Playing Scared

by Sara Solovitch

  I sometimes wondered if I was like Ivan Ilyich, the Tolstoy character who recognizes in his last days that he has lived all wrong, that he didn’t get what life was about until it was too late. I practiced with a seriousness and dedication that I had never had when I was young, which made me ask myself why I hadn’t stuck with it. Was it because I was lazy or because I didn’t understand what was actually required to be good at something? As I began deconstructing difficult passages, breaking them down—hands apart, practicing whole measures in syncopated rhythms, closing my eyes to get the feel of the music in my body, sometimes running the same measures a dozen times, sometimes a hundred—I admitted to myself that I was, in important ways, learning to play for the first time in my life.

  Landis Gwynn (Marilyn Gwynn)

  But still I refused to play for an audience, and whenever Landis suggested the idea, I quoted my childhood hero, Glenn Gould, who said that his ideal artist-to-audience ratio was one to zero. I found myself gravitating to the surreptitious performance, best executed with the listener as fly on the wall. For this to work, the person had to overhear me playing in the background, either on the phone or from the sidewalk outside my front door. Sure enough, I began to meet people in the neighborhood who told me they occasionally stood outside and listened to me play.

  My favorite such instance occurred soon after Rich and I inherited a little house on Lake Champlain in upstate New York. We began flying back east every summer to spend a month on the lake, hike in the Adirondacks, and see old friends. The only drawback was that the house, an 1839 clapboard colonial, didn’t come with a piano. It wasn’t long, however, before I met Ethel Bernard, the ninety-something widow of a former violist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and herself an excellent pianist.

  Bernard kept a beautiful Yamaha grand piano in her barn a few blocks from our house, and every winter she had it moved into storage, to be returned to her cool, uninsulated barn when the weather grew warm. Years earlier, when she was in her eighties, she’d given concerts in the barn for which an overflow crowd gathered on folding chairs and blankets on the lawn outside. She invited me to play her piano whenever I wanted; the barn door was always open. She herself rarely played anymore, though she was so vigorous that when I walked over to her place one afternoon to take her up on her offer, I came upon her in the middle of building a stone wall.

  I loved playing that piano, though the light inside the barn was bad and the air was hot and humid. These conditions required that I leave the barn door ajar, which let the music drift out and make its way up to the covered porch where Bernard often sat and—apparently—listened. I was once informed that she told her neighbors I was “a very fine pianist.” That was gratifying, but mostly I appreciated that she never entered the barn.

  Back in California, Landis was less decorous. In 2011, after years of weekly lessons, he announced that the time had come for me to give a little recital. “Little” was the operative word: The invited guests included Jesse, my only child still living at home, Rich, Landis, and his wife, Marilyn. Since Marilyn couldn’t make it, that left three people on the sofa. By the time I got to the second page of the prelude from Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque, I was a mess. I botched one easy run after another until, finally, I gave up in disgust and flung the music on the floor. “Damn it, Landis,” I snapped. “You knew I didn’t want to do this. It’s all your fault.”

  My little audience urged me to resume, and eventually I did, gathering up the score and taking the piece from the beginning to the final chords. All proclaimed it a great success. But when Landis left the house, I felt suddenly mortified. Nobody talked about what had happened, but it hung in the air along with the inexorable questions: How meaningful was it to study and practice so diligently if I was unwilling or unable to share the music? Was it worth all this effort just to play for myself?

  I posed these questions in an emotional phone call to one of my oldest friends, who declared that it was high time I faced my demons. Amy Linn had been hearing my stories for years; all her entreaties to hear me play had been swiftly denied. Now, at her instigation, I signed up for a group piano class at my local community college. It was a nurturing atmosphere, held in a classroom filled with forty electronic keyboards, twelve of which were occupied by students of widely varying talents and abilities. There were two grand pianos at the front of the room, and when the teacher called on me one night, I walked up confidently, set my hands on the keyboard, and ran my fingers up the first broken chord. As they lifted off the keys, I saw that they were shaking like hummingbirds at a feeder. All these years later and my leap to panic still came as the ultimate betrayal. Et tu, Brute?

  It was as if my body were hardwired, back in some deep, cellular pit to which I had no access. I kept playing, but my hands were shaking so uncontrollably that I could hardly strike the chords. I gazed down at myself from a distance high above the keys, watching a body that was no longer in charge. My fear was at the controls, like an independent organism emerging from inside me, my own Rosemary’s baby. Soon, I was paying more attention to the shakes than the music, and though I managed to make it to the end, it was with an embarrassing array of hiccups and gaffes. Driving home in the dark, feeling depressed and angry, thirsting for a big glass of wine, I asked myself for the thousandth time if I was just one of those people who shouldn’t perform. Julie Jaffee Nagel, an Ann Arbor psychoanalyst, had intimated as much when I called her up for some advice. A pianist who graduated with two degrees in performance from Juilliard, Nagel was, I took it, speaking from personal experience. “I see it as the symptom of a constellation of problems,” she said. “There are some people who should not perform. You see them self-sabotaging all the time.” For individuals like us, she seemed to imply, the act of performance was an act against gravity.

  Many of my favorite performers had improvised strategies to tame their demons. Brilliantly, pianist Sviatoslav Richter had settled his nerves by turning the house lights on the audience and off himself, save for a reading light above his musical score. He said this freed the listener “to concentrate on the music rather than on the performer.” In a New Yorker piece about the terrors of stage fright, the drama critic John Lahr described Richter’s decision as one that conjured “an illusion of invisibility” for the pianist.1 Lahr interviewed Carly Simon, who is almost as famous for her stage fright as for her singing. She, too, has turned the lights on the audience and then gone far beyond that innocent trick. Backstage before performances, she has jabbed herself with safety pins and persuaded her band members to spank her. “Simon has found that physical pain often trumps psychological terror,” Lahr wrote.

  Arthur Golden recounted something similar in his novel Memoirs of a Geisha, which was loosely based on the life of a retired geisha in Japan. The book’s protagonist, Chiyo Sakamoto, describes how she was made to plunge her hands into icy water before carrying her shakuhachi and koto, traditional Japanese instruments, out into the snow, wind, and rain to practice. “I know it sounds terribly cruel, but it’s the way things were done back then,” she explains matter-of-factly. “And in fact, toughening the hands in this way really did help me play better. You see, stage fright drains the feeling from your hands; and when you’ve already grown accustomed to playing with hands that are numbed and miserable, stage fright presents much less of a problem.”2

  It reminded me of a recital I once attended by pianist Charles Rosen in San Jose, California. He was performing the three late Beethoven sonatas, and you could feel the excitement in the hall as the hour approached. But there were parking complications and the concert was briefly delayed. It began twenty minutes later than scheduled, and Rosen played as if he were making up for lost time. Jaw clenched, he attacked the music percussively, angrily, while missing notes, many of them. It was an unhappy performance by a renowned musician and musicologist, whose analytic texts of classical composers are part of the twentieth century’s critical canon. After intermission, as more than a few elderly people inched th
eir way down the aisle to their seats, Rosen strode back onstage, glanced at the dawdlers, and plunged into the music: Sonata no. 32 in C Minor, op. 111, Beethoven’s farewell piano sonata. His glance carried disdain, but perhaps also a fear of the audience writ large, as he himself once acknowledged in an essay: “The popular idol is greeted as he enters with acclaim by the audience because he is, for its sake, about to expose himself to the danger of public humiliation. At any moment the singer’s voice may crack on a high note, the pianist fall off his stool, the violinist drop his instrument, the conductor give a disastrous cue and irretrievably confuse the orchestra. The applause that rewards the performer who has come through unscathed is tinged with regret.”3 Rosen’s own fears seemed to rise to a crescendo with this sentence: “The silence of the audience is not that of a public that listens but of one that watches—like the dead hush that accompanies the unsteady movement of the tightrope walker poised over his perilous space.”

  How true. Seated at the piano, attempting to play some vast piece from memory, without a score, one might as well be perched on the high wire without a net. The thin margin of safety depends on absolute precision. Every note, every step, carries a search for balance over a fixed point on the wire. The analogy of the tightrope is one so often raised by classical musicians that I wondered what a real tightrope walker would say about it.

  I found Pete Sweet, a circus artist originally from Berkeley, California, studying at a school for clowns in Florence, Italy. We spoke a few times over Skype—long, rambling conversations following his long days of juggling and slack-rope walking. Then thirty-nine, Sweet had learned to juggle while a student at Berkeley High. His parents were free-minded religious scholars, ex-hippies who took their three kids out of school to travel the world for a year, then settled for a time in central Java to start a school. It was in Indonesia, when he was seventeen, where Sweet first tied a rope between a coconut tree and the porch of his father’s house and teetered across. He went on to study Indonesian at the University of Wisconsin, playing in a gamelan, a traditional Indonesian orchestra, and practicing his juggling. He had walked the tight wire several years before discovering the slack rope. It offered up a whole other challenge. As its name states, the tightrope is taut and relatively stationary, while the slack rope is always moving, undulating beneath one’s feet. “Of course the center is always in yourself, but on the tightrope you keep your center above the wire,” Sweet explained. In other words, your center stays fixed. But in slack, your center—that balance point—is elusive: “In slack, you move the rope underneath you. It’s like being able to move the ground. It’s moving, but you also move, so in some way you’re influencing and controlling it, and in other ways it’s influencing you; you’re not at all in control.” It sounded like playing the piano.

  Falling off the tightrope is like falling off a log, he continued, while falling off the slack rope is like having a carpet pulled out from under you: “My teacher says that falling is like death. It’s something we all know is going to happen; we just don’t know how it’s going to happen.” Over the years, Sweet has walked tightropes and slack ropes in troupes across Europe; he was part of a vaudeville-style circus act, singing and dancing for thousands of spectators. But it wasn’t until he attended a workshop in Paris, where he was challenged to imagine himself on the high wire—while still very much grounded on terra firma—that Sweet experienced his first and only panic attack. The experience shocked him; until that moment, he hadn’t realized how afraid he actually felt. “I read an article by a big wave surfer who said that nobody’s fearless when they surf big waves unless they’re certifiably insane. You can’t be fearless out there, you can only be panicless. I think I had maintained my own poise for years by being numb to my fear. The fact that I was continually putting myself in scary situations and asking myself that I be poised and not panicked—it was much easier to do that without being aware of my fear,” he said. The panic experience at the workshop inspired his next show: a performance of Maximilian, a clown with a bad case of stage fright walking the slack rope.

  Sweet quoted Fritz Perls, the German-born founder of Gestalt therapy, who defined fear as excitement without breath. When we’re in a state of fear and panic, our breath gets shallow. Our abdomen fills with butterflies because normal digestion shuts down. The tension causes numbness. Our body retracts; we numb the fear. The most important thing Sweet learned was breathing—whether he was walking the slack rope up in the air or walking on his hands on solid ground. Breathing—so autonomic, so much a function of the reptilian brain—is so easy to forget.

  “Part of the training has been to focus on the technique and hone it so it’s precise,” Sweet said. “With every step, I first touch the side of the rope with my foot. Then I transfer my weight onto the foot, setting it on the rope, which is moving all the time. And that’s what I do with each step: First I feel the side of the rope—like the side of a pencil. It becomes so innate you do it very quickly. That’s something I focus on, but once I do that, I will intentionally distract myself and look from side to side, do things with my hand.”

  I’d been half listening to this discourse on the mechanics of slack-rope footwork, when I suddenly recognized the similarity to what I was learning at the piano. As I practiced my scales and arpeggios each day, I often tried to distract myself, to move my head from side to side and up and down, as a way of freeing myself from the very precision I was working so hard to achieve. We were in parallel worlds, Pete Sweet on his slack rope, I at my piano—both of us searching for the place where fear evaporates long enough for freedom and joy to reach the surface.

  Sweet was a classic autodidact whose years of study in juggling, dance, clowning, mime, and breath work amounted to a self-directed Ph.D. program. Listening to him, it became apparent that I had to design my own course of action, one requiring that I undergo the kind of exposure therapy with which claustrophobics, arachnophobics, and other neurotics typically are treated. I had heard reports of claustrophobics shut away in car trunks and coffins by their therapists, of arachnophobics cajoled into playing with tarantulas.

  The equivalent for me was to confront an audience. So without allowing myself too much time to think about it, I went ahead and scheduled a solo recital for June 30, 2013, the day before my sixtieth birthday. It was now early June 2012. That left me just over a year to prepare, to “expose” myself; I imagined it as a round of inoculations, a series of graduated steps. As the year progressed, they would serve as my road map. In the first few months, I would perform in retirement homes and hospitals. I would attend a nine-day piano camp in Bennington, Vermont, sign up for master classes at which I would play before other piano students and be critiqued by a teacher. I would routinely drop by the closest major airport to perform on a piano that sat, invitingly, just outside of the baggage claim area. In the last few months of my campaign—my year of living dangerously—I would organize a series of informal evening “soirees,” inviting small groups of friends and acquaintances to my house for music and wine. My teacher would arrange for me to play before several top pianists in the San Francisco Bay Area. Then, in May 2013, I would perform a half-hour solo recital at the local public library. After all that, I told myself, I would be ready to play before fifty or more invited guests in a public hall—my grand performance. But first, I had to touch a few tarantulas.

  Chapter 4

  ARE YOU MY GURU?

  My concert was still nearly a year away, but the thought of it was already disturbing my dreams, reigning over my nights, plunging me deep into Emily Dickinson country, where, as she said, you don’t have to be a house to be haunted. I felt haunted, wondering at my own recklessness. Why was I doing this to myself? Was it too late to change my mind? How was I ever going to pull it off? When I did sleep, my dreams were piano possessed. In one, I laid my fingers on the keyboard and then couldn’t pry them off. They were superglued to the keys. In another dream, I looked down at my belly, saw that I was pregnant, and opene
d my mouth just as two small hands fluttered out of it, waving delicately in the air before my eyes. They were just a baby’s hands, I noted, but the fingers were long and graceful and I congratulated myself on the fact that this child of mine was going to be born with piano hands.

  Some of my apprehension stemmed from the fact that I found myself without a teacher. I had an almost religious belief in the power of a great teacher. Throughout my life, I’d been inspired by numerous teachers and in recent years had seen what the right ones could accomplish with my sons. One in particular stood out. Mary Lou Galen became my son’s violin teacher soon after he entered high school. Max was innately musical, but stubborn and resistant to instruction. His previous teacher couldn’t get through to him; he had developed a way of looking through her and closing his ears to almost everything she said. When Galen took him on, she did so on the condition that I sit through the lessons and take notes. I was taken aback; I had always spent the kids’ lesson times running errands, meeting friends for coffee, making a deadline, or catching up on my reading. Now, in addition to all my other responsibilities, I was being asked to take on the job of stenographer.

  It didn’t take long for me to realize that I’d been admitted into what amounted to an exclusive lecture series, a year’s worth of master classes with a master teacher. Galen, a former concertmaster with the San Jose Symphony Orchestra, had suffered repetitive stress injury and no longer played the violin. Unable to demonstrate technique, tone, or style, she had learned to communicate by using story and metaphor.