Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  The Kissins lived the life of the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia: physically uncomfortable, constantly frustrating, the pleasures of the mind partially filling in for ordinary discomforts of the flesh and ideology’s constant intrusions on the spirit. Their assumption was that Zhenya’s sister, Alla, would play piano like her mother, while Zhenya would be an engineer like his father, Igor. At eleven months, Zhenya sang an entire Bach fugue that his sister had been practicing. He began to sing everything he heard. “It was rather embarrassing to take him out in the streets,” Emilia recalled. “As it went on, relentless, nonstop—I became frightened by it.”

  At twenty-six months, Zhenya sat down at the piano and with one finger picked out some of the tunes he had been singing. The next day he did the same, and on the third day he played with both hands, using all his fingers. He would listen to LPs and immediately play back the music. “Chopin’s ballades, he would play with those little hands, and Beethoven sonatas, Liszt’s rhapsodies,” his mother told me. At three, he began improvising. He especially liked to make musical portraits of people. “I would make the rest of the family guess whom I was playing,” he recalled.

  Kantor taught him in the Russian tradition that the imagination and spirit of the performer should be equal to that of the composer. “Anna Pavlovna’s greatest triumph,” Emilia explained, “is that she preserved his gift. She knew how to supplement what was there, never replace it.” When I asked Zhenya how he had managed to avoid the burnout of so many wunderkinder, he said, “Simply this: I was brought up well.” By the time he was seven, Zhenya had begun to write down his compositions. He played as though it were a necessary emancipation. “When I would return from school, I would, without taking my coat off, go to the piano and play,” he said. “I made my mother understand that this was just what I needed.” Zhenya used to make lists for Anna Pavlovna of the things he wanted to learn: “If I was asking for a difficult piece, I would put in brackets, ‘Lenin said that difficult doesn’t mean impossible.’”

  He played his first solo recital in May of 1983, at eleven. “I had such a feeling of relief,” he recalled. “During intermission, I was impatient to return to the stage.” After the concert, the wife of someone high up in the Composers Union congratulated teacher and pupil and promised an invitation to perform. This was a gateway to fame and comfort in the Soviet period of deprivation. Kantor, however, was uneasy. “He is still very young,” she replied. “He shouldn’t be overexposed.” A stranger standing nearby interrupted and identified himself as a doctor. “When I saw in what a state of enthusiasm the boy returned to the stage for his encores, I realized it would be even more dangerous for him to become so overexcited inside, without release,” he said. “He needs to perform.” Zhenya played at the Union’s House of Composers a month later.

  When the preeminent conductor Daniel Barenboim came to Moscow the following January, he heard Zhenya play and arranged an invitation to Carnegie Hall. Musical performance enjoyed a special status among the arts in the Soviet Union because interpretive acts were less ideologically suspect than creative ones. But the government sought to keep its geniuses, so neither Zhenya nor his teacher was told about Carnegie Hall. A few months later, Zhenya played both of Chopin’s piano concertos in Moscow. Afterward, Zhenya’s parents told him that they had a surprise: a visit to a town in the country. Years later he learned that they had arranged the trip because they knew what a sensation the concert would create, and they didn’t want him exposed to so much praise.

  As Zhenya began to tour, he received private tutoring “in the usual subjects of history, literature, mathematics, dialectical materialism, Leninism, military science, and so on.” He had never been very connected to other people his age, and the escape from ordinary schooling was a relief. In 1985, he left the USSR for the first time to play at a gala in East Berlin for leader Erich Honecker. “There were some circus performers, then I played the Schumann/Liszt Widmung and the Chopin E Minor Waltz, and then a magician did tricks,” he recalled. Two years later, with travel restrictions easing under the new policy of glasnost, Zhenya played for the renowned conductor Herbert von Karajan, who pointed at him and said through tears, “Genius.” Unlike many prodigies, he does not mourn his childhood. “Sometimes I regret that the course of my life was set so early,” he told me. “There was never any way to resist it. But even if my career had begun later, music would always have been the only thing that was important to me.” In 1990, at nineteen, he made his Carnegie Hall debut to astonishing reviews; in 1991 the family emigrated to New York. Anna Pavlovna Kantor came with them.

  Zhenya had been described to me before we first met in 1995 as a moonchild—peculiar, closed, incomprehensible—and at that initial encounter, he explained clearly that he had little to say about himself beyond the facts. He has never much liked talking, or journalists, or the attention many celebrities find flattering. He is indifferent to his success, except insofar as it allows him to play more. Zhenya is too tall and too thin, with a strangely large head, enormous brown eyes, pale skin, and a mop of crazy brown hair in which you could mislay something. The overall effect is slightly gangly, and his bearing combines the tense and the beatific. Watching Zhenya sit down at the piano is like seeing a lamp plugged in: decorative though it may have seemed, only then does its real use become apparent. You feel less that he is pouring energy into the instrument than that he is receiving energy from it. “I don’t know if I would be able to live if I suddenly became unable to play,” he said. Zhenya plays as though it were a moral act that could redeem the world.

  Throughout the nineties, Zhenya was always accompanied on tour by his mother and Kantor. The dynamic between the two women was both intimate and respectful; neither would critique Zhenya’s performance without consulting the other. Upon arriving in any new venue, Zhenya would run through his program. Kantor would sit still to assess the performance, while Emilia would wander the hall to check acoustics. Zhenya was never given leeway to become arrogant. “They didn’t want me seeing myself as a great prodigy,” he said. “But when I deserved it, they always praised me, too.” While his father and sister disappeared to the shadows, Zhenya stayed with his mother and piano teacher; one critic referred to them as a “three-headed beast.”

  If Zhenya plays the piano with the fluidity with which I talk, he talks with the awkwardness with which I play the piano. His profound intelligence and complex thoughts are indicated but not expressed by conversation. Zhenya has a slight speech impediment, a lingering on explosive consonants that burst forth like popping balloons. His utterances are saturated with pauses; nothing organic leads from one word to the next. When he was little, Kantor would explain something, then, when he didn’t respond, would explain again, more elaborately. Finally she would say, “Have you understood?” Zhenya would say, “Yes, I understood a long time ago.” It had not occurred to him to say so. When he was in his twenties, the concertmaster of an orchestra with which he was to perform noticed his practicing during the break and commented that she could not work without an occasional rest. Zhenya said, “That is why you are not a soloist.” He is solicitous to a fault, but this ingenuous frankness pervades his communication; the critic Anne Midgette wrote in the Washington Post, “The performance was so compelling precisely because of the awkward poignancy that accompanied the technical mastery.”

  I had been toying with the idea of music as a first language for some time before I put it to Zhenya one day about a year after we met. We were sitting in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Our meeting had been impromptu; I wanted to know something about the structure of a Rachmaninoff cadenza. “This one?” asked Zhenya, and played six bars. On the tape of our meeting, the emotional transition is more surprising than the shift from speech to music: the notes contain all the feeling absent from the words. I thought of a fish that flips around on the deck of a boat, then slips back into pure grace in the water. A yearning to be understood—the primary beauty of Zhenya’s playing—distinguishes
this from technical facility. Though he was playing only to indicate passages to which I had alluded, I felt for the first time that we were in full conversation; it was as intimate as a confidence or an embrace.

  Zhenya told me, “Music conveys what I feel; I don’t know how to convey through speech at all. I don’t like to speak about the music, either: it speaks for itself.” Music makes sense of the world for him, which is why it seems to make sense of the world for his audiences.

  More than a decade after our first meeting, I asked him whether he had fully realized his own insights; Zhenya said simply, “Not yet.” Later he added, “When I played as a child, it was simply that I loved music and was just playing the way I felt it. The better and the clearer my ideas become, the more I realize how difficult it is for me to achieve them. In the past I have been tempted to take up conducting, but now I don’t want to, exactly because I realize how difficult it is to play the piano. That’s why now I am more nervous before my concerts than I used to be.” This is as fair a description as I’ve heard of how a prodigy grows up.

  • • •

  For Zhenya Kissin, music is the repository of intimacy; others deploy it to express what circumstances or temperament forbid them to utter. The pianist Yefim Bronfman, called Fima, a prototype for explosive genius, was born in Tashkent in 1958. His father, Naum Bronfman, had been drafted into the Soviet army and taken prisoner by the Germans; he escaped and managed to walk six hundred miles back to Moscow, where he was imprisoned and tortured by Stalin. Fima’s mother, Polina, had been a Nazi prisoner in Poland. Naum was a violinist who taught in the Tashkent conservatory; Polina was a pianist who taught pupils at home. “We always suspected that somebody was listening to our conversations,” Fima told me. “So the only way you could express yourself was through the music. That’s what made us work so hard at it.” Music became a realm of liberty, a medium in which it was possible for the Bronfmans to articulate everything they couldn’t say in a bugged apartment. Part of the beauty of Fima’s mature performance is that lingering urgency. If some musicians converse in music because their brains are not strongly wired for spoken language, Fima—who has never married and, like Zhenya Kissin, lives with his mother—remains in those original suppressed conversations and produces music with the exigency of having been denied speech for the most important of his early dialogues. Russian music of the twentieth century consistently exploited the expressive merits of ambiguity, of being able to say things that a bureaucrat cannot pin down and label subversive. Music can liberate people immured in almost any kind of silence.

  • • •

  The origin of genius has been a topic of philosophical debate for at least twenty-five hundred years. Plato believed that genius was bestowed by the gods upon passive human beings. Longinus proposed that it was something a person does—that the genius does not receive divinity, but creates it. John Locke (who, tellingly, had no children) thought that parents could engender genius; he said, “I imagine the minds of children as easily turn’d this or that way, as water itself.” This idea from the Age of Reason, the period in which genius took on its current meaning, gave way to a Romantic image of ingenuity swathed in mystery. Immanuel Kant said, “If an author owes a product to his genius, he himself does not know how he came by the ideas for it.” Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.”

  In 1869, Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius announced that genius could not be achieved by anyone not born to it. Lewis M. Terman, a eugenicist and follower of Galton’s, developed the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, which measured IQ, to categorize army recruits during World War I; after the armistice, he pressed to have it used on preschool-age children as a predictor of academic success. Because such quantifiable intelligence tests have built-in biases, measurements of low IQ appeared to demonstrate the inferiority of “undesirable” groups.

  The question of how high IQ correlates to genius has been in debate ever since the tests were introduced. Terman followed a group of about fifteen hundred children with very high IQs; seventy years later, his critics claimed, they had accomplished no more than their socioeconomic status would have predicted. One child Terman had excluded as not bright enough, William Shockley, had coinvented the transistor and won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Psychometrics were nonetheless championed by the eugenicists. Paul Popenoe, who advocated forced sterilization of the “inferior,” asserted that “no son of an unskilled laborer has ever become an eminent man of science in the United States.” Hitler was well versed in the work and ideas of Galton and Popenoe; indeed, Popenoe enthusiastically collaborated with his Nazi counterparts, and defended them until it was no longer advantageous to do so. The Holocaust had a dampening effect on the notion of inherent supremacy, and in 1944, the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber suggested that genius was contextual. Why did fifth-century Athens, or the Italian Renaissance, or the Song Dynasty produce clusters of genius? Shouldn’t it have a fixed population frequency?

  If genius springs from genetics, a meritocracy is hardly more just than the divine right of kings; it, too, mythologizes inherent superiority. If genius results from labor, then brilliant people deserve the kudos and wealth they reap. The communist perspective is that everyone can be a genius if he will only work at it; the fascist perspective is that born geniuses are a different species from the rest of humanity. Many people fall short of their potential through lack of discipline, but a visit to a coal mine will amply demonstrate that hard work on its own neither constitutes genius nor guarantees riches. The history of high intelligence is no less political than the history of intellectual disability or of mental illness.

  • • •

  Leon Fleisher was born in 1928 in San Francisco, where his immigrant father had become a milliner who made hats for Lucille Ball. Leon’s brother was the reluctant recipient of piano lessons, and Leon used to listen. “When my brother went out to play ball, I would go to the piano and play as the teacher wanted,” Leon recalled. His parents soon switched the lessons to Leon, and before long he was studying with a Russian named Lev Schorr, “who was the San Francisco prodigy-maker. He felt it wasn’t a good lesson until he made me cry. But he would take me out to lunch afterwards and feed me lamb chops.”

  In 1937, the conductor of the San Francisco symphony heard one of Leon’s first recitals and decided that the boy should study in Italy with the renowned pianist Artur Schnabel. Schnabel politely declined; he was not interested in nine-year-old pupils. A few months later, the conductor invited Schnabel to dinner, snuck Leon in, and obliged Schnabel to listen. Schnabel immediately took Leon as a student, on the condition that he give no further concerts; Schnabel understood that Leon’s mother wanted merely fame, and that he had to keep the boy focused on music. Leon and his mother went to Como in 1938. Schnabel’s lessons were different from anything Leon had known. “The prodigy-makers separate technique and music,” Leon said. “Schnabel maintained that technique is the ability to do what you want. He advocated sitting in a comfortable chair and studying the music before you started to play—not drumming it out before you’d thought how you’d like it to sound.” Schnabel never had more than a half dozen students, and he made each attend the others’ lessons. “He would do a whole lesson on twelve bars, and we would stagger out like inebriates,” Leon recalled, “filled not just with information, but with inspiration. Schnabel dealt in transcendence.”

  At the brink of World War II, Italy was hardly the place for a Jewish pupil to study with a Jewish pianist, and before long Schnabel sent Leon back home. Schnabel emigrated to New York soon thereafter, so Leon’s father had to take a job in an East Coast factory. “That became a heavy responsibility for a kid to carry around,” Leon said. But his mother was singularly determined. “She gave me a choice between being the first Jewish president or a great pianist,” he added ruefully.

  Leon Fleisher made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1944 at sixteen and quickly established himself. His c
areer rise was meteoric, and three years later, Schnabel told him that his studies were over. “I was desolate when he dismissed me,” Leon said. “Then, I remember hearing on the radio one of his Beethoven sonata recordings, and reveling in how extraordinarily beautiful it was. But I wasn’t sure that I would have done it quite that way.”

  Leon had a twenty-year blaze of glory before he was struck, at thirty-six, with focal dystonia, a neurological condition that causes involuntary muscle contractions, which made it impossible for him to use the third and fourth fingers of his right hand. Focal dystonia is associated with relentless repetition of fine-motor-skill patterns despite the onset of pain. Leon’s son, the jazz musician Julian Fleisher, explained, “He used his right hand relentlessly because his mother told him to; he used it until it broke.” Leon went through a depression; his marriage fell apart. “It took a couple of years of despair before I realized that my connection was to music, not to being a two-handed piano player,” he said. He reinvented himself as a conductor, a teacher, and a performer of the limited but pyrotechnic left-hand piano repertoire.

  Leon’s maturity is highly self-aware. “You can either perform a piece as though you’re in the midst of what’s happening, or as a narrator,” he said. “You know, ‘Once upon a time, there was . . .’ That can be more expressive. It frees the listener’s imagination. It doesn’t dictate, ‘This is what I feel, therefore you should feel this.’ A prodigy can’t do that, but a fully developed performer can.” He described brilliant young students as being like people who want to build a house around a decorative object. “I teach them, ‘The bedroom goes here, the kitchen, there, and the living room, there. You have to have that before you fill it with beautiful things. First is the structure.’” His son wryly pointed out that this tremendously nuanced way of thinking does not extend to human relations: “It’s not a question of being nice, but of noticing the minds of the people he loves. But then in the music, it’s all there.”