Rush Hour

Not so very long ago a man stood outside a metro station in Washington D.C. and began playing the violin.  He played six pieces, two by Bach and the others by Massenet, Schubert, Ponce, and Mendelssohn. During that time, since it was rush hour, over a thousand people went through the station, most on their way to work.

Three minutes went by before anyone seemed to notice the musician. A middle aged man turned his head as he hurried by, barely slowing down. Thirty seconds later, a woman threw a dollar tip in the open violin case as she walked by.

A few minutes later, a man leaned against the wall to listen and stayed three full minutes before continuing on his way to work.  A three-year-old boy watched for about three seconds, clearly wanting to stop, but his mother moved him along as mothers in a hurry often do.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, just seven people stopped and listened for a while; one man stayed for nine minutes.  Twenty people dropped money in his violin case. He collected $32.

Only one woman recognized him, walking up at the end of his performance to say hello.

The violinist was Joshua Bell, often described as a “genius” whose virtuoso performances according to Interview magazine “[do] nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.” The first piece Bell played that morning — the exhaustingly intricate 14-minute “Chaconne” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor — is almost impossibly difficult for any but the most masterful violinists.

Three days before playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at Boston’s Symphony Hall where a “pretty good” seat averaged around $100.

—This story is adapted from “Pearls Before Breakfast” by Gene Weingarten (The Washington Post, April 8, 2007)