Revisiting a tragic life

Many gifted artists have died all too young, their enormous promise not entirely fulfilled. Among the most famous: the poets Keats and Shelley, composers Mozart and Schubert, singers Fritz Wunderlich and Kathleen Ferrier, and violinists Ginette Neveu and Michael Rabin.

Thursday, Jan. 19, was the 40th anniversary of Rabin’s tragic death at the age of 35. His authorized biography — authorized by his surviving older sister, Francine — was just revised and updated: “Michael Rabin: America’s Virtuoso Violinist,” by Anthony Feinstein, professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto.

Rabin, originally Rabinowitz, was one among many notable Jewish violinists of the 20th century (Heifetz, Menuhin, Elman, Stern, and so forth).

Feinstein wrote to me about Rabin’s Jewishness:

“Religion was not important to Rabin. He did, however, come from a family that was very comfortable with their Jewish origins and Michael did celebrate his bar mitzvah. Thereafter, religion faded into the background….His few girlfriends were Jewish….His funeral was a religious one, but there were certain non-conventional formalities, such as the coffin being left open at the memorial service….”

The book answers a number of questions about Rabin. What accounted for the swift decline of his musical career? What did he die of? Did he commit suicide, as some claim?

Above all, what went wrong?

Certainly, he was an especially gifted violinist. He began playing at age 7, and made solo appearances at Carnegie Hall at ages 13 and 15. Critics hailed him as a new Jascha Heifetz. Olin Downes, a New York Times critic, wrote of him: “Mr. Rabin appears to us to have simply everything.” He toured all over the world. While critics never doubted his amazing virtuosity, however, they questioned his expressiveness. When one watches a film of him playing today, he sometimes seems so bored that he might have been painting a wall.

Sadly, his was not a well-rounded personality. He was uni-dimensional, and he was bitter about it. Playing the violin magnificently was the chief prop to his self-esteem. And everyone agrees why: His mother, Jeanne, a failed musician herself, wanted to triumph vicariously through her son. While she surely deserves some sympathy, she is portrayed in the biography as the mother from hell. Rabin himself referred to her as his musical mentor — and tormentor. He told a friend (one of very, very few), “My mother sees me as the career she always wanted.”

Francine, his sister, told Feinstein, “Sometimes my mother would be yelling at Michael, and I remember beng embarrassed because my friends were there and my mother was screaming at Michael….He probably got hit if he played a note out of tune sometimes. Or she would demand that he play a passage 100 times. Extraordinary things like that….”

The first young woman Rabin developed a crush on, Adrienne , said about him, “He was not a particularly interesting person to know, but when he picked up the violin, it was pure magic. I wish he could have continued it into his conversation.”

When Rabin rushed over to Adrienne after a concert, she told Feinstein, his mother “rounded on me in public, shouting at me that I didn’t understand who Michael was, what his obligations were, what kind of public figure he was, and so on. I felt humiliated….Michael stood there, crimson, crestfallen and silent.”

Adrienne closed the door on Rabin.

Eventually, Rabin developed psychological problems — for example, he became afraid of falling off the stage. He began taking powerful sedatives and other medications. He cancelled concerts; his performances turned sloppy. Invitations to play dried up. He entered Mount Sinai Hospital; he saw a psychiatrist. He tried to make a comeback, and succeeded for a while, but then he returned to his medications. In his apartment, groggy with sedatives while answering the telephone, he slipped, fractured his skull, and died.

Rabin’s funeral was attended by such celebrities as Van Cliburn and Itzhak Perlman. June Le Bell, a friend of Rabin’s and a radio commentator who attended, reported that Rabin’s mother seemed inconsolable. “She just wouldn’t stop screaming. The ranting and screaming didn’t read true. I’m sure she was feeling these things, but I also think it was her way of becoming the center of attention, which is what I think she wanted all along.”