Playing Scared (27 page)

A week after the library recital in May, my teacher had flown to Shanghai to see her husband. During her absence, she arranged for me to perform for two of her colleagues. One was a retired Argentinian pianist in long floral robes named Celia Mendez; the other was Ellen’s own duet partner, Tom Burns. I played through my entire repertoire for each of them, and they gave me hours of undivided attention. I left their studios, my head spinning with suggestions, criticisms, and interpretations regarding tempo, articulation, pedaling, and the length of my fermatas, or pauses. I drove two hours to Berkeley for yet another lesson with Gwendolyn Mok, the concert pianist who had urged me to go for excellence instead of perfection. A demanding pedagogue, Mok was known for her wit and her insights, which could be acerbic. A friend of mine, knowing how thin-skinned I could be about the piano, questioned whether I really needed to subject myself to Mok’s scrutiny.

The answer was yes. I was feeling a lot more assured about my playing, and I wanted to know what she thought. She had recently recorded a collection of Brahms’s piano music and had strong ideas about how he should be approached. After I played through the Romanze in F Major, she pointed to the inner voicings—not the soprano line I’d been drawing out, but the alto and tenor lines, which, she believed, symbolized the secret love of Brahms and Clara Schumann. “And don’t brace your shoulders,” she cautioned as I furiously took notes. “When you play an octave, you stick your boobs out. That’s not going to help.” I had to find the hydraulics in my hands,
flatten them like pancakes, and then raise them, elevator style, like an old Citroën automobile.

I was still making sense of everything she and the others had told me when Ellen returned to California. She had cut short her stay in China to fly back and hear me one last time before my concert. She never got jet lag, she said, dismissing my hesitation about scheduling a lesson a few hours after her touchdown in San Jose. She would be ready to go after a brief nap. All she asked for was a wake-up call on my way over “the hill.” I remembered to call her at the summit. The phone rang and rang until finally she picked up, her voice cracked with sleep and not all that pleased to hear me. “Is there any way we can reschedule?” she asked. I had just passed the last turnoff on Highway 17, and there wouldn’t be another one until I reached the base of the mountain, not far from her house. My concert was four days away. “Oh, just come over,” she capitulated. “Drive slow. I’ll make some strong coffee.”

She hadn’t heard me play for nearly a month, and I began with the rhapsody. I knew I had had a breakthrough these last few weeks, but I wasn’t prepared for Ellen’s response. She set down her coffee, stared at me, and passed her hands across her heart. “You are at a whole other level,” she declared. I played
Reflets dans l’eau
, and when I finished, she shook her head. “You have had a transformation.” It happened with each piece I played, and when I was done she stood up and seemed to search for what she wanted to say. “You are a different pianist from the last time I heard you.”

Now, lying on the floor of the Sunday School office, my chartreuse dress smoothed beneath me, I told myself I had
every reason for confidence. I had chosen each piece on my program because I loved it. The program was ambitious, an hour’s worth of music, nearly twice what I played at the library, and I intended to communicate my love for this music, perhaps to make converts of people who wouldn’t otherwise hear it, like my friends who listened mostly to Bob Marley and Jimmy Buffett. I wanted to keep Bach and Brahms alive. In the late 1960s, in the heat of my infatuation with Glenn Gould, I’d worn out the grooves listening to his recording of Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier
, studying the cover, gazing into those brooding, leonine eyes—never guessing that the reason behind his repudiation of live performance was most likely stage fright. Now here I was, about to perform the Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, one of my favorites from the
Well-Tempered Clavier
.

“Are you ready, Mom?” Max asked. I raised myself up off the floor. I was as ready as I would ever be. He led the way up a flight of stairs into the octagonal sanctuary. It wasn’t far from a noisy interchange on Highway 1, but the sanctuary was an oasis of quiet and the bank of stained-glass windows cast the soft light of a forest canopy. I’d spent a couple of hours in the room over the previous week, familiarizing myself with the Yamaha grand piano, moseying around the pews, getting comfortable in the space. Entering it now, I moved past a crowd of faces that appeared to me as unfocused as a drive-by blur. These were my children, my family, and my friends, some of whom had come from the East Coast, the Rocky Mountains, Hawaii, and Canada. I picked out my sister, Syma, who more than almost anyone understood what this occasion
meant to me. I tried to make out my friend Amy, who had flown in from Montana, but my eyes clouded over. It was time to take a bow, and I made it quick. I sat down at the piano, made eye contact with Max, and jumped into the Haydn. I forgot to center. I forgot to let in—what had Landis Gwynn called it?—the sacredness. I just played. And for a while it was okay. Then I lost it. My breath hung in the air. My fingers screeched to a halt. My heart was in my mouth. What a cliché. But it wasn’t just my heart. All my vital organs had moved up and lay at the base of my throat.
Remember, no matter what happens, keep on going! Don’t stop!
Lynn Kidder, my page-turner, my Virgil, laid her fingers on the page and I was back.

With Haydn over, Max walked off and I heard Don Greene’s command.
Never again—not in your sleep, not in your thoughts—are you to sit down at the piano without centering.
Alone, I centered.
Feel it. See it. Hear it.
I heard the first few bars of the Bach prelude and knew how I would play them. Landis, my former teacher, had cautioned me to take it slower than I was accustomed, but as I began the prelude I paid no mind to prudence. I had a passion for this piece, which struck me as simultaneously rational and emotional, Apollonian and Dionysian. It demanded utter control, yet it was a wild piece with a tension that advanced and uncoiled until it reached the point where all hell broke loose. After so many months of practicing and deconstructing its mysteries, I had the technique to play it as I heard it, and my intent was to turn loose its ferocity. Now I felt my fingers run through the familiar patterns and had the image of a tightrope. But I wasn’t walking a tightrope; I was running it. I came to the pause, the silence
before the fast and furious presto. My eyes flickered across the page, which looked more like a swarm of ants than the music I so thoroughly knew. It was a Hansel and Gretel moment—I was lost—but then, yes, I spotted the crumbs leading back to the path. I finished with a false sense of gusto and continued on to the fugue. A feeling of dispiritedness moved through me: disappointment; a taste of bile. I paused for a long moment before starting the rhapsody, then exhaled so loudly that I thought I heard an echo. The acoustics of the room were excellent.

Months before, Ellen had assured me that one day this would be my signature piece. I loved it for its sheer physicality: its two-octave leaps, the repeated crossings of the left hand over the right, and the sonorous heavy chords. It was like wrestling a grizzly bear. It was the most majestic piece I had ever played. The emotion it unleashed was practically excruciating; Brahms’s yearning and perseverance seemed to cry out from every note. I forgot the audience and aligned myself with its fierceness and introspection. By the time I moved on to Debussy’s
Suite Bergamasque
, the music took over.
Feel it. See it. Hear it.
The prelude was otherworldly, a reprieve from the intensity of Brahms. The music was falling into place, and I hardly had to do anything except follow it.

It was only after my encore—a tango by the Argentinian Astor Piazzolla—that I allowed myself to look around the room, settling on faces, including that of my oldest son, Ben, seated in the front row with his partner, Amanda. They had flown in from Maui for my big day, but—befogged by Brahms—I hadn’t noticed them until that moment. Handing me a bouquet of
white roses, Ben gave me a hug, and I can vaguely remember the roomful of people on their feet. My eyes combed the room, as if maybe, in my heart of hearts, I expected to spot my mother, a younger version of the one I’d last known, sitting tall and erect, chin jutted, clearly proud of me, forgiving of my mistakes—while also fully cognizant of how many I had made.

Ellen and Sara after the recital
(Ted Lorraine)

Back at the house, I celebrated my sixtieth birthday with a party, but I felt bereft. Now what? For days, I brooded about whether I had fallen short of my goal. I was reluctant to listen to the recording of the concert, afraid of what I would hear. I remembered how I once used to avoid checking my bank balance, certain I would find it in the red. But when I finally broke down and listened to my concert, I was surprised. I
heard some lapses, yes. But I also heard expressiveness. I heard assertiveness. I heard a voice. What I heard was me, Sara: I was not a professional, and I was hardly perfect. But I was striving for excellence, and sometimes I attained it.

My father had once told me that the best way to understand something about myself was to try to change it. (In my memory, he was alluding to my bad habit of biting my nails. It drove him crazy.) He was obsessed with the idea of change, probably because he was so resistant to change himself. He lectured us kids about it constantly—usually to impress upon us the intractability of personality. He relished the Jesuit maxim “Give me the boy until he is seven and I will show you the man”—though in my father’s opinion, the magic age was more like two. But he was an inconsistent man, so he also told us that the best way to try to understand something is to try to change it. I would take those words to heart, though it was years before I discovered that my stubborn dad was quoting Kurt Lewin, the social psychologist famous for his theories on the human potential for change.

Lewin’s model was based on three stages: “unfreezing, changing, and freezing.” The first stage, “unfreezing,” begins with the recognition that a change is required. (In my case, it was time for me to face my demons.) Once a person accepts that imperative, she has to overcome her inertia (I had to declare my intent, find the right teacher, ratchet up my practicing) and dismantle her previous “mind-set” (my conviction that I was not a performer, that maybe I wasn’t even a real pianist). The second stage is where “change” actually occurs. It’s not a single event; it’s a period of transition, a process that generates confusion and even chaos. (I perform, make
mistakes, feel chagrined, but learn to survive and accept imperfection.) In the third stage, known as “freezing” or “refreezing,” the change is crystallized and becomes the new norm. The journey has come to an end. (I can settle in and congratulate myself on a job well done. I’m a performer now.)

Which is where I part ways with Lewin. Conquering stage fright isn’t like planting a flag on the moon. The journey doesn’t end so definitively. In important ways, it doesn’t end at all. For me, the act of getting up and playing before an audience is something I’ll wrestle with for as long as I play the piano.

Looking back, I see the gap that’s always existed between who I think I am and the reality of what I am. Forty years ago, as an au pair in Italy, I happened to find a letter written by the signora, describing me as
“gentile, pero poco timida”
—nice, but a little shy. Her opinion shocked me. I—the loudmouth of my family, the one who fought and won most dinnertime debates, if only through the force of my voice—
timida
? My private and public personae were more different than I wished to admit.

We all dance so freely when alone in our bedrooms. The danger lies in stepping out from behind the closed door. Early in my year’s journey, I heard of a man who hoarded five pianos, two of them grands, in a double-wide trailer. He refused to play for anybody but himself; he collected pianos the way some people collect figurines. The image of those imprisoned pianos haunted me. It seemed pathetic, his music making like the proverbial tree falling in the forest. What was the good of all that music if there was no one to hear it? The image spurred me on to break out of my own double-wide trailer.

I’m out.

A few years ago I was visiting my friend Amy Linn in Missoula when, deep into a bottle of wine, we began swapping stories about stage fright. I described my piano disasters, she told me about her equestrian ones. That conversation set in motion a project that would consume me for the next three years. Amy’s smarts and creative vision have inspired me from the beginning. Her early readings were invaluable, and when I got lost in a thicket of words, she helped me find my way out.

This project leaned on the expertise of many different people, beginning with my piano teachers: Landis Gwynn, whose uncontained passion for Bach and Beethoven first brought me back to classical music; Lynn Kidder, my ballast whenever I feared I was reaching too high; and especially Ellen Tryba Chen, who pushed, prodded, and refused to accept anything less than excellence. Or at least my version of it.