TUGGING AT THE HEART STRINGS
A child prodigy, her priceless 300-year-old violin and the redemptive power of music
From the opening page of Min Kym’s unusual memoir, it’s clear that the Korean-born violinist’s relationship with her instrument is no ordinary one. In a vivid dream – or nightmare – she is forced by an airline attendant to put it in the hold and watches, helplessly, as it is placed on the conveyor belt. ‘The violin gives a little start, as if it’s been pushed in the back, something it won’t have liked, and then starts to be carried away…’
Kym’s anthropomorphism is no literary device. For her, the violin is much more than a piece of wood and four strings. It is a crucial part of her. More than that, she insists, it is her. The former child prodigy, whose talent led to her family leaving Korea so she could take up a scholarship at London’s Purcell School, searched for many years to find ‘the one’. And when she did, aged 21, ‘the instant I drew the first breath with my bow, I knew… It felt as if 300 years ago Stradivarius had held his hands over a length of wood and fashioned this violin just for me. It was love at first sight’.
When in 2010 her 1696 Stradivarius is stolen from a sandwich shop in Euston Station, she writes: ‘I’m gone. I am no longer quite me.’
On paper the violin is worth over £1m, but it is beyond value emotionally. Having been on the cusp of a major world tour, and with Sony about to release her recording of a Brahms concerto and a glittering career beckoning, 31-year-old Kym is plunged into decline. For those who tell her to move on, she writes: ‘If it had been my child that had been stolen, would people have expected me to accept another one?’
Racked with grief, she is cajoled into accepting the insurance money, with which she feels obliged to help her struggling parents buy their modest house. She is also coerced into buying another violin, which she can hardly bring herself to play. ‘Music had been
my life, as full of nourishment as the blood in my veins, the air in my lungs, but… I’d been emptied of it all.’
With its suspenseful account of the violin’s theft, its recovery three years later and the complex situation that prevents Kym from being able to keep it, this book makes for a devastating but ultimately redemptive read.
It is more than a story of a lost violin: it is about who we are, how we love, how we grieve. And, at its heart, it is about the power music has to touch and transform lives.