Some ten years ago, I set out to write the first full biography of Jascha Heifetz. The violinist was then still living—in a grand, gated mansion toward the top of Beverly Hills—but, despite intercession on my behalf from several mutual acquaintances, Heifetz refused to cooperate in any way. He had never much cared for publicity; in 1939, he summed up his life for Deems Taylor: “Born in Russia, first lessons at three, debut in Russia at seven, debut in America in 1917. That’s all there is to say, really. About two lines.”

Over the next months, however, I conducted almost twenty hours of taped interviews with those who had known Heifetz throughout his life. Mistaking quantity for quality, I thought I was making progress until the evening I played through part of my archive. And then I realized that I had absolutely nothing on which to build a book—only a vague portrait of a rigidly formal, exceedingly isolated, and not especially pleasant man who happened to play the violin with a technique that knew no difficulties and an idiosyncratic and affecting warmth that transcended the patrician authority of his approach.

Apparently, there were few eventsin the Heifetz story: he came, he played, he conquered, again and again—and then he went home. Friendships were uncommon and circumscribed, brought to an end, more often than not, by petty quarrels; there were two marriages, followed by two fairly nasty divorces. One is tempted to say that Heifetz ended