Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

1083 All quotations from Veda Kaplinsky come from my interview with her in 2010.

  1084 The Japanese proverb “the ten-year-old prodigy becomes a talented fifteen-year-old on the way to mediocrity at twenty” is cited in “Music: Prodigies’ progress,” Time, June 4, 1973.

  1085 All quotations from Charles Hamlen come from my interviews with him in 1996 and 2007 and other communications.

  1086 All quotations from Karen Monroe come from my interview with her in 2007.

  1087 The quotations from and about Van Cliburn occur on pages 182–83 of Claude Kenneson, Musical Prodigies: Perilous Journeys, Remarkable Lives (1993).

  1088 The increase in the number of piano competitions is chronicled in Michael Johnson, “The dark side of piano competitions,” New York Times, August 8, 2009.

  1089 All quotations from Robert Levin come from my interview with him in 2010.

  1090 This passage is based on my interview with Sue, Joe, and Drew Peterson in 2010 and subsequent communications.

  1091 All quotations from Miyoko Lotto come from Roberta Hershenson, “Playing piano recitals and skipping fifth grade,” New York Times, July 9, 2009.

  1092 All quotations from Justin Davidson come from my interviews with him in 2010 and 2012 and prior and subsequent communication.

  1093 “Craftsmanship has never stood in the way of genius” is an English-language paraphrase of a sentiment frequently expressed by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, as, for example, in a letter to the painter Henry Mottez, ca. 1910, quoted in Jean Renoir, Renoir: My Father (2001), pages 415–16. In full: “ . . . Certainly, there will always be Ingres and Corots, just as there have been Raphaels and Titians, but they are exceptions, for whom it would be presumptuous to write a treatise on painting. Those young artists who take the trouble to read Cennini’s book, in which the author has described the way his contemporaries lived, will note that the latter were not all men of genius, but they were always marvelous craftsmen. . . . All painting, from that of Pompeii, done by Greek artists . . . down to that of Corot, by way of Poussin, seems to have come from the same palette. Formerly all pupils learned this way of painting under their master. Their genius, if they had any, did the rest. . . . The stern apprenticeship imposed on young painters never prevented them from having originality. Raphael was the pupil of Perugino, but he became the divine Raphael, nevertheless.”

  1094 The quotation from Steven Isserlis (“It should be taught like a mixture of religion and science . . .”) comes from my interview with him in 2010.

  1095 This passage is based on my interviews with Mikhail, Natalie, Misha, and Natasha Paremski in 2007 and prior and subsequent communications.

  1096 Mannes College: The New School for Music website: http://www.newschool.edu/mannes.

  1097 Natasha Paremski’s performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2 was described as both “fresh” and “raw” by reviewer Anne Midgette in “Pinch-hitting at Caramoor: Young pianist and Rachmaninoff,” New York Times, June 25, 2007.

  1098 For more information on absolute pitch, see Daniel J. Levitin and Susan E. Rogers, “Absolute pitch: Perception, coding, and controversies,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9, no. 1 (January 2005); and A. Bachem, “Absolute pitch,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 27, no. 6 (1955).

  1099 The anecdotes about children’s manifestation of absolute pitch come from my interview with David A. Ross in 2010, as do all quotations from him.

  1100 Acquisition of perfect pitch is discussed in Annie H. Takeuchi and Stewart H. Hulse, “Absolute pitch,” Psychological Bulletin 113, no. 2 (1993); and Diana Deutsch et al., “Absolute pitch among American and Chinese conservatory students,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 199, no. 2 (February 2006).

  1101 Daniel J. Levitin evaluates the ability of nonmusicians to replicate the opening pitches of popular songs in “Absolute memory for musical pitch: Evidence from the production of learned melodies,” Perception & Psychophysics 56, no. 4 (1994).

  1102 See Nicholas A. Smith and Mark A. Schmuckler, “Dial A440 for absolute pitch: Absolute pitch memory by non-absolute pitch possessors,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 123, no. 4 (April 2008).

  1103 Both anecdotes about the difficulties encountered in group performance by musicians with absolute pitch come from my interview with David A. Ross. Ross is lead author of “Absolute pitch does not depend on early musical training,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 999, no. 1 (November 2003); “Absolute pitch: Music and beyond,” Epilepsy Behavio r 7, no. 4 (December 2005); and “Absolute pitch in children prior to the beginning of musical training,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1169 (July 2009). For the study finding that many subjects are able to recognize minor pitch changes in familiar tunes, see Glenn Schellenberg and Sandra E. Trehub, “Good pitch memory is widespread,” Psychological Science 14, no. 3 (2003).

  1104 The seminal study on absolute pitch and the planum temporale is Gottfried Schlaug et al., “In vivo evidence of structural brain asymmetry in musicians,” Science, n.s., 267, no. 5198 (February 3, 1995); see also Julian Paul Keenan, “Absolute pitch and planum temporale,” Neuroimage 14, no. 6 (December 2001).

  1105 Thomas Elbert et al. reported the finding of brain enlargement in violin players in “Increased cortical representation of the fingers of the left hand in string players,” Science 270, no. 5234 (October 13, 1995).

  1106 For neuroimaging evidence of enhanced motor coordination in musicians, see Burkhard Maess et al., “Musical syntax is processed in Broca’s area: An MEG study,” Nature Neuroscience 4, no. 5 (May 2001); and Vanessa Sluming et al., “Broca’s area supports enhanced visuospatial cognition in orchestral musicians,”Journal of Neuroscience 27, no. 14 (April 4, 2007).

  1107 This passage is based on my interviews and conversations with Robert, Orna, and Jay Greenberg in 2007 and 2008 and subsequent communication.

  1108 The quotation from Samuel Zyman (“What would you do if you met an eight-year-old boy who can compose . . .”) comes from his article “New music from a very new composer,” Juilliard Journal, May 2003.

  1109 Jay’s description of his compositional mental process comes from Rebecca Leung, “Prodigy, 12, compared to Mozart,” CBS News, February 18, 2009.

  1110 The quotation from Nancy Andreasen (“. . . the creative process is similar in artists and scientists . . .”) occurs on page 78 of her book The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius (2005).

  1111 Jay’s description of the mathematical underpinnings of one of his compositions comes from the liner notes to the recording Symphony No. 5; Quintet for Strings (2006).

  1112 “My music does express my feelings . . .” comes from Matthew Gurewitsch, “Early works of a new composer (very early, in fact),” New York Times, August 13, 2006.

  1113 See The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes, translated by E. S. Forster (1984), Problemata xxx 1, 953a10–14: “Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament (), and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile, as is said to have happened to Heracles among the heroes?”

  1114 For a host of diabolical legends about Paganini, see G. I. C. De Courcy’s 1957 biography, Paganini the Genoese (repr., 1977); and “Fiddler Paganini’s ways: Stories and facts in the great man’s life,” New York Times, July 27, 1891. For a more modern take on the great violinist, see Maiko Kawabata, “Virtuosity, the violin, the devil . . . what really made Paganini ‘demonic’?,” Current Musicology, March 22, 2007.

  1115 The quotation from Cesare Lombroso occurs on page 333 of his book The Man of Genius (1888). In full: “We may confidently affirm that genius is a true degenerative psychosis belonging to the group of moral insanity, and may temporarily spring out of other psychoses, assuming their forms, though keeping its own special peculiarities, which distinguish it from all others.”

  1116 The role of dopamine receptor
s in the creative process is explored in Örjan de Manzano et al., “Thinking outside a less intact box: Thalamic dopamine D2 receptor densities are negatively related to psychometric creativity in healthy individuals,” PLoS One 5, no. 5 (May 17, 2010).

  1117 Norman Geschwind refers to “pathologies of superiority” in his paper “The biology of cerebral dominance: Implications for cognition,” Cognition 17, no. 3 (August 1984). Geschwind and Albert M. Galaburda are authors of Cerebral Lateralization (1987); Daniel Goleman reports on their work in his article “Left vs. right: Brain function tied to hormone in the womb,” New York Times, September 24, 1985.

  1118 Pinchas Noy describes preoccupation with music as a defensive strategy in “The development of musical ability,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 23 (1968).

  1119 Miraca Gross discusses resilience in child prodigies in her essay “Social and emotional issues for exceptional and intellectually gifted students,” in Maureen Neihart et al., The Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children: What Do We Know? (2002), pages 19–30.

  1120 The quotation from Zarin Mehta (“Thank God we don’t have such talented children”) comes from my interview with him in 2010.

  1121 The quotation from Elisha Abas (“Sometimes the shoulders of a child are not big enough to handle his genius”) comes from Daniel J. Wakin, “Burned out at 14, Israeli concert pianist is back where he ‘really belongs,’” New York Times, November 2, 2007.

  1122 All quotations from Joseph Polisi come from my interview with him in 2010.

  1123 The quotation from Brandenn Bremmer (“America is a society that demands perfection”) occurs on page 142 of Alissa Quart, Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (2006); the quotation from his parents (“He was born an adult . . .”) comes from the news report “Child prodigy’s time to ‘do something great,’ Mom says,” Washington Post, March 20, 2005.

  1124 Terence Judd and Michael Rabin are both discussed in Richard Morrison, “The prodigy trap,” Sunday Times, April 15, 2005.

  1125 Christiaan Kriens is mentioned in Joyce Maynard, “Prodigy, at 13,” New York Times, March 4, 1973.

  1126 The quotation from Julian Whybra about suicide among gifted youth occurs on page 40 of his chapter, “Extension and enrichment programmes,” in Meeting the Social and Emotional Needs of Gifted and Talented Children, edited by Michael J. Stopper (2000). Nancy Robinson takes issue with the assertion that intellectually gifted children are less hardy than other children on page xiv of her introduction to The Social and Emotional Development of Gifted Children: What Do We Know?, edited by Maureen Neihart et al. (2002).

  1127 All quotations from Robert Sirota come from my interview with him in 2010 and subsequent communications.

  1128 Jascha Heifetz’s quip about the dangers of prodigiousness appears in the liner notes of his 1959 recording of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto (RCA Victor Red Seal/BMG Classics).

  1129 The quotation from Isaac Babel occurs on page 628 of The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, translated by Cynthia Ozick (2002). It has been condensed. In full: “Our fathers, seeing they had no prospects of their own, set up a lottery for themselves. They built this lottery on the bones of their little children. And sure enough, over the last few decades our town had sent a number of child prodigies onto the stages of the world. When a boy turned four or five, his mother took the tiny, frail creature to Mr. Zagursky. Zagursky ran a factory that churned out child prodigies, a factory of Jewish dwarfs in lace collars and patent leather shoes. There was powerful harmony in the souls of these little creatures with their swollen blue heads. They became acclaimed virtuosi. And so—my father decided to keep up with them. I had passed the age of child prodigies—I was almost fourteen—but because of my height and frailness I could be mistaken for an eight-year-old. Therein lay all our hopes.”

  1130 The quotations from Ruth Slenczynska occur on pages 31, 137, and 232 of her autobiography, Forbidden Childhood (1957).

  1131 The psychologist who examined Ervin Nyiregyházi was Geéza Reéveész; his book is The Psychology of a Musical Prodigy (1925).

  1132 All quotations from Ervin Nyiregyházi come from Kevin Bazzana, Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy (2007): “I was like a calling card,” page 44; “By the time I was five . . . ,” page 53; “My mother hated me,” page 37; and “Whatever obstacles were put in my way, I just gave up,” page 41. Nyiregyházi’s praise for Hitler is mentioned on page 40: “Perceiving himself to be emotionally deprived, struggling with the conflicting emotions of youth, he seems, self-defensively, to have projected all of the blame for his anxieties onto his mother, making her the enemy of everything he held dear. She died in the Holocaust, and he was once (while drunk) heard to say that Hitler was a great man because Hitler had killed his mother.”

  1133 This passage is based on my interview with Lorin Hollander in 2007.

  1134 Mozart originally wrote “Next to God comes Papa” in a March 1778 letter reproduced on page 183 of The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1866); see also Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (1996).

  1135 Paganini’s description of abuse by his father (“If he didn’t think I was industrious enough . . .”) is described on page 13 of G. I. C. de Courcy’s 1957 biography, Paganini the Genoese (repr., 1977), citing to Julius Max Schottky, Paganini’s Leben und Treiben als Kunstler und als Mensch (1830).

  1136 The quotation describing how Clara Wieck’s father examined and wrote in her diary occurs on pages 18–20 of Nancy B. Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (1985); the quotation from Robert Schumann occurs on page 64: “You are, forgive me, like a pair of children,” he (Schumann) wrote on October 24, 1838. “You cry, he scolds, and it is still the same as ever. . . . You can’t belong to him and to me at the same time. You will have to leave one, him or me.”

  1137 This passage is based on my interview with Scott Frankel in 2010, and prior and subsequent communications.

  1138 All quotations in this passage come from an interview by Nikki Murfitt, “The heart-breaking moment I realised my mother had cut me off forever, by violin virtuoso Vanessa-Mae,” Daily Mail, August 7, 2008.

  1139 This passage is based on my interview with Nicolas Hodges in 2010 and subsequent communications.

  1140 Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia website: http://www.curtis.edu.

  1141 The anecdote about Rudolf Serkin was recounted to me in 2009 by Gary Graffman, the sometime director of Curtis, who was with Serkin when he made this remark.

  1142 The quotation from Yo-Yo Ma occurs on page 265 of Samuel and Sada Applebaum, The Way They Play, vol . 13 (1984).

  1143 The quotation from Thérèse Mahler comes from my interview with her in 2010.

  1144 The quotation from Hoang Pham comes from my interview with him in 2010.

  1145 This passage is based on my interview with Ken Noda in 2009 and subsequent communications.

  1146 Takayo Noda is an accomplished artist and poet; see http://www.takayonoda.com.

  1147 This passage is based on my interview with Candy Bawcombe in 2010.

  1148 This passage is based on my interview with David Waterman in 2010 and subsequent communications; see also his article “Four’s a crowd,” Times, January 17, 2004. Website of the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition, founded by Dame Fanny Waterman, DBE: http://www.leedspiano.com/. Website of the Endellion String Quartet: http://www.endellionquartet.com/.

  1149 This passage is based on my interview with Marion, Solanda, Vikram, and Sondra Price in 2010. All names in this passage are pseudonyms, and some identifying details have been changed.

  1150 Mitsuko Uchida’s remark about society’s bewildering preoccupation with prodigies comes from a personal communication in 2012.

  1151 The quotation from Janice Nimura (“The child prodigy is the polite version of the carny freak . . .”) comes from her article “Prodigies have problems too,” Los Angeles Times, August 21, 2006.

  1152 The anecdote about Leonard Berns
tein occurs on page 107 of Clifton Fadiman, The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (1985). In full: “Bernstein’s father was criticized for not having given his talented son more encouragement. ‘How was I to know he would grow up to be Leonard Bernstein?’ he protested.” I have heard the anecdote phrased as I have phrased it from other members of the Bernstein family.

  1153 This passage is based on my interview with Jonathan Floril in 2010.

  1154 The characterization of Jonathan Floril as “more than a prodigy, not only because of what he performs, but also how he performs” comes from Alfredo Brotons Muñoz, “Más que un prodigio,” Levante EMV, May 7, 2007. In the original: “Aunque, como luego se explicará, va más allá de eso, de momento no puede escapar a la calificación de prodigio. No sólo por cómo toca, sino por lo que toca.”

  1155 The quotation from Gore Vidal (“Hatred of one parent or the other can make an Ivan the Terrible or a Hemingway: the protective love, however, of two devoted parents can absolutely destroy an artist”) occurs on page 34 of his collection of essays Matters of Fact and Fiction (1977).

  1156 For the study finding a threefold increase in early parental loss among eminent people, see Catherine Cox, The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred Geniuses (1926). Eighty-three years later, Dean Keith Simonton and Anna V. Song published a follow-up study, “Eminence, IQ, physical and mental health, and achievement domain: Cox’s 282 geniuses revisited,” Psychological Science 20, no. 4 (April 2009).

  1157 This passage is based on my interviews with Lang Lang and Lang Guoren in 2005 and 2009 and on other communications. Lang Lang maintains a website at http://www.langlang.com and has published two autobiographies, which I have used as sources: Lang Lang: Playing with Flying Keys (2008), with Michael French; and Journey of a Thousand Miles: My Story (2008), with David Ritz. I have also consulted David Remnick, “The Olympian: How China’s greatest musician will win the Beijing Games,”New Yorker, August 4, 2008; and made use of Dad’s Aspirations Are That High, by Yuanju Li (2001) (an unpublished English translation of: : / Ba ba de xin jiu zhe mo gao: Gang qin tian cai Lang Lang he ta de fu qin).