Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  I wondered whether Leon’s dystonia had brought any rewards. “This forced me, and so enabled me, to go sideways, to expand my field of—what is the companion word to vision: aurision? Were I given the chance to relive it and not come down with focal dystonia, I’m not sure I would change anything.” The dystonia proved what he had learned from Schnabel: that musicianship requires modesty. “Schnabel likened the performer to the Alpine mountain guide,” Leon said. “His aim is to lead you to the top of the mountain so that you can enjoy the view. He isn’t the goal. The view is.”

  When Leon was in his mid-seventies, Botox relaxed the permanently cramped muscles of his hand, and Rolfing further eased the movement of his soft tissue. He began to perform with both hands again, and his subsequent recordings earned him high honors. “The technique isn’t what it was, and what’s left is the musicality,” Julian said. “He almost doesn’t play notes; he plays the meaning in them.” Leon said, “I am in no way cured. When I play, a good eighty to ninety percent of my concentration and awareness is how to deal with my hand. I’ve worn away the cartilage between my joints, so bone is rubbing on bone in my fingers, and it’s a little bit like ‘The Little Mermaid.’ She fell in love with a man, and her wish was granted: she became a human. The price was that every step she took was like walking on knives. That’s a fairy tale I remember very, very clearly.”

  • • •

  Musical prodigies are sometimes compared to child actors, but child actors portray children; no one pays to watch a six-year-old playing Hamlet. No discipline has ever been permanently transformed by a child’s revelations. Leon Botstein said, “Prodigies confirm conventional wisdom; they never change it.” Musical performance can quickly be integrated because it is rule-driven, structured, and formal; profundity comes later. Mozart was the archetypal prodigy, but if he hadn’t lived past twenty-five, we’d know nothing of him as a composer. After the English lawyer Daines Barrington examined the eight-year-old Mozart in 1764, he wrote, “He had a thorough knowledge of the fundamental principles of composition. He was also a master of modulation, and his transitions from one key to another were excessively natural and judicious.” Yet, Mozart was also clearly a child. “Whilst he was playing to me, a favourite cat came in, upon which he immediately left his harpsichord, nor could we bring him back for a considerable time. He would also sometimes run about the room with a stick between his legs by way of horse.” Every prodigy is a chimera of such mastery and childishness, and the contrast between musical sophistication and personal immaturity can be striking. One prodigy whom I interviewed had switched from the violin to the piano when she was seven. She offered to tell me why if I didn’t tell her mother. “I wanted to sit down,” she said.

  Most people who receive rigorous early training do not become singular musicians. Juilliard’s Veda Kaplinsky, who is perhaps the world’s most highly esteemed piano teacher for younger students, explained, “Until the child reaches eighteen or nineteen, you don’t know if he’ll have the emotional capacity for expression.” A mature childhood can be a recipe for an immature adulthood—a principle most publicly borne out by Michael Jackson. A Japanese proverb says that the ten-year-old prodigy becomes a talented fifteen-year-old on the way to mediocrity at twenty.

  The sprinter unwisely indulges his arrogance against the marathon runner, and likewise, parents who encourage their children’s narcissism do them no favors. It is best to accomplish something before becoming famous, because if the fame comes first, it often precludes accomplishment. The manager Charles Hamlen, who has nurtured the careers of many stellar musicians, wearily described the parents who want their children to make Carnegie Hall debuts at twelve. “You don’t build a career by playing Carnegie Hall,” he said. “You build a career, and then Carnegie Hall will invite you to play.”

  Schnabel saw Leon Fleisher as a child with remarkable skills rather than a set of skills inconveniently attached to a child, but many parents lack the sophistication to make such a distinction. Karen Monroe, a psychiatrist who works with prodigious children, said, “When you have a child whose gift is so overshadowing, it is easy for parents to be distracted and lose track of the child himself.” Van Cliburn was among the preeminent prodigies of the twentieth century, although he was not catapulted to fame until he was twenty-three, when he won the Tchaikovsky piano competition at the height of the Cold War and was welcomed home with a ticker-tape parade. His mother was his piano teacher, and when she was teaching him, she would say, “You know I’m not your mother now.” Of his childhood, Cliburn said, “There were other things I would like to have done besides practicing the piano, but I knew my mother was right about what I should do.” Cliburn lived with his mother all her life. But he largely forsook his career after the death of his father, who was also his manager, because he could not bear the pressure, and he suffered from depression and alcoholism, becoming a revered fixture of Fort Worth society—kind, affable, piously reactionary, and the figurehead of an eponymous competition that has become as prestigious as the one that he won.

  In 1945, there were five piano competitions worldwide; there are now seven hundred fifty. Robert Levin, professor of music at Harvard, said, “The favored repertoire is music of such technical challenges that, as recently as thirty years ago, less than one percent of pianists were playing it. Now, about eighty percent are. It isn’t an improvement. It reflects a purely gladiatorial, physical behavior. You should not tell a young student to learn the notes and then add the expression. You might as well tell a chef, ‘First you cook the food, then you add the flavor.’”

  • • •

  Sue and Joe Peterson always put their son Drew’s personal needs before his talent, but the two often seemed to coincide. Drew didn’t speak until he was three and a half, but Sue never believed he was slow. When he was eighteen months old, she was reading to him and skipped a word, whereupon Drew reached over and pointed to the missing word on the page. Drew didn’t produce much sound at that stage, but he already cared about it deeply. “Church bells would elicit a big response,” Sue said. “Birdsong would stop him in his tracks.”

  Sue, who had learned piano as a child, taught Drew the basics on an old upright, and he became fascinated by sheet music. “He needed to decode it,” Sue said. “So I had to recall what little I remembered, which was the treble clef.” Drew said, “It was like learning thirteen letters of the alphabet and then trying to read books.” He figured out the bass clef on his own, and when he began formal lessons at five, his teacher said he could skip the first six months’ worth of material. Within the year, Drew was performing Beethoven sonatas at the recital hall at Carnegie Hall and was flown to Italy to perform in a youth festival where the other youths were a decade older than he. Sue said, “I thought it was delightful, but I also thought we shouldn’t take it too seriously. He was just a little boy.”

  The family had some differences with Drew’s teacher, and Sue was advised to seek out a teacher named Miyoko Lotto, who warned that she didn’t have time to teach Drew, but would listen to him play and then refer him to someone else. When he finished playing, Lotto said, “I have time Tuesdays at four.” Years later, she recalled, “He could barely reach the pedals, but he played with every adult nuance you’d ever want. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this really is a genius. He’s not mimicking and not being spoon-fed. His musicality comes from within.’”

  Her enthusiasm was not entirely welcome. Sue said, “It was so extreme, and it gave me the creeps.” Joe said, “It just sounded ridiculous.” Sue could not take Drew into Manhattan every week, but she enrolled him with a teacher in New Jersey whom Lotto recommended. Lotto e-mailed Sue every couple of weeks to ask how things were going. Every few months, she’d invite Drew to play for her. “It felt very casual, but in retrospect, it was regimented and purposeful,” Sue said.

  On his way to kindergarten one day, Drew asked his mother, “Can I just stay home so I can learn something?” Sue was at a loss. “He was reading textbooks this big,
and they’re in class holding up a blowup M,” she said. Drew said, “At first, it felt lonely. Then you accept that, yes, you’re different from everyone else, but people will be your friends anyway.” Drew’s parents moved him to a Montessori school, then to a private school. They bought him a new piano because he had announced, at seven, that their upright lacked dynamic contrast. “It cost more money than we’d ever paid for anything except a down payment on a house,” Sue said. By junior high, he was performing frequently and had taken up competitive swimming with a team that practiced nine hours a week. When Drew was fourteen, Sue found a homeschool program created by Harvard; when I met Drew, he was sixteen and halfway to a Harvard bachelor’s degree.

  Spending time with the Petersons, I was struck not only by their mutual devotion, but also by the easy way they avoided the snobberies that tend to cling to classical music. Sue is a school nurse; Joe works in the engineering department of Volkswagen. They never expected the life into which Drew has led them, but they were neither intimidated by it nor brash in pursuing it; it remained both a diligence and an art. Joe said, “How do you describe a normal family? The only way I can describe a normal one is a happy one. What my kids do brings a lot of joy into this household.” When I asked how Drew’s talent had affected their parenting of his younger brother, Sue said, “It’s distracting and different. It would be similar if Eric’s brother had a disability or a wooden leg.”

  The gravitational pull of music is inexorable for Drew. He said, “I thought at Harvard I would find some subject that I was really interested in, maybe even more than music. I haven’t, and I’m not sure I really want to.” Since Lotto was at the Manhattan School of Music, Drew has pursued his musical education there. “He said, ‘I don’t want management and publicity now; I don’t want a childhood in music; I want a life in music,’” Sue recalled. She had fielded invitations to put him on Oprah. “He was seven,” Sue recalled, “and he said, ‘I’m not a circus act.’” At sixteen, Drew still didn’t want management. “You have to be able to fight back,” he explained.

  I asked Drew how he could express so much through music after so little life experience, and he said, “I can only express it through music, not through words. Maybe I can only experience it through music, too.” We assume that certain intimacies are apportioned to speech, others to sex, others to sports—but why shouldn’t music be the locus of intimacy, and speech the locus of formality? A year after I met him, Drew was selected for a master class with the Chinese pianist Lang Lang, then twenty-eight, and I went to watch them interact. Lang Lang, for whom speech is easy, coached six students. He said the least to Drew, and Drew the least to him, yet Drew’s playing changed to incorporate Lang Lang’s insights with a fluency none of the others could muster.

  Sue said, “His talent is a magnifying glass on what I need to do. To be honest, I have no way to know what I’m doing right or wrong except to ask him.” Drew said to her, “You’re always questioning. As much as I am a nonconformist, you’re a questioner.” She said, “Fortunately, your answers are very convincing.”

  • • •

  Musical talent can be divided into three components: the athletic, the mimetic, and the interpretive. It takes physical prowess to move your hands or lips with the precision most instruments require. To be a musician, the person has to have a mimetic capacity to reproduce others’ techniques. “That should not be dismissed as simply replication,” said Justin Davidson, music critic for New York magazine. “That’s how we learn to speak, to write, to express ourselves. Musicians who have a tremendous gift for mimicry can produce very refined interpretations at a very young age. Are they producing those because they’ve learned them from a teacher, from a recording, or from hearing other pianists, or because it comes to them internally? Everybody does both.” Robert Levin said, “It’s hard to convey a message if you haven’t learned how to pronounce the words. People who have amazing minds, but neglect their technical skills, will fail just as surely as people who are perfect at what they do but have no message. You have to take these apparently incompatible elements and make a vinaigrette of discipline and experience.” As Pierre-Auguste Renoir said, craftsmanship has never stood in the way of genius.

  Musical performance, like Sign, requires that manual dexterity become the seat of emotional and intellectual meaning. Sometimes that meaning is there from the beginning, as with Drew Peterson. Sometimes it comes later. The cellist and pedagogue Steven Isserlis complained to me that music is too often taught as a competitive sport. “It should be taught like a mixture of religion and science,” he said. “Being able to move your fingers very fast is very impressive, but has nothing to do with music. Music does something to you; you don’t do something to music.”

  • • •

  Mikhail and Natalie Paremski held comfortable positions within the Soviet system: Mikhail with the Russian Atomic Agency, Natalie with the Physics Engineering Institute. Their daughter, Natasha, born in 1987, showed a precocious interest in the piano; her younger brother, Misha, did not. “I was in the kitchen, and I thought, ‘Who is playing?’” Natalie recalled. “Then I saw, ‘It’s the baby, picking out nursery songs.’ My husband said music was a terrible life; he begged me not to give her lessons.” But Natalie thought a few lessons could do no harm. Six months later, Natasha played a Chopin mazurka in a children’s concert. “She decided, ‘I’m going to be a pianist,’ at four years old,” Natalie said. Natasha was always first in her class at school. “We didn’t worry about music, because she was so good in math, physics, chemistry. She could have easily done something else if she ran out of talent for this.”

  When the Soviet Union collapsed, people with Soviet-era privilege were figures of considerable suspicion. In 1993, Mikhail was brutally beaten on his way home from work late one night. The doctors told Natalie that night, “Prepare to be a widow.” A corporate recruiter had been pestering Mikhail for years to work in the United States, but the Paremskis didn’t want to leave Russia. After the attack, Natalie changed her mind. “Three days later, I take the paperwork to the hospital. Mikhail’s hand, I move it myself to make his signature. When he woke up from his almost coma, I tell him, ‘You’re going to California.’”

  Mikhail went ahead; the family followed in 1995. Natasha entered fourth grade, where everyone else was two years older than she. Within a few months, she was speaking English without an accent and coming first on every school test. The family couldn’t afford a good piano; they finally found a cheap one that “sounded like cabbage,” Natasha recalled. Natalie persuaded the school to let Natasha do independent study so she could perform. “Everyone would say, ‘You must be so proud of your daughter,’” Natalie said. “I used to say that it’s not for me to be proud, it’s Natasha who does this herself—but I learned that this is not the polite American way. So now I always say, ‘I am so proud of my daughter,’ and then maybe we can have a conversation.” Natasha agreed that her own impulse drove her success. “What did they do to make me practice?” she asked. “What did they do to make me eat or sleep?”

  At thirteen, Natasha was in a competition in Italy, and one of the judges saw that she was going to play Prokofiev’s six sonatas. He said, “You can’t play this piece, because it’s about prison, and you didn’t go to prison.” Natasha was indignant. “I’m not going to prison to improve my playing,” she said. Natasha sees nothing strange in a musician’s ability to express emotions she has not experienced. “Had I experienced them, that wouldn’t necessarily help me to express them better in my music. I’m an actress, not a character; my job is to represent something, not to live it. Chopin wrote a mazurka, person X in the audience wants to hear the mazurka, and so I have to decipher the score and make it apprehensible to person X, and it’s really hard to do. But it has nothing to do with my life experience. We need to keep populating the world with sound. If you eliminated one thing—if you deprived the world of, say, Brahms’s Second Concerto—there would be something wrong. This world, with
that Brahms in it, is my world—and some of what makes up that world comes through me.”

  Natasha graduated with top honors from high school at fourteen and was offered a full scholarship by Mannes College for Music, in New York. She signed with management, moved East, and began fulltime study there. She lived with a host family in New York City during the week and spent weekends with her manager in the suburbs. Her mother worried about the deficit of soul in New York. “There is no time for vision! People are just struggling to survive, like in Moscow,” Natalie said—to which her daughter replied, “Vision is how I survive.” In those early New York days, Natasha and her mother spoke by phone constantly. Nonetheless, Natalie said, “That was my present to her: I gave her her own life.”

  I met Natasha when she was fifteen, and I first interviewed her when she was sixteen. A year later, in 2004, I went to her Carnegie Hall debut, for which she played Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2. She’s a beautiful young woman, with cascades of hair and a sylphlike figure, and she wore a sleeveless, black velvet dress, so her arms would feel free, and a pair of insanely high heels that she said gave her better leverage on the pedals. Her playing was as virile as her clothing was feminine, and the audience gave her an ovation. Her parents were not there. “They’re too supportive to come,” Natasha told me just before the concert. Natalie explained, “If I am there, I am so worried about every single note that I can’t even sit still. It’s not helpful to Natasha.”