The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations (5 page)

I immediately began to read everything I could get my hands on: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, and others.

In return, we, his students, did our best to respond to his magnanimity and to give him our best: our own generosity and our own high standards. He gave us the desire to play, to be artists, a desire that subsequently allowed each person, in his or her own way, to solve technical problems and to move mountains. I can’t count the number of times that, after leaving his course, I worked six to eight hours without stopping, carried away by enthusiasm.

Professor Pan tried to develop the positive points he detected in my playing. This was the exact opposite of so many professors, who doggedly attempt to change everything about the way their students play, or who seek to mold students in their own image out of sheer egotism. He defined a few essential points that needed improvement, and focused on them. He chose composers who corresponded to my sensibilities and my technique. His philosophy of life, which was as simple as it was true, was based on the principle that one cannot change everything and ask the world of someone all at once.

“During a difficult passage where you must play fast and loud, first play slowly and loud, then fast and softly, make sure you are at ease, and then finally play it fast and loud.”

He also took care never to block a student, again in contrast to so many professors. When I would play an excerpt, he never stopped me.

“Can you start over and play it through again?” is the most he would ask at the end.

I would stop in the middle of a piece, having missed a difficult passage:

“Keep going to the end,” he would say. “It’s not important, keep going. You have the responsibility to go right to the end. Think about your listeners. Be generous!”

Professor Pan had a rare virtue: he told the truth directly but didn’t offend you in the process. His natural sensitivity allowed him to understand completely the meaning of a word or gesture.

When it came to pure technique, Professor Pan was mercilessly demanding.

“You know, Zhu Xiao-Mei,” he told me during one of our first lessons, “the Chinese have a wonderful advantage: they are flexible by nature. This is essential for excellent piano technique and good tone. You must cultivate this asset.”

The work he gave me was unrelenting. I reviewed all the basics of technique with him, playing the
Hanon
in every key, as well as the main volumes of Czerny, Cramer, Moszkowski, and Brahms. He also gave me Bach’s
Inventions
and
The Well-Tempered Clavier
to work on.

“I want you to play all of this by heart. From now on, for each lesson, you must play a piece by Bach and two etudes from memory and with no mistakes. Try to memorize each of them from the very first time that you sight-read them.”

Easy for him to say! At the very beginning, in the three days he gave me, I had great difficulty memorizing the pieces, particularly Bach’s
Inventions
. At night, after lights out, I would shut myself up in the toilets, the only place where there was still light after ten o’clock, and stay there until my eyes started to close. Essentially, Professor Pan was right: if you don’t work your memory early, afterwards it will be too late. But it was a real challenge.

“If you are not attentive,” he said, “you cannot learn how to focus. To help with this, you will write a short summary of each of my classes. You will show it to me, and then we will be able to evaluate if you were listening closely to everything.”

Another day, he told me:

“You know, unfortunately I only have a few records. If I could, I would play opera for you, because to play the piano is to
say
something. That is something that a singer could make you understand better than anyone else. Instead, go and listen to the older children: observe how they play and take notes.”

I followed his recommendations, and one week later I returned with several pages of comments concerning a dozen pupils who were entering international competitions. During the following class, he spoke the words that I will never forget:

“I read your notes and what you said about the need to have a sound, a presence, an engagement. Deep inside, you know what you like and what you want to hear. This will help you a great deal…You’ll see, you are going to succeed.”

It was also Professor Pan who, to help me concentrate, made me play with my eyes closed, which I still do today in concert.

The first time we spoke about it, we were working on Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major. When Professor Pan announced that we were going to tackle this miraculous piece, I lit up with pride and happiness. I was the only student to whom he had proposed this. It was summertime, and the windows of the classroom were open. Below, my girlfriends listened to us: they would have done anything to take my place. That day, we rehearsed the beginning of the first measure of the slow movement for two hours: C sharp–D–C sharp, in dotted rhythm for the right hand, a small tonic chord for the left. All the desolation of the world in a few notes. Too fast. Too slow. Too loud. Too soft. Professor Pan was still not satisfied:

“That’s not the right color.”

Why was he talking about color? As far as I knew, the hammers of the piano hit the strings, and always in the same place. One could play louder or softer, fine, but how could the sound have a different color?

“Relax, Zhu Xiao-Mei, and close your eyes.”

C sharp–D–C sharp. I sensed that it was better that time. Professor Pan said nothing. I slowly opened one eye.

“There you go,” was all he said.

How many times did he tell me, “Close your eyes. You’ll feel your hands better, you’ll hear yourself better.”

Professor Pan dreamed of scores in which differences of tone and touch were shown in different colors.

“That would be wonderful,” he told me. “Imagine—the passages in B flat major would be in orange, just like I hear them.”

Professor Pan also insisted on working the imagination. He often used poetic imagery. “Each note is a pearl in a velvet box.” “Each note is a drop of dew on a flower at dawn.” Above all, he wanted me to always have an idea, an image, a story, or a feeling in my head while I was playing.

“Today, you aren’t thinking about anything.”

How could he know what was in my head? It was impossible. Was he some sort of magician?

“You can feel it, Zhu Xiao-Mei. The listener can hear it.”

One day, when I played one of Bach’s
Inventions
too dramatically, he burst out laughing. I wanted to please him, to thank him for everything he had done for me, and he guessed it:

“Be careful, that’s not a good thing to do. You get up on stage, you want to please the public, and then you lose your way. Truth and error are very close to one another.”

Seeing my disappointment, he added:

“A good pianist is like a good cook. He must have a sense of measure and proportion. Do you like dishes that are too sweet? Or too salty?”

“No, of course not.”

“Do you like dishes with no seasoning at all?”

“Absolutely not!”

“You see, it’s the same thing when you’re at the piano. You need seasoning, but one that is neither too salty nor too sweet. Search for that balance, look for—” Here he stopped for a few seconds, as he often did when he had something important to say, and then he went on: “Look for the golden mean.”

Another time, I was trying to impress him by playing a piece with particular brio, like the older students at the Conservatory who showily lifted their arms throughout the great pieces by Liszt or Rachmaninoff. He turned to me.

“Why such drama today, Zhu Xiao-Mei? Do you think the music needs it? Do you really think you have to play the piano that way? Don’t you think it’s possible to play in a more sober manner?” And he added, “Do you know the story
‘Hua she tian zu’
? It is the tale of a painter who drew a snake on the ground that was so lifelike that people thought it was real. By accident, a passerby stepped on the drawing. She began to shout, ‘I’ve been bitten by a snake!’ Those around ran up to see what was going on. Everyone began to laugh, and exclaimed, ‘We’ve never seen such a well-drawn snake!’ Soon everyone in the town knew about the drawing and the artist. The painter began to wonder how he could make his drawing even better. He decided to add feet. But when the passersby discovered the footed snake, they made fun of it: ‘What a ridiculous animal!’ And the painter fell back into oblivion.”

I absorbed the lesson so completely that now, whenever I walk on stage, I am always worried that someone might think I’m putting on a show. I am reminded of the wonderful remark by Pascal: “The unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel, acts the beast.”

Those years spent studying with Professor Pan were happy times. Today, when I give my classes, I often think of him. He was a marvelous professor who stood at the crossroads of two schools of piano playing. On the one hand, there was the Chinese school, which favored flexibility, lightness, fluidity, and a calligraphic sense of the melody line, but also a distance from, and a control over, emotion. Then there was the Russian school, with its grand gestures, Romanticism, powerful imagination, feeling, and generosity.

One day in the spring of 1963, when I was approaching my fourteenth birthday, Professor Pan said to me, smiling:

“Zhu Xiao-Mei, we must now start preparing for your first recital.”

There was a rule at the Conservatory that one must regularly play in public, particularly during the end-of-semester examinations. But this was not enough for Professor Pan.

“In order to have a real feeling for the stage, you have to stay up there for at least an hour. And even an hour is not that long. You know, some Japanese dancers live on stage for several days before giving a performance.”

Together, we chose the program: Beethoven’s
Pathétique
Sonata, Mozart’s Concerto No. 23, for which he himself would play the orchestral reduction, and Chopin’s Etude Op. 25, No. 3. He warned me:

“You must be two hundred percent prepared. As Sun Tzu said: ‘Invincibility is in ourselves.’ If one is not ready to wage war, one abandons the idea. It’s the same thing for a recital. If you are not sufficiently prepared, don’t play. It takes too long to undo a bad experience.”

And then he added, mysteriously:

“Pay attention to yourself as well. Obey.”

What did he mean? I didn’t dare ask him.