Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  • • •

  Some who love applause confuse that fervor with a passion for music. “Unfortunately,” Veda Kaplinsky said, “they’re going to be miserable. Because most of the time, it’s you and your music, not you and your audience.” The critic Justin Davidson said, “When you’re fourteen, you do it because it’s expected of you, you’re good at it, and you’re getting rewards. By the time you’re seventeen or eighteen, if that’s still why you’re doing it, there’s a good chance you’re going to crash. If music is about expression, you have to be expressing yourself by that point, not somebody else.”

  Sometimes the adults a prodigy wants to please are competing with one another. Like deaf children who learn Sign at school, many musicians share with teachers a cherished language that their parents cannot master. The relationship between teacher and student often triangulates the parent-child bond as it did with Leon Fleisher, his mother, and Schnabel. It can be like a messy divorce, with the teacher and the parents giving different instructions, with different objectives, and the child caught awkwardly in the middle. One teacher told me about a student so anxious about the divergence between her mother’s suggestions and the teacher’s that she forsook a promising career and switched to mathematics.

  • • •

  The Texan prodigy Candy Bawcombe, her parents, and her teachers all recognized her potential, and they were all damaged in the effort to realize it. Candy was different in multiple ways from the other children in Cleburne, Texas, in the 1960s. She was adopted; her parents were Yankees; and they liked to listen to the Chicago Symphony on the radio. They put Candy in ballet classes. She hated ballet but was fascinated by the pianist who played for the lessons. She told her parents, “If you let me quit ballet, I’ll practice the piano and I’ll never stop.” Their priest loaned Candy’s father an 1893 Steinway upright piano that an erstwhile parishioner had brought to Texas in a covered wagon.

  Candy’s teacher used to tour Texas with the Dallas Male Chorus, and he started taking Candy along to perform when she was seven. “In Mineola, a lady said, ‘I want your autograph,’” Candy remembered. “I said, ‘I don’t know how to write in cursive yet.’ She said, ‘Honey, it doesn’t matter. You’re going to be the next Van Cliburn.’” People started to call her Van Cleburne as an inside joke. “I began to feel like a circus act,” Candy recalled. “I eventually went to my parents and said, ‘I don’t feel good. My tummy hurts.’”

  Her parents pulled her from the shows when she was eight. Someone introduced them to Grace Ward Lankford, the Fort Worth grande dame who had effectively created the Cliburn Competition. Lankford offered to put Candy in private school in Fort Worth, board her during the week, and take over her musical education. Candy’s parents declined, but they took the assessments of their daughter’s ability seriously, and Lankford became Candy’s teacher. Candy’s mother insisted that Candy practice four hours a day, but Candy was determined to do so anyway. “I’d said when I was four, ‘I’m going to be a concert pianist,’” she said. “There was no other option for me.” That year, she won a competition in Fort Worth. When Candy was ten, Lankford was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer and lived only three months. No one wanted Candy to witness mortal illness, so she never saw her mentor again. She told her parents that she couldn’t play without Lankford. Then they received a call. On her deathbed, Lankford had asked the renowned Hungarian pianist Lili Kraus, artist-in-residence at Texas Christian University, to take Candy as a pupil.

  “I was overwhelmed by the glamour,” Candy said. “Lili Kraus was a European queen. The brocade gowns. The triple strand of pearls around her neck that she wore every day of her life. The violinist Felix Galimir later told me, ‘Every man in Europe was in love with Lili Kraus.’” Candy had learned the Mendelssohn Concerto in G Minor and thought her new teacher would be impressed. “She listened, and then said, ‘Now, darling, I will teach you how to play the piano.’ She took all my books off the piano, threw them on the floor, and said, ‘Play a scale.’ So I played a C-major scale. Then she started saying, ‘Play G minor. Play B-flat major. Play in counter-motion. Play four octaves.’ She was asking me to do things I’d never heard of before. My whole life caved in and crashed down.”

  Candy’s mother had been somewhat intimidated by Lankford, but she was in awe of Lili Kraus; she took home the teacher’s dresses to mend. Candy displaced a lot of feeling onto her new teacher. “If you have the strong personality of a world-famous concert artist in your life at the age of eleven, how can that not overshadow your mother?” she said. “I wanted to emulate Kraus in every way.” Candy developed a rapport with Kraus beyond her mother’s reach, but her mother became her drill sergeant, keeping her at the piano for hours every day. “Nothing came before that,” Candy said. “Ever.”

  For a year and a half, Candy played nothing but exercises: arpeggios, trills, scales, Czerny, scales in thirds, scales in octaves. “I thought I was going to go insane. What happened to the concertos?” Finally, Kraus decided Candy was ready for a Mozart sonata. They established a routine: Kraus would tour in Europe all summer, during which time Candy would have music to learn by heart; when Madame returned in September, Candy would relearn those same pieces “the right way.” Candy’s father was offered promotions, but they involved moving, which was unthinkable as long as Candy was studying with Kraus.

  It became a running joke to introduce Candy as “Lili Kraus’s student who is the next winner of the Cliburn Competition,” which for Candy would “ratchet that bolt and screw tighter and tighter.” She wanted to go to Juilliard, but couldn’t bear to leave Kraus. “I’m the only student who learned the real technique that Kraus had,” she said. “I spent fourteen years with her to earn it.” But Candy decided that she wanted to make her mark playing the concerto version of Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy, and Kraus said, “I’m the only pianist who plays that piece.” It was the beginning of trouble. “Madame Kraus was fighting to continue her career as long as possible,” Candy said. “She wanted my youth, and she couldn’t have it.”

  Candy felt pressured by her mother’s focus and her father’s missed career opportunities. She felt pushed by Kraus to triumph in a way that would elevate but not overshadow Kraus’s own reputation. She felt the lingering burden of Lankford’s hopes, and of being an adopted child who needed to prove herself worthy enough not to be abandoned. She felt the terrible anxiety that had begun with her sideshow act around Texas. She enrolled at TCU, where she began to struggle more and more with her work and physical health. She was, at last, preparing to enter the Cliburn Competition, playing the Prokofiev Piano Concerto no. 2.

  Shortly before the competition, she became terribly ill and lost thirty pounds in a month. Doctors diagnosed her with anorexia, and for the next five years she became weaker and weaker; eventually, she was down to eighty-five pounds, though she is five feet ten. Her kidneys were giving out, and she was put on life support. Kraus wrote in her diary that she was saying good-bye to Candy before she died. In the hospital, Candy pondered her despair. “I accused my mother many times, ‘You don’t love me because I didn’t win the Cliburn Competition.’ I thought she’d seen me only as the piano prodigy. Madame Kraus loved me; I was her baby, and she called me Candy Bandy. But it was always ‘Candy Bawcombe, pianist.’ Why can’t it just be ‘Candy Bawcombe, person?’” She finally learned that she had Crohn’s disease; it took her a year to walk again.

  When she was nearly thirty, she wrote to Lili Kraus, “I have to leave you, Madame Kraus. I have to leave Fort Worth, and my parents, and my world as I know it, and jump into New York City.” Candy sold everything she had to pay for Juilliard. “My parents were in tears,” she recalled. “They knew I needed to do something, but they really didn’t know what was ahead.”

  What she discovered at Juilliard was people. “I was so tired of being alone, on the road, in my career, in my life, in every way all the time,” she recalled. Candy became romantically involved with a violinist at Juilliar
d, Andrew Schast. Andy was offered a job with the Dallas Symphony, and Candy married him and returned to Texas. Not long afterward, the marriage started to fall apart. “He was the esteemed conductor, and I had nothing to do,” Candy recalled. Her relationship to Kraus had been poisoned by Kraus’s one-upmanship; now she found it difficult not to compete with her husband. “I was ready to leave him,” she said. Then she discovered she was pregnant. Motherhood unexpectedly united them; it focused Candy’s energies on someone other than herself. “As a prodigy, you’re always the most important person in the room,” she said. “Miss Perfect, that’s who I’d always been, and now, it wasn’t about me. As it turns out, that’s what I really wanted all along.”

  Candy eventually became the organist and musical director at the local Episcopal church. When I attended services there, I asked some of the congregants what they made of the music. Everyone knew she was a fine musician, but many of them didn’t listen to classical music outside church, and some had never liked it before joining St. Andrew’s. Listening to Candy play there felt a little like Babette’s Feast, as the congregation stood up and sat down and fumbled with their hymnals while perfectly sublime harmonies cascaded all around them.

  • • •

  The parents of a prodigy cannot know whether that child will have sufficient skill for a career in music, and equally cannot know whether that child will want such a life. The pressure can be overwhelming, and even those who like performing may not want to live with constant travel that makes sustained relationships nearly impossible. Are parents preparing their child for a life that he or she will actually enjoy in adulthood? Many such parents have a single-minded focus on a solo career and don’t deign to explore other ways to have a life in music, such as orchestral and chamber performance.

  • • •

  David Waterman’s aunt Fanny, who has been called “Britain’s best-known piano teacher,” founded the Leeds Piano Competition, and both his elder sisters were prodigies. His parents were too worn out to push their third child toward music, too. Instead, he was pressured to become an all-around excellent student, and he decided very definitely against being a prodigy, learning the cello at a recreational pace. As a teenager, he fell in love with chamber music and the sociability it entailed. He joined an amateur quartet while he was an undergraduate studying philosophy at Cambridge and undertook a PhD there so he could keep his campus housing while he decided whether to become a professional cellist.

  In 1979, David founded the Endellion String Quartet with three other musicians who had all been prodigies; thirtysome years later, the group has had to replace only one member and is going strong. David described how liberating it was for him to have a broad education and know that he could function in many other areas. That is not to say that his late start did not come at a cost. “If the quartet doesn’t play for a week, the level to which I sink in that time is alarming. That doesn’t happen to them. I’m sure that’s to do with how deeply ingrained their movements are.” He acknowledged, however, that a broader education had helped his human relations. “Knowing how to articulate has been very valuable for the quartet,” he said.

  I wondered whether David regretted those lost years of early practice. “I’d most likely be a failed soloist, instead of a successful chamber musician,” he said. “I might be a better cellist now if I had made that decision in my teens. But I think I’d be a much less happy person. And that would actually make me a lesser cellist.”

  • • •

  Musicians such as Ken Noda, Candy Bawcombe, and David Waterman retain a quieter life in music than their parents fantasized for them; others decide to keep playing but give up the notion of being heard. I knew someone in college, Louise McCarron, who showed brilliant talent as a pianist. In her early twenties, she was to make her Kennedy Center debut. Her parents hired a bus to take friends and relatives to the performance. Two days before the concert, everyone received notice that Louise had had an injury and would be unable to play. I thought it might be repetitive stress from all the practicing, but it was simply that her pinkie hurt. In the twenty-five years since, Louise has never scheduled or made a public performance. She lives alone in an apartment with two pianos and practices eight hours a day. Dating and marrying are impossible because she must “give everything” to her art. When she occasionally comes to a party, she introduces herself as a concert pianist, even though she has never given a concert.

  • • •

  While a taste for wealth and fame can propel parents of prodigies into exploitation, most are not venal; they are unself-aware, and powerless to separate their wishes from their children’s. Young children mirror back their parents’ ambitions. If you dream of having a genius for a child, you will spot brilliance in your child, and if you believe that fame would have salved all your own unhappiness, you will see a longing for prominence in your son’s or daughter’s face. While many performers are self-involved, it is often the parents of prodigies who are most obviously narcissistic. They may invest their own hopes, ambitions, and identities in what their children do rather than who their children are. Instead of cultivating curiosity, they may sprint for fame. Though they sometimes seemed pitiless to me, they were seldom vindictive; the abuse they perpetrated reflected a tragic misunderstanding of where one human being ends and another begins. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and no power is more absolute than parenthood. The children of these parents, despite being the subjects of obsessive attention, suffer from not being seen; their sorrow is organized not so much around the rigor of practicing as around invisibility. Accomplishment entails giving up the pleasures of the present moment in favor of anticipated triumphs, and that is an impulse that must be learned. Left to their own devices, children do not become world-class instrumentalists before they turn ten.

  • • •

  When I spoke to Marion Price on the telephone to set up our interview, I invited her to bring her violinist daughter, Solanda, for dinner, but she said, “We have a family of fussy eaters, so we’ll eat before we come.” The Prices arrived wearing coats, and I offered to hang them up. Marion, speaking for her husband and daughter as well, said, “That won’t be necessary,” and they sat through the interview holding their outerwear. I offered them something to drink, but Marion said, “We are so used to our schedule, and it’s not time for a drink right now.” In three hours, none of them had had a sip of water. I had put out homemade cookies, and Solanda kept glancing at them; every time she did, Marion shot her a look. When I asked Solanda a question, her mother constantly jumped in to answer on her behalf; when Solanda did reply, she did so with an anxious glance at her mother, as though worried whether she’d delivered the right response.

  The Prices live around their musical talent. Sondra, ten years older than Solanda, is a pianist; Vikram, four years older than Solanda, is a cellist. When Solanda was five, her parents had all three children in a children’s orchestra; they now perform as a trio. Marion is African-American; Solanda’s father, Ravi, is Indian, and he writes and plays smooth jazz. “We’re hearing the word gifted, we’re hearing the word musical,” Marion said. “We see three children who, when they practice together, it seems like one person.” It’s an oddity of English that the word play refers both to what children do for fun and what musicians do for a living, and it is misguided to infer from these homonyms that performance and practice are recreational activities.

  “We had music going from the time Solanda was conceived,” Marion said. Solanda started piano lessons at four. “But she fell in love with Itzhak Perlman and the violin. Solanda got that violin when she was almost five. The nurture has always been there, but when you have a child who within a moment of having received that violin, they are making music, there’s something innate there as well.” Solanda explained, “I chose the violin because I thought it sounded like my voice.” She began studying at Juilliard just shy of six. But her instructor “was kind of scrambling to keep up with what Solanda really needed,” Marion sai
d. “Solanda was digesting everything on the spot. She wanted to play the Beethoven D Major Concerto, the Brahms D Major, the Mendelssohn E Minor. And music theory is just the air she breathes.”

  All three Price children have been homeschooled. Marion develops the curriculum, and Ravi does the actual teaching. I asked Solanda about having friends, and Marion said that Solanda’s siblings were her best friends. I asked Solanda what she did for fun. “Basically, Juilliard,” Solanda said.

  Solanda had been asked to perform at an important ceremony in the nation’s capital. “I was nervous,” Solanda said. “It was very, very shocking to be there, but I played my best and I didn’t mess up.” Marion said that both Solanda and the trio had been invited to play all around the country. “She played in the Midori and Friends series, and Midori was there. We have the photos to prove it. We’re looking for more opportunities.” In a rare interpolation, Ravi said, “We need to take it up to the next level, where it would be, as necessary, profitable.” Marion was clearly embarrassed by the mention of money. There had been a few paid performances, she said, but her children mostly played for joy—“and it just so happens that their joy is something that brings joy for others,” she explained. “I don’t consider us to be pushy parents. Involved parents. Supportive parents. But I don’t think we’re pushy. I know what that looks like. I think we’re just able to respond to what our children are asking for.”

  In general, I don’t ask musicians to perform when I interview them. Marion was holding a violin case in her lap, however, so I asked Solanda if she wanted to play. Marion said, “What do you think you’ll play, Solanda?” Solanda said, “I think I’ll just play the Bach Chaconne.” Marion said, “How about the Rimsky-Korsakov?” Solanda said, “No, no, no, the Chaconne is better.” I was struck that Solanda had chosen the instrument for its resemblance to her voice; now it provided her only chance to be heard over her mother. Solanda played the Chaconne. When she finished, Marion said, “Now you can play the Rimsky-Korsakov.” Solanda launched into “Flight of the Bumblebee,” the proof of every virtuoso. Marion said, “Vivaldi?” and Solanda played “Summer” from The Four Seasons. She played with a clear, bright tone, although not with such brilliance as to resolve the question of why a childhood had been sacrificed for this art. I had hoped Solanda would light up at her instrument, but instead she brought out the violin’s searing melancholy.