"He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts."

Do you remember Gene Weingarten's Pulitzer Prize-winning article "Pearls before Breakfast" (Washington Post, April 8, 2007)? The much linked, much reported, much discussed think-piece recounted a bold experiment conducted five years ago this month: During a morning rush hour at L'Enfant Plaza, "the nucleus of federal Washington," a violinist

positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

What do you think happened? Weingarten asks.

Well, what if the violinist were, say, Joshua Bell?

Joshua Bell "plays like a god," maintained composer John Corigliano in 1999 when he accepted Academy Award for the score of The Red Violin. The soundtrack for the film features Bell's exquisite artistry, and the violinist even body-doubled for Jason Flemyng (as Frederick Pope) in the third of The Red Violin's five stories.

Weingarten writes:

No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.

The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. Though the arcade is of utilitarian design, a buffer between the Metro escalator and the outdoors, it somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.

So, what do you think happened?

If you don't already know how this story ends, if you missed the coverage when it first appeared, read it now.

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We believe beauty would transcend. We (would like to) believe we would have seen and heard. At the very least, we (would like to) believe that we would have heeded the kids' insistence that we stop. ("But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch.")

But we weren't tested in that way this afternoon. No, our art had a frame, as Weingarten might put it.

We just saw Bell play "like a god" at the Chicago Symphony Center.

Local reviews are not available yet, of course, but he played the same program in Washington earlier this month. You'll find a review here.

A clip from Bach and Friends: Joshua Bell plays and describes "Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor.