• • •
While the behavior of parents can be damaging, those parents can be victimized along with their children by the classical music industry. Many managers seem to believe that the only way to keep a paying audience is to ensure a constant flow of young musicians. There has always been a market for prodigies, but in the past thirty years the tendency has been to find a new one every week. A machinery has been established by people with short-term interests in the people they are using, for whom even the child’s mental health is only a mercenary concern. “It’s like burning fossil fuels,” Justin Davidson said. “Constantly replenishing the prodigy supply, you flood the market. These managers are creating an oversupply of people who can do a narrow range of things, many of which are no longer of great interest. They’re preparing them for a future that’s in the past.”
“It’s a bewildering preoccupation,” the pianist Mitsuko Uchida said to me. “Ask those audiences how they’d like to be represented in court by a seven-year-old; let them try surgery with a very gifted eight-year-old.” The critic Janice Nimura said, “The child prodigy is the polite version of the carny freak. Gawking at the dog-faced boy in the sideshow is exploitative, but gawking at the six-year-old concert pianist on the Today show is somehow okay, even inspiring, demonstrating just how high human potential can soar.” While etiquette demands that we not stare at dwarfs, it makes no such claim for the privacy of the prodigy.
• • •
Pushing talented children can backfire; not pushing them can backfire, too. Leonard Bernstein’s father, when asked why he’d opposed his son’s career, replied, “How did I know he was going to be Leonard Bernstein?” Doing the interviews for this chapter, I began to feel that half the parents of these children had coerced them into an uncongenial musical life, while the other half had unreasonably held their children back. Jonathan Floril has the dubious distinction of having lived both clichés.
As a child in Ecuador in the early 1990s, Jonathan yearned for music lessons, but his mother, Elizabeth, didn’t think music important, while his father, Jaime Iván Floril, who had left the marriage before Jonathan was born, ran a music academy and didn’t think his son warranted the training. Jaime finally relented and allowed Jonathan to take piano at eleven. Within three months, the piano teacher told Jaime that Jonathan had a talent too significant for Ecuador and needed to train in Europe.
Jonathan’s mother was enraged at the thought of his going abroad and tried to hold on to him through a legal battle for custody. “She was killing me,” Jonathan remembered, “because my passion for music was everything.” Two months later, Jaime closed his academy to take his son to Europe. Elizabeth had notified the police that her husband was trying to kidnap Jonathan, so they drove by night across an unmanned border in the Andes to Colombia to board a plane to Madrid. Jonathan, who had studied piano for less than six months, was accepted into the fifth year at the Rodolfo Halffter Conservatory.
His mother persisted in trying to get him back, and Jonathan had to assert over and over to the Spanish police that he wanted to stay there. “With all the weight that I had from my mother, I didn’t know whether what I had done was right or wrong, and my father couldn’t tell me,” Jonathan said. He started reading for moral guidance: Aristotle’s Ethics and Plato’s Republic, Saint Thomas, José Ortega y Gasset. When he was twenty, I asked him what he now thought about his departure to Spain. “My mother said that music would prevent me from living my childhood,” he replied. “But I didn’t want to live my childhood anymore.” Between eleven and sixteen, Jonathan won more than twenty competitions; his father, who could not find work as a music teacher, took a clerical job instead. “My prodigy time was very, very stressful,” Jonathan said. He returned to Ecuador for the first time when he was fifteen, four years after his departure, to play a major concert. Though his mother greeted him there joyously, an unbridgeable gap had opened.
The next year, he earned a full scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music; he soon made his debut in Valencia and was reviewed as “more than a prodigy, because of not only what he performs, but also how he performs.” His studies were changing him. “I started to grow into different criteria of musicianship,” he said. “My father was asking me to work on repertoire that I thought was senseless; he set himself against me, and I hated him for that. I needed to do something besides win another prize.” Having fled his mother in Ecuador, he now left his father. “He wanted me to learn popular selections and make a CD. I thought I was going to get lost in that superficial way of doing music. So he kicked me out of my home in Madrid. I had to pack in two hours. It was that drastic.” I asked what effect that second exile had had on him, and he said, “It seems to me almost a pilgrimage, the way that I walk as a musician through life. Sometimes I feel that my fingers moving on the keys, it’s like how a blind person reads in Braille. There is so much meaning that you find only when you are touching the instrument. I search to bring something noble to the world, something as noble as the passion of Jesus Christ. I’m not actually a religious person, but I believe there’s something higher than us, that makes music what it is. I can serve that thing, even if I cannot see or know it.”
At twenty, Jonathan will not play a Chopin mazurka without knowing the folk mazurkas that inspired it, and he won’t play a nocturne without studying the time of bel canto. “Recently, I have gone back to recordings from the 1930s of Ecuadorean music,” he told me. “The way I think and am is still rooted in my country, so I need to keep this part of myself alive.” I wondered how the traumas of leaving his mother, then his country, and then his father still echoed. “I do not think there was another way,” he said. “I understand why my parents turned against me. We all hate what we don’t understand.”
• • •
Gore Vidal wrote, “Hatred of one parent or the other can make an Ivan the Terrible or a Hemingway: the protective love, however, of two devoted parents can absolutely destroy an artist.” Early trauma and deprivation become the engines of some children’s creativity. One researcher reviewed a list of eminent people and found that more than half had lost a parent before age twenty-six—triple the rate of the general population. A horrific upbringing can kill talent or bring it to life. It is a matter of having a match between how the parents act and what a particular child needs. Robert Sirota said, “It’s very easy to destroy a talent; it’s much less likely that nurture can create ability where none existed.”
• • •
Lang Lang, often billed as the world’s most famous pianist, is the embodiment of brilliance honed in punishment. His father, Lang Guoren, wanted to be a musician but was assigned to a factory during the Cultural Revolution. When his eighteen-month-old son showed signs of being a prodigy, Lang Guoren’s longing reared up. From the age of three, Lang Lang woke up every morning at five to practice. “My passion was so huge that I wanted to eat the piano up,” he said. His teacher was astonished by his memory; he could memorize four big pieces every week. “My teacher was always telling her students to learn more,” he said, “but she was telling me to slow down.” At seven, at China’s first national children’s competition in Taiyuan, he took an honorable mention for talent and rushed onto the stage, shouting, “I don’t want the prize for talent, I don’t want it!” When another contestant ran over to comfort him, saying that he, too, had won an honorable mention, Lang Lang said, “You think you can compete with me? What the hell can you play?” Lang Lang’s prize was a stuffed-dog toy; he threw it in the mud and trampled it, but his father picked it up and kept it on the piano at home in Shenyang, so Lang Lang would never forget how much work he had to do.
Lang Guoren had become a member of the special police—a prestigious job. He decided, however, that he had to take Lang Lang to Beijing to seek a place at the Attached Primary School of the Conservatory of Music, while Lang Lang’s mother, Zhou Xiulan, would stay behind to earn money to support her son and her husband. “I was nine, and it was really painful to leave
home, and I realized that my father was quitting his job to be with me,” Lang Lang said. “I felt such pressure.” Lang Guoren taught Lang Lang his maxim: “Whatever other people have, I will definitely have; whatever I have, nobody else will have.”
Lang Guoren described quitting his job as “a kind of amputation.” He rented the cheapest apartment they could find, without heat or running water, and told his son that the rent was much higher than it actually was. “That much money?” Lang Lang replied, shocked. “I had better really practice.” He missed his mother terribly, and he often cried. Lang Guoren, who had always scorned domestic work, had to cook and clean. The teacher they had come to see in Beijing assessed Lang Lang harshly. “She said I played like a potato farmer,” he recalled, “that I should taste Coca-Cola and play Mozart like that; my playing was flavorless water. She said, ‘You Northeasterners are big, coarse, and stupid.’ Eventually she said, ‘Go home. Don’t be a pianist.’ Then she fired me.”
Shortly thereafter, Lang Lang stayed after school to play piano for the celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and he was two hours late coming home. When he walked in, Lang Guoren beat him with a shoe, then proffered a handful of pills and said, “You’re a liar and you’re lazy! You have no reason to live. You can’t go back to Shenyang in shame! Dying is the only way out. Take these pills!” When Lang Lang did not take the pills, Lang Guoren pushed the boy onto the apartment’s balcony and told him to jump. Lang Guoren later explained his behavior with a Chinese proverb: “If you do not let go of your child, you cannot fight the wolves.” In other words, coddling exposes everyone to disaster. But Lang Lang was furious and refused to touch the piano for months, until his father swallowed his pride and begged him.
Lang Guoren had also begged another teacher to work with his son and sat through the lessons so that he could reinforce the instruction at home. “He never smiled,” Lang Lang said. “He was scaring me, sometimes beating me. We were like monks. The music monks.” A family friend commented that Lang Guoren never showed affection or let his son know that he was pleased. “It was only when his son was sound asleep that he would sit by him silently and gaze at him, fix his quilt, and touch his small feet,” the friend wrote.
When they went back to Shenyang for the summer, Lang Guoren treated the visit as a mere change of location for piano exercises. Zhou Xiulan fought with him, demanding, “What does it matter to be a ‘grandmaster’ or not a ‘grandmaster’? What the hell are you doing, acting as if you are preparing for war every day? How does this resemble a family?” Lang Lang would try to distract them from their arguments with his music; a friend said, “Every time they fought, his playing progressed.” He worked so hard that he collapsed and had to go to the hospital for intravenous fluids every day, but his practice schedule never changed. “My father is a real fascist,” Lang Lang said. “A prodigy can be very lonely, locked out of the world.”
He was finally accepted at the Attached Primary School and then, at eleven, he auditioned to represent China at the International Competition for Young Pianists in Germany. He was not selected. Lang Guoren told his wife that she had to raise enough money to enter Lang Lang privately, which was contrary to etiquette and potentially humiliating. Before the contest, Lang Guoren identified a blind pianist from Japan as Lang Lang’s most serious opponent and told Lang Lang to draw out his competitor about technique. Lang Lang then attempted to integrate the same approach into his own playing. When Lang Lang won, Lang Guoren sobbed for joy; when others told Lang Lang of his father’s response, Lang Lang countered that his father was incapable of tears.
In 1995, at thirteen, Lang Lang entered the second International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians. His father would eavesdrop on the other contestants practicing and urged Lang Lang to do the same if anyone was working on the same piece that he was. In Lang Guoren’s view, if the pianist before you played with strength, you should play with delicacy; if he played softly, you should begin with strength. This tactic would make it easier for the judges to remember you and would capture the attention of the audience. When someone later asked Lang Guoren how a thirteen-year-old could play something as heartbreaking as Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto for the finals, he said he’d told Lang Lang to think about his separation from his beloved mother and his beloved country. Lang Lang won.
Within months, Lang Guoren withdrew his son from the Central Conservatory. He had arranged an audition with Gary Graffman at Curtis. Lang Lang recalled, “My dad said, ‘The Chopin should be as light as the wind; the Beethoven should be heavy; when you use your explosive strength, be firm, generous, and natural, as if you were a mix of the English and Brazilian football teams.’” Lang Lang was accepted on the spot, and he and his father moved to the United States. During his first lesson at Curtis, Lang Lang said, “I’d like to win every competition that exists.” Graffman said, “Why?” Lang Lang said, “To be famous.” Graffman just laughed, but the other students told Lang Lang he should focus instead on being a superb musician; he didn’t understand the difference. Though he has since learned tact, he has never entirely renounced this Olympic model. Graffman said to me, “With most students, you want to get them excited about the emotional content of the music. With Lang Lang, it was just the opposite: I had to calm him down enough so he could learn.”
At seventeen, Lang Lang acquired a manager, who got him his first big break at the Ravinia Festival, outside Chicago. The critics were enraptured, and for the next two years Lang Lang sold out every concert, made numerous recordings, graced the covers of glossy magazines. “The higher the expectations, the better I play,” he told me. “Carnegie Hall makes me play best of all.”
Every tremendous prodigy story, like every political career, contains a backlash sequence that shocks the protagonist; the listening world has to go through its own rejecting adolescence between its childish rhapsody and its adult respect. Schadenfreude often makes the backlash mean. Lang Lang is socially porous, with a sensitivity to pleasing his specific audience that often seems reminiscent more of Beyoncé than of Sviatoslav Richter. Though these qualities are not incompatible with profundity, his playing to the gallery offends some sophisticates. The extent of Lang Lang’s self-branding is indicated by his having trademarked his name; he performs as “Lang Lang™.” He has signed endorsement deals with Audi, Montblanc, Sony, Adidas, Rolex, and Steinway. John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune, who had helped launch Lang Lang’s career, said a few years later, “The music became an accessory to the soloist’s acrobatic performance. All he needed was a white sequined suit and a candelabra and Ravinia could have sold him as the new Liberace.” Anthony Tommasini, of the New York Times, wrote that Lang Lang’s solo debut at Carnegie Hall in 2003 was “incoherent, self-indulgent and slam-bang crass.”
The narrative tension between composers’ masterworks and Lang Lang’s reading of them is exaggerated by his having grown up in a non-Western culture. “Western classical music in China is usually like Chinese food in the West: familiar but not quite the real thing,” Lang Lang said. He can do an impeccable rendition of a Mendelssohn concerto and follow it up with a self-indulgent Mozart sonata played with inflated dynamics and distended tempo. But then he’ll play elegantly again and critics will have to acknowledge his mastery. Five years after condemning him so sharply, Tommasini wrote that Lang Lang played “with utter command and disarming joy.” When I see Lang Lang in concert, I am always struck by how much fun he appears to be having. “I’m not just giving as a performer,” he said to me. “I’m also taking. My father is an introvert, my mother is an extrovert, and I am both: my father’s discipline and my mother’s happiness.”
I first sat down with Lang Lang in 2005, in Chicago, when he was twenty-three. I had gone that afternoon to a particularly lovely performance in which he played the Chopin Piano Sonata no. 3 in B Minor. Following the performance, a line of some four hundred people waited patiently to get his autograph on their CDs, and Lang Lang never flagged. A
fterward, Lang Lang invited me to talk in his room. When we arrived, Lang Guoren was watching television. He shook my hand, we exchanged pleasantries, and then, with his characteristic mix of brusqueness and intimacy, he took off his clothes and lay down for a nap. In my experience, everyone likes Lang Lang, and no one likes Lang Guoren, but Lang Lang is not as warm as he seems, and his father is not as harsh as he seems; they are collaborators in a single phenomenon. “When I turned twenty and became a huge success, I started to love my father,” Lang Lang told me. “He listens very well, and he helps me do the laundry, pack. I’m a spoiled kid. After a big recital, nobody else is going to do a little massage at two o’clock in the morning while talking about the performance.”
I once told Lang Lang that by American standards his father’s methods would count as child abuse, and that their present conviviality was startling to me. “If my father had pressured me like this and I had not done well, it would have been child abuse, and I would be traumatized, maybe destroyed,” Lang Lang responded. “He could have been less extreme and we probably would have made it to the same place; you don’t have to sacrifice everything to be a musician. But we had the same goal. So since all the pressure helped me become a world-famous star musician, which I love being, I would say that, for me, it was in the end a wonderful way to grow up.”
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