Stravinsky knew little about violin technique. It happens in the best circles. Schumann, on the evidence of his highly substantial string quartets, knew as much about string playing as I know about the cimbalom. Brahms and Tchaikovsky wrote great violin concertos against the violin. And Mahler's auditioning of violinists was a joke: ‘He attached the greatest significance to the steadiest possible bowing in sustained notes’, Carl Flesch recounts,and therefore considered the beginning of the third act of Siegfried [Flesch means the beginning of Act III, Scene 3] a touchstone for the bowing technique of an orchestral violinist … He first asked me to play a Mozart Adagio, and then set the Siegfried passage in front of me. As my bow glided over the strings with the phlegmatic calm of a world-weary philosopher, he seemed greatly pleased, wanted to nail me down to the post of leader at once, and accompanied me himself to the administration building …
