Post by Jared Langley Murray-Bruce

I think about this one a lot. July 1986. A music festival in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. Leonard Bernstein is on the podium, conducting his own Serenade after Plato's Symposium. The soloist is fourteen years old. Midori Goto. In the fifth movement her E string snaps. She doesn't stop. She walks over to the concertmaster, Malcolm Lowe, borrows his Stradivarius, and keeps playing. That string breaks too. So she walks to the associate concertmaster, Max Hobart, takes his Guadagnini, and finishes the piece. Three violins. No interruptions. A fourteen-year-old. The next morning it ran on the front page of the New York Times. The critic, John Rockwell, called her "absolutely unfazed." He wrote of her "aplomb in a situation that might have daunted the canniest veteran." They asked her later what she had been thinking up there. She said: "What could I do? My strings broke, and I didn't want to stop the music." Photo: Casa da Música, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.