The Violinist at L'Enfant Plaza: A Modern Parable on Rushing Past Wonder

It was 7:51 AM on a freezing Friday in January 2007 at the L'Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington, D.C. Over the course of forty-five minutes, 1,097 federal workers, lobbyists, interns, and commuters poured through the turnstiles on their way to offices across the capital.

Near an arcade wall by the trash bin, a young man wearing blue jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a dark Washington Nationals baseball cap opened a black violin case. He placed a few dollar bills in the velvet lid as seed money, tucked the violin beneath his chin, and began to play.

The instrument in his hands was a handcrafted 1713 Gibson ex-Huberman Stradivarius, valued at 3.5 million dollars. The musician was Joshua Bell, universally recognized as one of the finest classical violinists on earth. Three days earlier, he had performed the exact same repertoire at Symphony Hall in Boston, where orchestra seats sold for upward of two hundred dollars and audience members stood in line in evening gowns for hours to secure a ticket.

The experiment, organized by Washington Post journalist Gene Weingarten, was simple: In a mundane, everyday environment at an inconvenient hour, does beauty transcend the rush of daily life?

The architecture of a modern commuter transit station is engineered for velocity, not contemplation. L'Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C., with its cavernous brutalist concrete ceilings and roaring escalator banks, is designed to ingest human bodies from subway cars and expel them as rapidly as possible into government headquarters and office buildings. The air smells of ozone, diesel exhaust, and industrial floor cleaner.

In this environment, beauty is an intruder. People do not look at each other; they look at their watches, their shoes, and the digital departure monitors overhead. Their nervous systems are dialed to transit mode: defensive, hurried, and emotionally sealed.

When Joshua Bell opened his violin case that morning, he was not performing background music for a cocktail party. He was playing the Chaconne from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D minor—a twenty-minute architectural monument of classical music that Bach composed in 1720 after returning from a journey to discover that his beloved wife Maria Barbara had died and been buried in his absence. It is a piece that encompasses the entire spectrum of human grief, prayer, fury, and spiritual triumph.

And yet, as the glorious, rich acoustic resonance of the 300-year-old Stradivarius soared over the roar of the turnstiles, commuter after commuter marched past without turning their heads. An administrative assistant walking past at 8:03 AM barely glanced at the open violin case; a Department of Commerce director walking past at 8:14 AM adjusted his trench coat and walked on.