"The greatest technical difficulty I had when I was studying?" Jascha
Heifetz tried to recollect, which was natural, seeing that it must have
been one long since overcome. Then he remembered, and smiled:
"_Staccato_ playing. To get a good _staccato_, when I first tried seemed
very hard to me. When I was younger, really, at one time I had a very
poor _staccato_!" [I assured the young artist that any one who heard him
play here would find it hard to believe this.] "Yes, I did," he
insisted, "but one morning, I do not know just how it was--I was
playing the _cadenza_ in the first movement of Wieniawski's F♯ minor
concerto,--it is full of _staccatos_ and double stops--the right way of
playing _staccato_ came to me quite suddenly, especially after Professor
Auer had shown me his method.