Gone. A Girl, A Violin, A Life Unstrung by Min Kym
“I had my Strad for ten years. How do I sum them up, those years of love and happiness? A good addiction. How do I encapsulate the decade my violin and I were together? There are so many things to say, it’s hard to know where to start, how to separate them all into bare paragraphs and sentences, to impose a narrative upon it, because when I think about it, it all rolls into one: the violin, me, our life together.”
If this description of a musician’s relationship with her violin sounds melodramatic, I get it. If you are not a musician it’s hard to understand the anthropomorphic treatment of an inanimate object. Yes, some instruments are lovelier than others, but to describe it as one might a partner or lover?
Well, be prepared to be captivated by this memoir by violin prodigy Min Kym. The theft of her rare Stradivarius from a café in London’s Euston station was big news. There was a lot of snarky coverage, who would leave a seven figure instrument on the floor? She was playing on her phone and it got swiped. Well that’s not the real story of what happened in that moment. But what is real is that her world as she knew it ended at that moment.
She describes the loss the way many of us would describe the death of a loved one. “I didn’t quite know the totality of what I had lost, couldn’t quite bring myself to measure the depth and width of it, but I knew I’d lost and knew too there were fathoms beneath me, the numbness, gathering strength; chest, arms, head. I’d been thrown into unfamiliar waters, a big black ocean of them. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was out there, could sense it in all its unrelenting hugeness, its unimaginable strength its terrible indifference to who and where I was. How could I live without my violin?”
But before we get to this devastating loss we learn about the life of an ‘accidental’ prodigy. She picked up the violin at around age 8, waiting around while her sister was having her piano lesson. She was a natural, soon enrolled in the prestigious Purcell School of Music and following the trajectory of a bona fide prodigy. She didn’t have pushy stage parents, but once her talent was revealed her parents made extraordinary sacrifices to support her career, eschewing their traditional Korean life and moving to England and staying there.
We very soon learn that even a ‘natural’ has to work hard at being the best and Kym’s childhood is populated by a succession of teachers that fit our clichéd images of people in these roles. There was the suffocating, possessive Ukrainian Felix who nurtured her innate talent and ignored the niceties of practicing scales, pushing her to interpret and feel the music by learning a concerto a week. Then there was the old-school Russian Grigori Zhilslin, Felix’s polar opposite. All this time she was performing and making money and definitely had a career. She even had time for a boyfriend, providing a semblance of normality in her remarkably unbalanced life. But even as a young college aged girl, the violin was the one she was more devoted to than her “first love” Robert.
I must admit this is a world I didn’t think I had an interest in finding out about. I guess I had assumed that it all came naturally to prodigies. But Kym chronicles the commitment, expense and yes, hardship, involved in becoming a world class musician. She would commute from London to Salzburg for lessons with another teacher, and by the age of 21 she met (and purchased) the love of her life, a 1696 Stradivarius for four hundred and fifty thousand pounds.
The violin was, indeed, an extension of Kym, something she carried on her person everywhere, the one constant in her life. Even as she traveled the globe, performed at prestigious events and recorded a well-received record, she would never leave her violin unattended.
Is this a normal life? Is this the kind of life you would wish upon anyone? She had clearly missed out on a lot of the regular stages of a young woman’s life, living in the cloistered world of high performing musicians. It was inevitable then, that she should meet the man in her life at a prestigious music camp in South England and Matt becomes a fixture in her life. I won’t give away how that relationship developed and the challenges of a relationship between two musicians where one is really superior at the craft, but it is crucial to the story of her stolen violin.
Kym tells her story with an honesty and emotion that is captivating, and she aims to try and convey to the non-cognoscenti among us the depth of her relationship with her violin. By the time it is stolen you are as heartbroken as she is, especially as you read about the toll it had on her emotionally and professionally. The three-year search for the instrument and its ultimate return is not the happy ending one expects. You’ll have to read it and find out why.
“My violin was born in 1696, the year Peter the Great became Tsar of Russia. It’s seen off Napoleon, Queen Victoria, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, two world wars, and, so far, the atomic bomb. People come, people go, violinists live, violinists die, empires rise and fall, and the violin lives on, washed from shore to shore on the tides of wealth, fortune and history. This is but a speck of time for my Strad.”
We read books to enter other worlds. Kym’s time with the Strad was indeed, but a blip in the life of this centuries old instrument, but it was her life and she tells an affecting story of the world of a girl, a violin and a life unstrung.
BEFORE YOU READ
Length: 223 pages
Genre: Memoir
Themes: music, devotion, performance, love
Commitment: short in length, captivating in its revelation of a rarefied world.
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