OMAHA, Neb.—A third-string high-school football player turned first-string concert musician recently discovered the cause of his shoulder and back problems the past year: he’s been playing a cello, not a violin.
It all started as a practical joke: When Joseph T.Y. Fitzgerald, 17, a stoutly built linebacker, showed up on the first day of orchestra class, his teacher and classmates thought he was mocking the typically unathletic nature of concert musicians. So, they told him that the cello was actually a “porn-sized violin.” To their surprise and amusement, he believed them and naively took the instrument home, practicing with it in earnest for hours every day. And to their astonishment, he soon became better than any of the violinists in the class, some of whom had been playing since grade school.
During the class’s first public concert, many in the audience laughed at Fitzgerald, thinking it must be some kind of sophomoric gag. But the chuckles turned to shocked silence when the teen played Paganini’s 24 Caprices. Considered by some as the most challenging piece ever written for a violin, he played it like a virtuoso on the cello, which is twice as big and five times as heavy as its string-instrument cousin.
He instantly became an overnight sensation, receiving standing ovations at sold-out venues throughout the city. Even his school’s football team and cheerleaders attended a concert, though apparently many of them had never heard of a cello (or in some cases even a violin) and so didn’t understand what was so special about his performance. One local critic called Fitzgerald “Paganini on steroids,” while another coined the term “cellinist” for him. He even started to attract attention from music company execs; one said they saw him as a way to “bring classical music to the masses with his massive violin.”
Four months into the concert season, however, Fitzgerald began suffering pain in his head, neck, shoulders, and back. At first associating it with the extended practices he had been having with some of his female orchestra classmates (many of whom, he said, told him that they had always dreamed of playing with a football player), he endured through the discomfort, thinking it would eventually get better the way his violin playing had. But within weeks, the pain became unbearable. He was sent to, somewhat ironically, a sports medicine doctor for an examination. Based on his athletic build, Dr. Lisa Nguyen assumed he had been injured playing sports, most likely football or baseball. But during the physical exam, she observed that his left forearm was almost twice the size of his right. Having played violin in high school, she immediately, though incredulously, recognized it as an anatomical anomaly common in violin players and made the diagnosis.
According to Fitzgerald’s parents, he is expected to make a full recovery, though he will never play the cello as a violin again. They said that his playing days, however, are not over and revealed that after he learned in his doctor’s office how a cello is supposed to be played, he came up with a novel idea to potentially keep his stardom going: he will play a violin like a cello.
