Eric Sun: The Virtuoso
The New Yorker, January 1, 2018
“That profound moment of making music that takes you to another world is something we’re very privileged to experience.”
This memorable New Yorker piece will introduce you to Eric Sun. His last performance was as the Fiddler who plays the overture in the musical. The program read:
Due to an incurable brain cancer, this production of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ will be his final set of public performances…
Johannes Brahms wrote his first violin sonata for his muse, the pianist Clara Schumann. He presented it to her in 1879, soon after the death of her youngest child, Felix, who was named for the composer Felix Mendelssohn and was the only violinist among Schumann’s eight children. Brahms was his godfather. The sonata, which Brahms completed at the relatively late age of forty-six, takes its theme from his own “Regenlied,” or “Rain Song,” and is a meditation on the loss of childhood innocence. The violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who was captivated by the work as a child, has said that it is best played by an adult. “I have a deeper understanding of music and, if you want it or not, life does leave its marks not only in your brain but in your heart and in your soul,” she said. “The understanding of things deepens.”
“It’s been hard to come to grips with having aggressive and incurable Grade 4 brain cancer; it’s been hard not to get angry and sad about it; it’s been frustrating that every pathology test after my surgery came back with the worst possible result; and it’s been hard to accept that modern medicine isn’t able to fix me.” Eric Sun
Read this important New Yorker piece: The Virtuoso. It is a comment on disease, music, and the transforming nature of art. Eric Sun died of cancer on November 23, 2017, shortly after his last haunting performance as the Fiddler.
You Tube Eric Sun Fiddler (there are other versions, too)