Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  Lorin’s personal life became confused. “I don’t know whether you call it a sexual addiction. But I was not sexually faithful in my marriages. There’s no excuse. It’s just stupidity. There was nobody to speak to about the yearnings and thirsts and needs,” he said. “The giftedness comes equipped with this hell. No one tells you this. The music starts racing faster and faster and faster, and you can’t hold on to it. I’d hide after performances. I’d leave stages at the end of a concert with the audience standing and cheering. I’d go out a back door to drown in my shame.” Lorin has worked with the parents of gifted children, warning them of the dangers. “It is not possible to understand the highly gifted by extending our understanding of the average,” he said. “From understanding the highly gifted, we can go back down, but not vice versa.” In other words, Tolstoy can teach us to understand a farmworker, but farmworkers cannot in general give us insight into the metaphoric complexities of Anna Karenina.

  • • •

  Cruel parental control is hardly a recent invention. Mozart’s childhood mantra was “Next to God comes Papa.” Paganini said of his father, “If he didn’t think I was industrious enough, he compelled me to redouble my efforts by making me go without food.” In the early nineteenth century, Clara Wieck’s diary was examined every day by her father, who also wrote large sections of it, some in his own hand, some that he made her copy out, as he trained her to become one of the Romantic era’s singular pianists. “He persisted in using the first person throughout, as though Clara were writing,” according to her biographer. “He seemed to be taking over her personality.” When he realized she was in love with the composer Robert Schumann, he said, “You will have to leave one, him or me.” She married Schumann, and her father refused to hand over the diaries.

  • • •

  In the absence of adequate hotels in Cleveland in the 1960s and ’70s, the renowned Cleveland Orchestra put up visiting artists at the homes of board members, and Scott Frankel’s parents opened their house to Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, and Vladimir Ashkenazy. By five, Scott was taking piano lessons; he had perfect pitch and soon was able to improvise on any tune. “My mother used to write jingles and had plans for me to succeed in a larger way in the field,” he said. “My father’s work tapped neither his interest nor his aesthetic ability. So he was very attuned to how terrific it would be if I did something that interested me.”

  Scott’s first piano teacher knew that Scott had a remarkable talent; Scott knew, too. “There’s something palpable when your abilities fill you with a divine sense of fate,” he said. “It instantly separates, even alienates, you from your schoolmates.” Playing for his parents, “I began to think they liked me for what I could do, perhaps to the exclusion of who I was. The pressure made music an unsafe area. My partner and I had people over for lunch recently, and one asked me to play and I said, ‘No,’ and I sounded really rude, and I felt that rage again. I can’t shake it.”

  Scott believes that his mother’s need for control extended beyond his playing. “She wanted to be in charge of where I was going to go to school, who my friends were going to be, what career I was going to have, whom I was going to marry, what I was going to wear, and what I was going to say. When I started to veer from her notions, it enraged her. She was mercurial, carnivorous, and boundary-disrespecting and thought of me as an extension of herself. My father was unable, or unwilling, or both, to protect me from her.”

  Scott began to study at the Cleveland Institute of Music with a Russian piano teacher who disdained the Midwest. “We had these long, ferocious lessons,” he said. “If something was bad, her ultimate insult was to say it sounded Spanish. She’d say, ‘The way you’re playing the Bach—why does it sound so Spanish?’ But the Cleveland Orchestra had a concerto competition, and I entered and won. She couldn’t believe it.” The prize entailed a debut with the symphony; before long, Scott was off to Yale, where he discovered his calling—composing musicals.

  When he told his parents he was gay, they were livid. “I resented the parochial affection,” he said. “You get the whole package. You can’t pick the shiny bits from the other bits.” In his twenties, Scott became so angry at his parents that he stopped writing music. “Their interest made me want to eat the baby,” he said, “to deprive them of something to pimp and market for their own purposes. Of course, it had the side effect of shooting myself, career-wise and ethos-wise, in the foot. I was completely unmoored, and nothing made sense anymore. All I had was drugs, sex, and therapy.” Scott went ten years without touching a piano. “Yet music kept encroaching. I would be near a piano and feel emotions I couldn’t shut out.” Finally, Scott began composing the musicals that propelled him to Broadway.

  He described how inspiration comes fast when he finds the right lyrics, and I said it sounded like a joyful process. “The music has a topography of incredible highs and lows. But my writing in general is pain-based,” Scott said. “The varnished colors of regret and despair and hopelessness come out of my life experience.” He showed me a picture on his iPhone of himself at five, wreathed in smiles. “This is exhibit A.” Then he gave me a list of the antidepressant medications he was taking. “Exhibit B. That smiling little boy, I think he’s my natural, essential nature, and if he’d been allowed to grow up without being damaged, I’d be writing happy-go-lucky music instead of Sturm und Drang music.” He shook his head and I heard more sadness than anger in his protest. “The tunes might have been just as good,” he said.

  • • •

  The violinist Vanessa-Mae’s mother controlled every aspect of her life: her bank accounts, her clothes, and the sexually provocative photo shoot for the cover of the album she released at seventeen. Vanessa-Mae was never allowed to slice bread lest she cut her hand; she was not allowed to have friends, lest they distract her. Her mother said, “I love you because you are my daughter, but you’ll never be special to me unless you play the violin.” Vanessa-Mae chose a new manager when she was twenty-one, “desperately hoping for a normal mother/daughter relationship.” She wanted companionship instead of supervision. Her mother has not spoken to her since; when a BBC film crew asked to interview Vanessa-Mae’s mother, she wrote, “My daughter is nearly 30. That part of my life is well and truly over.” Vanessa-Mae has been wildly successful, with a personal fortune estimated at $60 million, but she said, “I felt older at twelve than I do now.” She explained, “I carry the e-mail she sent to the BBC around with me, and if I ever have any pangs about what our relationship might have been like, I read that and realize it is never going to be.”

  • • •

  Nicolas Hodges was born into music. His mother, an opera singer who performed at Covent Garden, gave up her career to have a family. Nic began piano lessons at six and had by nine started an opera on the theme of Perseus. At sixteen, he told his parents that he had decided to be a composer, not a pianist. “It was like I’d stabbed them,” Nic said. “What I had thought was all for and because of me was actually all for and because of her. It became shockingly clear that my mother didn’t care what I wanted at all.”

  As Nic got older and his relationship with music deepened, he realized that he could not keep up his skill as both a composer and a pianist, and playing paid better. He wanted “to focus on who I already was and become not less of that, but more.” His mother was delighted. “So I wrote her a letter saying I never wanted to speak to her again, and I had no contact for a year.” Today, he plays mostly contemporary repertoire, which his mother dislikes. Even twenty-five years later, he said, “It’s almost like an infidelity, and the partner never manages to forget the loss of trust. When I play nineteenth-century music, she says, ‘Oh, oh, that’s good! Oh, you do like that! Oh, you do!’ When I put on a CD of Chopin when she was at my flat once, she said, ‘Oh, so you still like Chopin?’ It was like, ‘Oh, you like boys, but you still like girls, too?’ She was hoping that I would do something that pointed to her, that fed her.”

  Nic’s eventual
decision to return to performing contains a strange mix of defiance and acquiescence. “I went back to what she originally wanted, but by then, it was my choice to do that,” he explained. “Having disappointed her so much and so suddenly when I was sixteen made it much easier for me to find what I really wanted to do.”

  • • •

  Developing a life in music takes tremendous will. When the pianist Rudolf Serkin was director of the Curtis Institute of Music, perhaps the most prestigious music school in the world, a student said to him, “I’ve been trying to decide whether I can be a pianist or whether I should go premed.” Serkin said, “I’d advise you to become a doctor.” The boy said, “But you haven’t heard me play yet.” Serkin said, “If you’re asking the question, you’re not going to make it as a pianist.” But questioning the decision to be a musician can be pressingly important. Even as enduring a genius as the cellist Yo-Yo Ma considered other careers after his prodigious youth. “It seemed as if the course of my life had been predetermined and I very much wanted to be allowed a choice,” he wrote. He has expressed gratitude that his parents understood “that an early physical facility has to be combined with a mature emotional development before a healthy musical voice emerges.” The singer Thérèse Mahler, a descendant of the composer Gustav Mahler, is likewise grateful she wasn’t pushed into music. “I might have accomplished more if I had been,” she said to me. “But I might not have discovered how much I need music. Because I was never pushed, I know it’s my choice.”

  Deciding not to develop a life in music after a prodigious beginning also takes will. Veda Kaplinsky said, “By the time they become adults, it’s very difficult for them to differentiate the profession from themselves. They can’t imagine themselves doing anything else, even if they really don’t want to be musicians.” Some wonderful musicians simply do not want the performer’s life. As the piano prodigy Hoang Pham told me, “When you’re young, you see success, but you can’t really touch it. As you grow older, you swim a little closer to the thing that you want to touch, and you realize it’s actually not quite what it seemed. There’s trouble at sea, and everything is a little rougher than it looked, and the thing that you thought was so beautiful in the distance is actually quite jagged and a little fallen apart. But you’ve already swum so far by that time that you just keep going.”

  • • •

  Ken Noda’s mother, Takayo Noda, saw an ad for piano lessons in the Village Voice and enrolled Ken when he was five. Within two years, his teacher suggested that he audition for Juilliard’s precollege division. Takayo had wanted to be a dancer, but she came from a prominent political family in Tokyo, and her father had forbidden it. She wanted to give her son the artistic opportunity she had been denied. “Suddenly my mother was sitting next to me, watching me practice, making sure I did two hours, punishing me when I made mistakes,” Ken recalled. “I loved music, but I started to actually loathe the piano. It’s a very recalcitrant, difficult instrument that doesn’t vibrate; it’s like a typewriter, basically.”

  As his parents’ marriage disintegrated, his practice sessions became more grueling. “Violent yelling,” Ken said. “It was nightmarish. You should have to pass a bar exam to qualify as a parent for talented children. I tried desperately to believe she was not the prototype of a stage mother, because she always used to tell everyone else she wasn’t, but she was. She was very, very loving when I did well, and when I didn’t do well, she was horrific.” Meanwhile, Ken’s father effectively abandoned him. “He often expressed contempt for what I was doing. It wasn’t really for me; it was contempt for her. Since I didn’t have time for friends, and since I needed someone to love me, I kept working so she’d love me, at least sometimes. You see, I was born with two umbilical cords: the physical one that everyone is born with, and another that was made of music.”

  What Ken refers to as his “first career” began when he was sixteen. After an auspicious 1979 debut concert, with Barenboim conducting, he was signed by Columbia Artists Management. Barenboim said to Takayo, “There’s so much emotion, and so much going on inside him, but physically, he’s so tense, so almost contorted when he plays, and I’m afraid he’s going to hurt himself.” Ken became Barenboim’s pupil. Technical proficiency was hard for him, but he played with poignant insight. “I was an old soul,” he said. Even an old soul needs some dalliance with youth, however. “Starting young, being groomed, being put on a certain track, meeting very powerful, important people who nine times out of ten see you in the image they want to make you, it’s intoxicating, frightening, and ultimately can kill you,” Ken said. When he was eighteen, Takayo left his father for an Italian painter. “That’s when suddenly everything clicked, and I realized she herself was trapped, and that I had become her outlet.”

  At twenty-one he came out of the closet, which was necessary for both his mental health and his music. “Young people like romance stories and war stories and good-and-evil stories and old movies because their emotional life mostly is and should be fantasy, and they put that fantasized emotion into their playing, and it is very convincing. But as you grow older, fantasy emotion loses its freshness,” he said. “For some time, I was able to draw on this fantasy life of what loss would mean, what a failed romance would mean, what death might mean, what sexual ecstasy might mean. I had an amazing capacity for imagining these feelings, and that’s part of what talent is. But it dries up, in everyone. That’s why so many prodigies have midlife crises in their late teens or early twenties. If our imagination is not replenished with experience, the ability to reproduce these feelings in one’s playing gradually diminishes.”

  Ken had a run of concerts with formidable conductors; management had him scheduled years in advance. When he was twenty-seven, he had a crisis that brought him to the brink of suicide. “I was suffocating. My playing began to be careful, a little bit anal-retentive. I never miss notes; I’ve always been a very clean player, but the cleanness became almost hypochondriacal. I felt unable to express anything.” He walked into the office of the head of Columbia Artists Management and announced that he was quitting. His manager said, “But you have concerts booked for the next five years.” Ken said, “I want to cancel my whole life.” Fifteen years later, he told me, “It was the single most thrilling experience I’ve ever had.”

  Ken had saved enough money to live comfortably for some time without working. “So I just walked around New York for a year. I sat in parks; I went to museums; I went to libraries—all these things I had never been able to do. People would ask, ‘Where are you playing next?’ and I’d say, ‘Nowhere.’ That was the best year of my life because my identity and self-worth had absolutely nothing to do with my talent.”

  Then James Levine, artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera, offered Ken a job as his deputy, and Ken’s second life in music began. Ken coaches the singers; while Levine is somewhat socially disconnected, Ken’s sparkle and warmth draw out the performers. “The musical life I’m having now is a dream,” he said. “I love the theater. I love singers. I love the Met.” He performs occasionally, usually as an accompanist, taking the unspotlit position he prefers. “I do it to prove to myself that I didn’t stop because of stage fright,” he said.

  It took Ken years to recognize the ways in which his new career resembled the relentless grind of his previous one. He woke every morning before five, studied operas, headed to the Met at six thirty, practiced for a few hours, rehearsed, coached, stayed until ten or eleven at night, and went home. At forty-five, Ken developed a staph infection; when the ER doctor asked for an emergency contact and Ken realized there was no one he wanted to inform, he entered a depression. He felt his musicality drying up again. It has served him as a bellwether: only when it wanes does he notice his underlying psychic decay. “It’s very, very easy to fall into the trap of thinking you’ve lived all these emotions, because you’ve been reproducing them all day long. With middle age, I started yearning for life—life that I’d always been reading about in books
, or seeing in movies, or witnessing in other people’s homes.”

  Ken began his first serious relationship at forty-seven. “I’d had many love affairs, and they’d all been somewhat theatrical, shooting-star kind of romances,” he said. “When I finally started to live, I had this incredible fear that my ability to produce art would dissipate.” Periodically, this fear would spur him to withdraw. “The first time I broke up with Wayne, he was heartbroken,” Ken recalled. “The second time, after three weeks, he just came back to find me.” Ken described, as well, a social incompetence that was the legacy of his isolation. In the middle of a Gay Pride party, he announced that he had to go practice at the Met. Wayne said, “You’re my partner. You can’t just leave. You can’t just run back to the Met and hide in a practice room.” Ken said to me, “I never played with other children, so why at forty-seven would I go out and play with my partner?” Soon thereafter, Ken donated his piano and sheet music to charity. “It’s a wonderfully simple feeling to come home, not have a piano.”

  After a period of estrangement, Ken has a cordial relationship with his father; Takayo has expressed enormous regret over his childhood, and they, too, have reconciled. “I can have overwhelming feelings of love for her,” he said. “I don’t hate her, ever. But the connection is so powerful, and I have to fight to have another focus in life.” He paused. “The drive and focus that I have came from the way my mother drove me. That took me very far. I will never forgive her for my first life in music, which I hated, but I will never be able to thank her enough for my second life in music, which I love.”