Playing Scared (16 page)

She started up again, and—though far from perfect—her performance came right from the gut. “Sometimes your heart breaks,” she sang, and it was all there: the hardships, the triumphs, the years of alcoholism and drug abuse. She knew it, and the crowd knew she knew it. A roar tore through the audience. “Did you hear that?” Beebe demanded. “That was more real, more electrifying, than any perfect performance. What was always scary about Liza to me in the past was that she was so perfect. Here, she’s working the dialectic between persona and anima. It gives her performance integrity.”

Beebe urged me to consider a little-known Jungian theory, “a lovely, lovely theory,” known as “deintegrative anxiety.” It is a model of child development that begins in infancy and describes how the self is built, one experience at a time. It
happens every time a baby surrenders her self or “wholeness” and opens up to another. She takes her first tentative steps toward her parents: That is deintegration. They catch her with open arms, and she understands that she is loved and supported: That is reintegration. According to this theory, life is an ongoing cycle of deintegration and reintegration, a constant flux between breakdown and assimilation. Every time we open ourselves to someone or something new, we risk giving up a part of ourselves. A healthy self will deintegrate and reintegrate continually throughout life. Any change to the status quo represents a threat to the whole, but most of us assume some degree of risk and adventure, knowing that our lives will be more interesting and fulfilling for doing so. If we’re lucky and survive these risks, we will integrate them into our selves.

Consider making performance an experience of reintegration, Beebe advised me now, pointing out that no one who has performed has ever failed to experience some deintegration. The important piece in this is to factor in imperfection. “There is something about trying to be perfect that lacks integrity,” he said. “When you present yourself honestly, it’s hard for someone to knock you off, because you never pretended in the first place to be perfect. It’s about a mix of confidence and unconfidence—that’s much safer. It’s bulletproof. Liza Minnelli, she can’t break down because she’s already broken down. She’s aware that one can break down, and there’s a durability to that.”

It was now January 2013. I had begun inviting small groups of friends and acquaintances over for a series of Saturday
evening recitals. I called them soirees, but I thought of them as my personal, custom-designed form of exposure therapy. These were small gatherings of six to eight people, with ample opportunity for deintegration and reintegration. The idea was that I would play through two or three of my pieces, after which we would retire for wine and dessert. I believed that these kind people were humoring me or at the very least doing me a favor, so I was taken aback when they actually seemed to enjoy themselves. They had questions: Why was I doing this? What had gotten me started? What did it mean to go deep into the music? And what was I learning about myself? They often entreated me to play some more, especially when I botched a piece. Play it again, they said. Inevitably, I played better the second time.

The first few soirees were exciting but exhausting. I usually took a beta-blocker an hour before my guests arrived, and I worried that it would wear off if they came late or dawdled before I played. I found the act of performance to be draining and often couldn’t wait for everyone to leave. Afterward, I couldn’t fall asleep. I suspected the beta-blocker caused my insomnia, but I didn’t dare play without it. How many mistakes had I made? How badly had I played? Beebe might call it deintegration and reintegration, but I felt caught in a school-yard game of Red Light, Green Light; for every two steps forward, another two steps back. How many of these deintegrations and reintegrations would I have the stomach to undergo?

But after three or four of these soirees, a shift occurred. I began playing more fluidly and confidently. I was making progress. At one gathering in April, I began with the Bach
Prelude and Fugue in C Minor and moved on to the Brahms Romanze in F Major, and I found myself enjoying it. I decided to keep going. My little audience’s response was so enthusiastic when it was over that I felt I had given them something valuable. Time was running out. But with two months remaining before my big recital, I was beginning to see possibilities beyond my own internal struggles.

The most famous child prodigy of the twentieth century had an upbringing full of deintegrative and reintegrative experiences. Two hours after Ruth Slenczynska’s birth on January 15, 1925, her father, Josef, a Polish violinist, examined her wrists and hands in the hospital nursery in Sacramento, California, and between sobs of joy declared she had the makings of a great musician. “Look at those good sturdy wrists!” he proclaimed. “Notice the way her thumb is separate from the rest of the hand! Look at the tips of her fingers! I swear to you, Mamma, that’s a musician!”
³

In her memoir, Slenczynska recounts the ruthless training that turned her into a wunderkind. It began when she was three, banging away on a toy piano while her father, a self-taught violinist (“He was not a great musician. He couldn’t count. And counting is not that hard”), gave lessons in an adjoining room. By the time she was four, Slenczynska was practicing nine hours a day, every day of the week. No mistake went unpunished. A missed note was met with a whack across her cheek, and if the mistake was especially egregious, she was hurled from the piano. Her father boxed her ears, swore at her in five languages, and pulled her shoes off in wild rages. On
the one occasion her mother reached out to protect her, Ruth screamed at her, “Daddy’s right! Stay out of this! It’s none of your business!”
⁴
Every new piece began with a threat: “Let’s see if you can learn this without a wallop.” It is almost without irony that she writes of the great progress she made under her father’s heavy hand. “I am ashamed to admit that until I was fourteen years old, and had already been on the concert stage for ten years, the only new piece I ever learned without a slap was the first movement of Schumann’s Piano Concerto. For some reason, I showed immediate affinity for that music, learning it in perhaps three hours. I felt completely secure with it that very first time I played it, and Father, tough critic that he was, paid me the compliment, for once, of keeping his hands to himself.”
⁵

She hated her father yet lived for his approval. He dictated every minute of her day, from the time she woke up and began practicing (six
A.M.
) to the way she parted her hair and what she wore when she practiced (a petticoat, so as not to ruin her dress with perspiration). When she was four years old and preparing for her first solo recital at Mills College in Oakland, she asked him what would happen if she made a mistake. He went into the kitchen, returned with half a tomato, and threw it in her face. “That’s what will happen,” he answered.
⁶

When she was six, the family moved to Europe so she could study with some of the most legendary pianists of the day: Sergei Rachmaninoff (who called her the greatest talent he had ever heard), Josef Hofmann, Alfred Cortot, Artur Schnabel. She made her debut in Berlin that same year. Three
years later, when she performed in Copenhagen, she was examined by two medical specialists after newspapers in that city suggested that she was a dwarf; in their opinion, no child of nine could play as she did. At the age of ten, she replaced the Polish pianist Ignace Paderewski, after he suffered a heart attack and canceled his scheduled performance at Carnegie Hall. With only a few days’ notice, she stepped in to play his exact program. For her first encore, she performed Mozart’s Sonata in F Major; for her second, Chopin’s Étude in A Minor (the
Chromatic
). When it was over, Ossip Gabrilowitsch (a Russian-born pianist who was married to singer Clara Clemens, Mark Twain’s daughter) turned to a fellow pianist and said, “I worked on that piece twenty-five years before I dared to play it in public. I’m sure she hasn’t put quite that much time on it.”
⁷

As Slenczynska entered her teen years, however, little “buts” began to creep into the reviews of her performances. The word
immature
was frequently applied. Her obedience and slavish practice—at times exceeding eleven hours a day—failed to produce the acclaim she had come to expect as a child prodigy. “It was as if each time that terrible word appeared in a review, I was branded anew. It made me feel condemned, tainted … The inferiority complex it gave me was frightful. I began to think I was not made for music, that there was something glaringly wrong somewhere, so wrong that none of my teachers, least of all Father, could correct it.”
⁸

Slenczynska’s memoir has been out of print in the United States for decades. In China, however, it is in its third printing, studied as a primer for music education, its eighty-eight-
year-old author regularly sought out for advice. “Wherever I go, Chinese people seek me out. They want reassurance from me that it’s possible for their little kid to be made to work and become extraordinary like me. And it is.” What she doesn’t tell them is that there is no such thing as a natural prodigy. “It’s the most manufactured process you can imagine. Just like a rose is highly cultivated. Or a prized tomato. Or a prized pig.”

Child prodigy Ruth Slenczynska at eight years old
(Ruth Slenczynska Collection, Lovejoy Library, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville)

The first time I talked to Slenczynska on the phone, she was generous with her advice about how to practice (“I don’t allow my students to play scales two-handed”), memorize (“Accept that you are stupid and don’t know anything and therefore play the right hand alone, working on a passage
that’s no more than four bars long”), and prepare for the inevitable stage fright (“Ordinary calisthenics—it gets the blood moving, the blood goes to your head, and you feel good”).

I was delighted when she invited me to visit her the next time I came to New York. I arrived at her apartment, not far from Lincoln Center, a couple of hours before she was scheduled to teach a lesson, and she greeted me, a short woman in a knit suit. Her living room was dominated by side-by-side Steinway grand pianos, with a bank of windows overlooking the Hudson River. There was little empty wall space; most of it was covered with oil paintings, Chinese prints, and lithographs; a discreet corner held a collection of photographs and personally signed thank-you notes from Presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Reagan.

“I think he’d be actually surprised to see this apartment,” she said, glancing around her with satisfaction, referring back, as always, to Father. I asked if she ever felt a twinge of gratitude toward him. By her own account, she would have had a very different life if he hadn’t driven her so hard. Wasn’t there some irony in the fact that the man who nearly destroyed her was also responsible for the life she enjoyed today? “That’s only because I had the courage to run away,” she snapped. “He beat me. When his hands weren’t enough, it was ‘the magic stick.’ When the stick wasn’t enough, it became his belt. No girl likes that, to run around the house being chased.”

I mulled that over, remembering how my own mother used to chase me around the dining room table, flailing a wooden cooking spoon, half yelling, half laughing, at me to practice. In my memory, it looked like a game of tag—far
from the abuse meted out by Slenczynska’s father. But I also wondered what made him so effective.

Other people apparently wondered the same. No less a pianist and pedagogue than Artur Schnabel, the Austrian pianist renowned for his Beethoven interpretations, once asked Josef Slenczynska for child-rearing advice. “How did you start her?” he demanded, according to Slenczynska’s memoir. “I took my own son as a little boy and locked him in a room for eight hours a day and I made him study all by himself. That boy is sixteen and he is a young man now, but he can’t do what this little child of yours is doing. What did you do with her?” “That boy”—Karl Ulrich Schnabel—would in fact go on to have a fine career as a pianist and teacher, with a special interest in the literature of four-hand piano music.

As I said my good-byes to Slenczynska, she told me about one of her few remaining students, an eleven-year-old boy who was giving small recitals around New York. He had recently asked her the same question she’d once posed to her father. What would happen if he made a mistake at an upcoming recital? She smiled, crinkled her eyes, and answered in her kindliest, gentlest manner: “Your mother will still love you and I’ll still love you. The only difference is that people who were thinking of you as excellent will think of you as just okay.” She was her father’s daughter.

Susan Raeburn, a clinical psychologist in Berkeley, California, suggested that I carried unresolved intergenerational loss, by which she meant that I was burdened by the ghosts of previous
generations, alert and responsive to the wishes and expectations of people long dead. I regularly thought about my mother, father, and aunt and almost unconsciously consulted them before making any important decision. But did that mean I was carrying unresolved grief and trauma? I felt deeply beholden to my aunt, whom, as a child, I always pictured with a fairy wand in hand. She was the one who bought me my first piano, sent me to summer camp, funded my college education, and showered me with gifts and opportunities I never otherwise would have known. I believed that my mother felt so beholden to her older sister that when I was sixteen she offered me up as a sacrifice. She relocated our family from a little town in Canada to an even littler town three hours away in upstate New York. And when she realized that she had made a mistake and moved the family back again after a year, I stayed behind to finish high school and assume a life apart. My mother’s sense of duty splintered our family and changed my life. Jungians would probably see it as a modern-day version of Rapunzel, the story of a young girl handed over at adolescence to an older enchantress.