The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations

by Xiao-Mei, Zhu

  I think about my experience with Western music. My limited language skills mean that I cannot discuss it as well as others. I often feel hindered by my nationality; I sense, in the gaze of others, unspoken doubts about my abilities as a foreigner to truly understand Bach and Beethoven. To be sure that I am on the right track, as soon as I begin to work on a piece, I make it a point to listen to every recording of it available. It would be unthinkable for me to play a Beethoven sonata without first checking how Kempff interpreted it, or take on a composition by Chopin without Rubinstein’s imprimatur. Working with Gabriel Chodos only heightened this fear in me; for him, approaching a work structurally, through a process of analysis—or even dissection—was paramount. His approach to music was, like his idol, the writer Thomas Mann, fundamentally intellectual.

  If, however, in Chinese philosophy, the truth can be attained as much through committed practice as through explanation, why should it be any different when dealing with the truth of music?

  Unconsciously, these reflections brought about a change in how I approach a musical work. Once I have analyzed the entire piece, I play it evenly and attentively; I never force it or try to grasp its meaning too quickly. I do this until I experience love for each passage and note, until I reach a state of natural and intuitive understanding.

  Using this method, you understand that the first layer of a work to be uncovered is the tempo. By living with a piece, by not attempting to impose yourself in any way, you begin to breathe with it. One day, completely naturally, a tempo emerges, one that feels organically right. If you deviate from this revealed truth, you feel uncomfortable.

  This largely has to do with the connections that exist between breathing and life, but also with those between tempo and thought.

  If you have a great deal to say, in life or in music, you must take the time to express it. The beauties of a score must be brought out, they must be made to spring forth. The composer wrote them for that very reason: to be heard. And yet, there are limits. There is a risk that the audience will cease to pay attention, that they will become lost in the details without comprehending the whole—and all because the tempo is too slow for their thinking process. The reason is clear: the right tempo is not merely the one with which you breathe naturally, it is also the pace that allows thought to encompass both the forest and the trees.

  But this is only the initial stage, the elemental stage of grasping a work. The hardest part—the search for meaning—is yet to come. When you have the meaning, you have the solution to every problem involving technique. The search for the meaning of a work is a quest for the essential. If a run of sixteenth notes needs to be played very quickly, obviously there are some notes that matter more than others. When you have identified them, you know how to play the run. Perhaps the word thrust—with its twin meanings of “line of reasoning” and “forward motion”—best conveys the concept I am attempting to describe.

  It is increasingly clear to me that the thrust (line of reasoning or meaning) of a work is linked to its thrust (forward motion or direction). That the music—propelled forward and shaped by the life-giving bass notes—advances horizontally, and that this horizontality ultimately takes precedence over its verticality. This is not to say that we should reject the critical element of verticality and harmony when approaching a piece. But it is the bass that forms the pulse of the work. No, what I find even more striking is the need to look beyond the bar-lines in one’s quest for the musical line, the work’s progression. Gabriel Chodos made me work for months on musical phrasing. Over time, these phrases, these lines, are overlaid with concepts of progression, flow, movement, and transformation—ideas that find an echo in Chinese philosophy.

  I also learned, during this same period, not to struggle with my piano. It is an eternal friend, regardless of external events and the day’s fugitive moods. This in turn allows me to better explore its infinite resources, to get closer to the attack and the sonority that I am seeking. A story by Zhuangzi, “The Dexterous Butcher,” really opened my eyes in this regard. In the story, Prince Wen Hui is admiring the skill with which a butcher is carving up an ox. The prince inquires about his technique, and the butcher answers:

  “What I have wished for is Tao, far superior to technique. When I first dissected oxen, what I saw was nothing less than the whole ox. After three years, I no longer saw the whole ox. And now, I let my intuition, not my eyesight, lead the way […]. A good butcher changes his knife every year; he uses it to cut muscles. An ordinary butcher changes his knife every month; he uses it to cut bones. I have used the same knife for nineteen years.”

  Now I can enter into music with greater ease. Many wise men retreat to the silence of the mountains, away from everything, in order to meditate. Before playing a work, I have discovered I need to take the same approach: to be peaceful, to empty my mind.

  The Chinese are well acquainted with this way of seeing things; they often use the image of water to illustrate it. To see down to the bottom of a lake, the water must be calm and still. The calmer the water, the farther down one can see. The exact same thing is true for the mind—the more tranquil and detached one is, the greater the depths one can plumb.

  Increasingly, I understand that it is precisely by following this path of self-effacement and emptiness that one attains the truth of a musical work. Without attempting to impose one’s will, without forcing something on the listener. Without struggling with the self. By disappearing behind the composer.

  In meditating on the words of Laozi, I began to understand how he was able to express the essential nature of emptiness better than anyone, particularly in this passage, to which I endlessly return:

  Thirty spokes join together at one hub,

  But it is the hole in the center

  That makes it operable.

  Clay is molded into a pot,

  But it is the emptiness inside

  That makes it useful.

  Doors and windows are cut

  To make a room,

  It is the empty spaces that we use.

  Therefore, existence is what we have,

  But non-existence is what we use.

  Little by little, without even being aware of it, I began to apply this method to every musical work that I approached and to works that I took up anew. Each day, I would experience two great moments of happiness. The first was during my daily meditation session. The second was during what I will call my “piano meditation.” According to Chinese philosophy, work—even work without purpose—is one of the greatest virtues, and this was exactly what I was seeking when I was seated at the piano. I worked, and worked tirelessly, with no other goal than the truth of the music. Since I was unable to build a career at that time, I had no professional obligations—no programs to prepare for upcoming concerts, no problematic dates in my agenda. I worked in the way I wanted, and for as long as I wanted, and this piano meditation brought me the same sense of fullness as my morning mediation sessions.

  Looking back, I now see that those years of so much hardship were, in fact, a period of great privilege. How many pianists, once they are over thirty and often involved in a career, still have the time to work at their piano, strictly for their own pleasure, with no particular goal in mind? How many have the opportunity to seek the essence of a work that they would never consider playing in public? As I see it, in life it is important to know how to work, without any thought of recompense. During my meditations at the piano, I never imagined that I would perform real concerts before a real audience, or that I would make real recordings. Sometimes in life, work for work’s sake can reap the greatest benefit.

  21

  Dreaming of Paris

  One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace.

  One plundered, the other burned.

  Victory can be a thief, or so it seems.

  (Victor Hugo)

  I began to think about Paris.

  In Brattleboro, despite all my different jobs, I simply wasn’t able to make end
s meet. Thom and Gregg were wonderful, yet I sensed that I was a burden on them. And then there was the fact that, even though I was surrounded by friends, I felt unchallenged.

  I was drawn to Paris; I was linked to it by a very old memory. By a connection that was at once tenuous and sustained, one that had been forged long before I was born, when my family lived near Fuxing Park, in the French Quarter of Shanghai. When I was a child, my mother often talked to me about the Louvre, which she considered the most beautiful museum in the world. I could still remember the scent of the little perfume bottle that she had kept for so long, and that the Red Guards had poured onto the floor of our Beijing apartment. And then there was Rodin’s Art, for which I had traded two years of free piano lessons.

  Now that I live in France and I have read Lin Yutang, I have a better understanding of what connects the French and the Chinese. Lin Yutang, the great Chinese author—and bridger of cultures—studied at Saint John’s University in Shanghai and subsequently in the US and in Leipzig, the city forever associated with the name of Bach. He then divided his time between the East and the West. In The Importance of Living, Lin sets out what China and France have in common: a sense of humor, depth of feeling, and a genuinely artistic way of approaching life.

  And, of course, how could I not want to discover the country of the French Revolution—the revolution that inspired so many others.

  I shared my plan with my friends, who thought it was unrealistic: if I couldn’t establish a career for myself in Brattleboro, the idea that I was somehow going to be able to do so in Paris was simply crazy. When one friend—a former student of Yves Nat at the Paris Conservatory—heard that I was thinking of going to France, he was horrified:

  “Don’t do it. It’s the worst place on earth for pianists. The critics are merciless there.” He then told a story about a great living pianist who shall remain nameless: “After one of his concerts, the French critics wrote: ‘He gave a concert of music by Chopin. One wonders why.’ That was it. It’s a frightful country; all people care about is being clever. Don’t go.”

  No doubt there was truth in what he said.

  Sue Fleisher was the one person who offered encouragement. I had met Sue at the School for International Training—where she was working when I studied in Brattleboro—and we had hit it off immediately. She had lived under terrible conditions in France during the Occupation because she was Jewish. Nevertheless, she still considered it the most beautiful country in the world.

  I still remember her words when, one day, I asked her about Judaism:

  “Let’s not talk about it. Religion is what sets people against each other.”

  She was convinced that France would welcome me, and she promised to attend my first concert. The likelihood seemed so improbable that she and I had a good laugh about it together.

  As my departure plans took shape, I began wondering why former colonial powers, like France, can hold an unhealthy fascination for populations that were once subjugated by them at an earlier point in their history.

  In China’s case, the subjugation took place without any real resistance on the part of the Chinese people. Nevertheless, it was carried out with brutality, as attested to by the sack of the Summer Palace. When I was in Beijing, I would often walk through its grounds. All that remained were a few ruins, hidden in the foliage, faint reminders of what had once been a splendid monument.

  In one of his letters, Victor Hugo responds to this dramatic event and describes it very aptly. I don’t believe the text of the letter is well known in France, but it is famous in China. In Mao’s time, schoolchildren read it in class as an illustration of the crimes committed by the imperial powers. In it, Hugo is responding to a certain Captain Butler, who wrote to him while he was in exile, and asked for his assessment of the event.

  Hauteville House, November 25, 1861

  You ask my opinion, Sir, about the China expedition. You consider this expedition to be honourable and glorious, and you have the kindness to attach some consideration to my feelings; according to you, the China expedition, carried out jointly under the flags of Queen Victoria and the Emperor Napoleon, is a glory to be shared between France and England, and you wish to know how much approval I feel I can give to this English and French victory.

  Since you wish to know my opinion, here it is:

  There was, in a corner of the world, a wonder of the world; this wonder was called the Summer Palace. Art has two principles, the Idea, which produces European art, and the Chimera, which produces oriental art. The Summer Palace was to chimerical art what the Parthenon is to ideal art. All that can be begotten of the imagination of an almost extra-human people was there. It was not a single, unique work like the Parthenon. It was a kind of enormous model of the chimera, if the chimera can have a model. Imagine some inexpressible construction, something like a lunar structure, and you will have the Summer Palace. Build a dream with marble, jade, bronze, and porcelain, frame it with cedar wood, cover it with precious stones, drape it with silk, make it here a sanctuary, there a harem, elsewhere a citadel, put gods there, and monsters, varnish it, enamel it, gild it, paint it, have architects who are poets build the thousand and one dreams of the thousand and one nights, add gardens, basins, gushing water and foam, swans, ibis, peacocks, suppose in a word a sort of dazzling cavern of human fantasy with the face of a temple and palace, such was this building. The slow work of generations had been necessary to create it. This edifice, as enormous as a city, had been built by the centuries, for whom? For the peoples. For the work of time belongs to man. Artists, poets, and philosophers knew the Summer Palace; Voltaire talks of it. People spoke of the Parthenon in Greece, the pyramids in Egypt, the Coliseum in Rome, Notre-Dame in Paris, the Summer Palace in the Orient. If people did not see it they imagined it. It was a kind of tremendous unknown masterpiece, glimpsed from the distance in a kind of twilight, like a silhouette of the civilization of Asia on the horizon of the civilization of Europe.

  This wonder has disappeared.

  One day two bandits entered the Summer Palace. One plundered, the other burned. Victory can be a thief, or so it seems. The devastation of the Summer Palace was accomplished by the two victors acting jointly. Mixed up in all this is the name of Elgin, which inevitably calls to mind the Parthenon. What was done to the Parthenon was done to the Summer Palace, more thoroughly and better, so that nothing of it should be left. All the treasures of all our cathedrals put together could not equal this formidable and splendid museum of the Orient. It contained not only masterpieces of art, but masses of jewelry. What a great exploit, what a windfall! One of the two victors filled his pockets; when the other saw this he filled his coffers. And back they came to Europe, arm in arm, laughing away. Such is the story of the two bandits.

  We Europeans are the civilized ones, and for us the Chinese are the barbarians. This is what civilization has done to barbarism.

  Before history, one of the two bandits will be called France; the other will be called England. But I protest, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity! The crimes of those who lead are not the fault of those who are led; Governments are sometimes bandits, peoples never.

  The French empire has pocketed half of this victory, and today with a kind of proprietorial naivety it displays the splendid bric-a-brac of the Summer Palace.

  I hope that a day will come when France, delivered and cleansed, will return this booty to despoiled China.

  Meanwhile, there is a theft and two thieves.

  I take note.

  This, Sir, is how much approval I give to the China expedition.

  Victor Hugo

  I was impressed by the nobility of spirit in Victor Hugo’s letter. To admit one’s errors, isn’t that a reflection of real courage in a man, or a country? A strength of character that Mao never possessed.

  But the French and the English were not the only ones to attack China’s cultural heritage. As I reflected on Hugo’s account, I thought about the unimaginable acts that were c
ommitted during the Cultural Revolution, acts that resulted in the destruction of entire swaths of China’s history. Without anyone having had the courage to step forward and make amends.

  Hugo, in his text, shows where the real strength of the soul resides. He also alludes to how culture and education must serve as bulwarks against crimes of all sorts. I was powerfully drawn to a country that could produce such writers.

  My mind was made up.

  I wrote to my friend Xiaoqin; she had settled in France after having been granted permission to marry her French boyfriend. She had given up on a career in publishing and was dedicating herself to writing instead. Her husband had gone to work in China, and she was expecting her second child. She would be thrilled to put me up.

  And so it was that, in December 1984, I flew to Paris.

  22

  Starting Over

  I’m used to going astray,

  And every way leads to the goal.

  (Franz Schubert, Winterreise, set to poems by Wilhelm Müller)

  In France, I didn’t know a soul other than Xiaoqin. And, of course, I didn’t speak a word of French. I was staying in her apartment in Issy-les-Moulineaux, yet I didn’t dare go out because I was afraid of getting lost. Thus, for some time, Paris for me was reduced to a few streets in the suburbs.