with a violin pressed between his cheek and shoulder, and make thousands of people weep and tremble. I have seen him do this. And it seemed to me, a devoted amateur, that little cherubs with haloes fluttered around the head of his fiddle. I would be envious if I did not know how hard he works to keep those cherubs under control. He does this year in and year out, and his career as a concert musician takes him to Los Angeles, Munich, Singapore, and the ends of the earth. At home, Heifetz teaches young violinists from the Peabody Conservatory, when he is not practicing, or looking after his children. Father, husband, artist, and teacher, Daniel Heifetz is a young man with exacting responsibilities.
Not the least of Heifetz’s concerns is his violin, which is 264 years old, approximately 227 years older than either of us. It even has a name. His violin is called the De Chaponay Stradivarius, after the French count who owned it until his death in 1877. I have seen the De Chaponay listed in the classic study of Stradivari’s life and work, written by Hill, Hill, and Hill and published in 1902. In that faraway time the Hill brothers were calling the De Chaponay one of the finest instruments made in the year 1722, when the violin-maker was in his maturity as a craftsman.
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