Nobody's Looking at You

by Janet Malcolm

  When I asked Costan if she thought of herself as a rebellious force in the company, she said, “Yes, I totally see myself that way. I like what’s unusual and unexpected and different. I look for colors I find cool at the moment. I’m interested in trends. I create a story. I come from a discipline where everything means something. I’m not sure everyone around here cares. But I’m also a good girl. I fit in with the culture of the company. They’ve allowed me a lot of latitude because they like what I do. I feel appreciated—though sometimes I get annoyed.” A recent source of annoyance was the rejection of one of the colors she proposed—the “wildly trendy” color called cosmetic or skin tone—which happened to be the color that in my ignorance I called pinkish beige when describing her striped jersey. “I wear Eileen Fisher designs sometimes, and I really like them,” she said. “But my style is quirkier. I always want to be different. It’s my rebelliousness.”

  As Rowe led me to another part of the floor, I recalled a passage in an Eileen Fisher brochure entitled “Simply—to Be Ourselves”:

  The underlying philosophy of our design—no constraints, freedom of expression—extends to the company itself, which is run in a loosely structured manner that allows for an open exchange of ideas. Every employee is encouraged to give input to any area, no matter their position or expertise. The individual is valued for the total picture of who they are and what they can contribute.

  I also thought of something Eileen had said about today’s company and its leadership: “I don’t feel like I need to be there anymore. I feel like they’re my full-grown adult children and they do an amazing job and they don’t need me.” Rowe, who was wearing Kelly-green trousers (“No, they’re from my own clothes,” she said when I asked if they were of Eileen Fisher design), paused before a short rack of garments with a sign on it reading:

  EILEEN’S SAMPLES DO NOT TOUCH

  These were the clothes for Mom’s closet, in the obligatory black and gray and white, and as we stood before them, the image of Eileen, in all her delicacy and beauty, wafted out of them like an old, expensive scent.

  The New Yorker, 2013

  PERFORMANCE ARTIST

  What is one to think of the clothes the twenty-nine-year-old pianist Yuja Wang wears when she performs—extremely short and tight dresses that ride up as she plays, so that she has to tug at them when she has a free hand, or clinging backless gowns that give an impression of near-nakedness (accompanied in all cases by four-inch-high stiletto heels)? In 2011, Mark Swed, the music critic of the Los Angeles Times, referring to the short and tight orange dress Yuja wore when she played Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto at the Hollywood Bowl, wrote that “had there been any less of it, the Bowl might have been forced to restrict admission to any music lover under 18 not accompanied by an adult.” Two years later, the New Criterion critic Jay Nordlinger characterized the “shorter-than-short red dress, barely covering her rear” that Yuja wore for a Carnegie Hall recital as “stripper-wear.” Never has the relationship between what we see at a concert and what we hear come under such perplexing scrutiny. Is the seeing part a distraction (Glenn Gould thought it was) or is it—can it be—a heightening of the musical experience?

  During the intermission of a recital at Carnegie Hall in May, Yuja changed from the relatively conventional long gold sequinned gown she had worn for the first half, two Brahms Ballades and Schumann’s Kreisleriana, into something more characteristically outré. For the second half, Beethoven’s extremely long and difficult Sonata no. 29 in B-flat, known as the Hammerklavier, she wore a dress that was neither short nor long but both: a dark-blue-green number, also sequinned, with a long train on one side—the side not facing the audience—and nothing on the other, so that her right thigh and leg were completely exposed.

  As she performed, the thigh, splayed by the weight of the torso and the action of the toe working the pedal, looked startlingly large, almost fat, though Yuja is a very slender woman. Her back was bare, thin straps crossing it. She looked like a dominatrix or a lion tamer’s assistant. She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman in sadistic high heels. Take that, and that, Beethoven!

  A few months before the performance, I asked Yuja why, out of all Beethoven’s sonatas, she had selected the Hammerklavier, and she said that she had done it out of defiance. She wanted to prove that she could play the most difficult of Beethoven’s sonatas. I said that I was probably not alone in finding the sonata hard, almost unpleasant, to listen to, and several days later she sent me a link to a video of a lecture about the Hammerklavier by the Hungarian-born pianist András Schiff. Schiff speaks in the slow, self-savoring way in which many Eastern European men speak, to let you know how interesting and amusing everything they say is—except in his case it is.

  Schiff characterized the work as “the greatest” and “most monumental” of Beethoven’s sonatas, “a work that everybody respects and reveres but very few people love.” Schiff’s object was to communicate his own “deep love for this piece,” and he began by talking about Beethoven’s metronome markings, which are “incredibly fast” and are ignored by most pianists, who play the piece slowly and ponderously. The piece “is not pretty,” but it is not “heavy-handed … not made of lead.” Schiff mocked the pianists who protract the long third movement to show that “we are very deep and profound.… You can have lunch and dinner and breakfast, and we are still sitting here.” Schiff went on to say, “If you play this piece at Beethoven’s tempi, then it’s not ponderous anymore.… It is not a piece in marble.… It is incredibly human and alive.”

  At Carnegie, Yuja did not play the piece quite at Beethoven’s tempi—these days, few pianists do apart from Schiff—but I found myself responding to it as I had not responded to recordings by the great Maurizio Pollini and Mitsuko Uchida. I had not been able to get past the music’s unprettiness. But now I was electrified. The forty- or fifty-minute-long piece (depending on how ponderously or not ponderously you play it) seemed almost too short.

  A communication from another audience member, the pianist Shai Wosner, helpfully explained the inexplicable: why a piece that is about struggle and difficulty should have given the pleasure it gave in Yuja’s interpretation. “There is hardly any passage in it that is truly comfortable to the hand,” he wrote, along with “a certain harmonic tension that runs pretty much throughout the piece between B-flat major and B minor, Beethoven’s ‘dark, forbidden’ key.” He went on:

  With all the Beethovenian struggle, this piece is also a very “cleanly” conceived sonata, more faithful to the Classical sonata model than any of Beethoven’s other late Sonatas. So what I loved about Yuja’s performance was how this other aspect of the piece came across … her effortless approach brought out the brilliant, clear structure of Hammerklavier and highlighted it from another angle. Like a great monument that’s not made of stone but of light-reflecting glass.

  Anthony Tommasini, reviewing the performance in the Times, wrote, “Ms. Wang’s virtuosity goes well beyond uncanny facility.… She wondrously brought out intricate details, inner voices and harmonic colorings. The first movement had élan and daring. The scherzo skipped along with mischievousness and rhythmic bite.” Neither Tommasini nor Wosner mentioned Yuja’s dress, but I wondered about its impact on their experience. I know that what I saw was intertwined with what I heard. Looking at her in that remarkable getup was part of the musical experience. But what part?

  Yuja had played the Hammerklavier a week or so earlier in Santa Barbara, and Mark Swed had again not failed to notice what she wore. This time, perhaps not altogether seriously, he attributed her choice of costume to altruism. Six days earlier, Murray Perahia, who is sixty-nine, had played the Hammerklavier nearby, in Los Angeles. “Hers is a 40-year age advantage,” Swed wrote, so “as if to level the field technically, she came out onto the stage … tightly squeezed into a red-orange gown and wearing platform heels so high that she could barely walk.” Swed praised both performances. “Perahia’s underst
anding, feeling and urgency produce a ‘Hammerklavier’ for the ages,” while Wang, “with a flick of her dazzling fingers on the keys, sends an electric current through the ‘Hammerklavier’ that makes it modern music, Beethoven for the 21st century.” And, while Perahia “emerged from his ordeal exhausted, hardly able to walk offstage” (in spite of his flat-heeled shoes), Wang “in the manner of the greatest virtuosos of yore … made this great effort seem almost effortless and was ready for three amazing encores.”

  In New York, as it happened, Perahia had once again played the Hammerklavier a few days before Yuja did and again had had the starch taken out of him. Tommasini returned to Perahia’s performance in his review of Yuja’s (he had enthusiastically reviewed the Perahia on May 9) and held up the older pianist’s exhaustion as a sort of necessary tribute to the piece’s profundity and monumentality. “This was not a probing or profound Hammerklavier,” he said of Yuja’s interpretation, as if suddenly remembering himself and wishing that his praise of her had been more grudging. I could hear András Schiff laughing to himself. We are very deep and profound.… You can have lunch and dinner and breakfast, and we are still sitting here.

  Tommasini ended his review by complaining about the five encores that Yuja played, each one making the Hammerklavier recede “further from memory.” I have to say that I agreed with him. I had heard these encores before. Yuja habitually wheels them out at performances. They include Vladimir Horowitz’s amusing high-speed Carmen Fantasy and an equally funny arrangement by various hands of the Alla Turca movement of Mozart’s Sonata no. 11 in A Major. The audience, as Tommasini felt obliged to report, went mad with delight. When I first heard Yuja play these encores, I went mad with delight, too. But this time I wished she had left us with an unmediated memory of her Hammerklavier. The roars that went up after the encores were greater than those after the Hammerklavier. This seemed wrong. But in the split between the concert proper and the encores we may read the split in Yuja herself—her persona as a confident musical genius and as an uncertain young woman making her way through the maze of a treacherous marketplace.

  * * *

  She was born in Beijing to a mother who was a dancer and a father who was a percussionist. She is vague about her emergence as a prodigy. She likes to tell interviewers that her mother wanted her to be a dancer, but that she was lazy and chose the piano because she could sit down. She was performing publicly by the age of six, and entering competitions from which she always emerged with the first prize. When she was nine, her parents enrolled her in the Beijing conservatory, and when she was fourteen, they sent her to a conservatory in Calgary, Canada, where she learned English. From there she went to the Curtis Institute, in Philadelphia, whose head, the pianist Gary Graffman, immediately recognized her quality and took her on as his student, something he did only with the most outstanding talents, such as Lang Lang. Yuja hasn’t lived in China since.

  About a year ago, I began meeting with Yuja in the Sky Lounge, on the top floor of the building she lives in on Riverside Boulevard, in the West Sixties—a common space with a view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey shoreline, whose privileged-looking armchairs and little tables evoke first- and business-class waiting rooms at airports. When I say “the building she lives in,” I am speaking loosely. Yuja tours the world, playing in premier halls, either in solo recitals or with leading orchestras, in London, Paris, St. Petersburg, Edinburgh, Bucharest, Caracas, Tokyo, Kyoto, Beijing, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Sydney, Amsterdam, Florence, Barcelona, and San Francisco, among other cities, and spends only a few weeks, between more than a hundred scheduled performances, in the apartment, a studio she bought in 2014.

  When you walk into the apartment—which is small and dark—the first thing you see is a royal-blue nylon sheet suspended from the ceiling like a shower curtain and drawn around a lumpish object that turns out to be a Steinway grand piano. The curtain is there to muffle the piano’s sound, to accommodate a neighbor for whom the practicing of a world-class pianist is not the thrill it would be for you and me. The rest of the apartment has the atmosphere of a college dormitory room, with its obligatory unpacked suitcase on the floor and haphazard strewings of books and papers and objects. There may be a few stuffed animals on the bed or maybe only a sense of them—I am not sure because I was at the apartment only once. Yuja prefers to see interviewers in the Sky Lounge. When I proposed visiting the apartment again—this time with a notebook—she politely demurred. It was too much of a mess, or the cleaning woman hadn’t come.

  Yuja speaks in fluent—more than fluent—English, punctuated by laughter that gives one to understand that what she is saying is not to be taken too seriously, and that she is not a pompous or pretentious person. Occasionally, there is the slightest trace of an accent (vaguely French) and a lapse into the present tense.

  We talked about her life as a child prodigy. “Oh, yes, I’m a real prodigy,” she said. “They still call me wunderkind. I remember when I went to the conservatory for the first time. All the other kids were looking at me like—by then I was already a child star—like I am another species in a zoo. Oh, my God, she’s here.”

  “You seem so unspoiled,” I said. “Were you more spoiled then? Or were you unspoiled even then?”

  “I think unspoiled came later,” Yuja said.

  She recalled something I didn’t and still don’t completely understand about the effect that playing Mozart had on her as a child. She said that performing his Twelve Variations in C Major (“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”) permitted her to feel for the first time what it was like to have stage fright. She was eight or nine.

  “I was always quiet before a concert, while the other kids were so nervous. They talk, some are very noisy. I don’t understand. Why are you nervous? Until the first time I played Mozart. I was not nervous until I was onstage. Then I felt I was in a completely different time and space. My fingers just played. And I thought there is a difference between practicing at home and playing onstage.”

  I asked if she could explain further what had happened to her when she performed the Variations.

  “Maybe intuitively I was struck by the beauty, by the symmetry, by how like something inherent in nature it is. Before, I was, Oh, Mozart is so boring.”

  When I told her of my feeling of awe at the superhuman feat that is a concert performance, she said, “For me that’s normal—like talking.” She has the erroneous idea that writing a book is a similarly remarkable achievement. She became a serious reader in her teens. Among the books she recently read are Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. When I commented on the high-mindedness of her reading, she quickly said, “No, I’m always reading something trashy, too.”

  I asked about her home life in China. “Did your parents immediately realize that you were different from other children?”

  “I don’t know. They’re very naïve people. Extremely conventional and traditional. Very Communist. If you read Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, you will understand what kind of people they are. Just simple, extremely kind. My dad was really talented, and my mom also. They are extremely artistic—or autistic,” she said, with a peal of laughter. “Their environment never allowed them to develop to their full potential.”

  “Is this what you mean by ‘very Communist’?”

  “Yeah. Because you have to go to Party meetings and talk about how to do well for society. Twenty-year plan. Five-year plan. You work for the common welfare rather than for the individual. Working for the individual is almost synonymous with being selfish. Which is not how I feel. I feel lucky that I came out when I was fourteen.” Yuja’s mother came for her graduation from Curtis and for her Carnegie Hall debut; otherwise, Yuja sees her parents only when she performs in Beijing. She speaks of them in an affectionate but veiled way, always stressing their kindness.

  When I asked Yuja to elaborate on her sense of the political differences between China and America, she paused before answering. After a while, listening to her
, I realized that she was talking about an entirely different subject. I decided to persist. “I asked you about politics, and you have been talking about music,” I said.

  “You noticed?” she said, laughing.

  My visit to Yuja’s apartment had taken place after this conversation. It was around four on a hot August afternoon, and Yuja was dressed in denim shorts, very short ones, and a tank top. We had tickets to a five o’clock concert of advanced contemporary music at Alice Tully Hall, and Yuja was debating whether to change for it. She rummaged through the suitcase on the floor and extracted two garments—strapless black-and-white minidresses made of a stretch fabric, called bandage dresses by their French designer, Hervé Léger, because that’s how they fit, and characterized by Yuja as “modern and edgy” as well as practical, because they don’t have to be ironed and lie nice and flat in a suitcase—and asked my opinion. Should she wear one of them or stay in the shorts? I asked what the issue was—was she interested in comfort or in how she looked? She stared at me as if I were crazy. What weird world was I living in where comfort could even be thought of? She wiggled into one of the bandage dresses, added her high heels, and we walked the three blocks to Lincoln Center at a brisk clip.

  * * *

  In February of this year, on four successive nights at Geffen Hall, Yuja played Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 9 in E-flat Major, the Jeunehomme—written when Mozart was barely twenty-one and considered his first masterpiece—with the New York Philharmonic, under the Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit. This was a departure for Yuja. Her career has been built on her playing of the Russian Romantics, the “red-blooded” and “hot-blooded” composers, as she calls them, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, for whose “passionate, emotional” pieces her short flame-red dresses seem to have been made. For a while, there was a picture of Yuja in front of Carnegie Hall in the flame-red dress she had worn at a recital in May 2013, her arms raised high in the air in a gesture of culminating abandon. It stopped passersby. Now she was entering a new phase of engagement with Mozart and the nineteenth-century German classical composers. The picture of her in front of Geffen Hall was unremarkable.