Playing Scared (5 page)

Brown enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley and majored in political science. He worked as press secretary to a New York congresswoman and eventually returned to California as communications director for the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where today he trains his staff how to be effective public speakers. The most important thing, he tells them, is plenty of practice. He can see in an instant when someone is nervous. Men tap their feet; their voices go dry. Women’s necks bloom shades of red and purple; their voices turn squeaky and thin. People develop telltale idiosyncrasies. Whenever one of his colleagues is called upon to speak, she picks up her ever-present can of Diet Coke, then sets it down, picks it up, and sets it down, obsessively, without ever taking a sip. Brown has recommended that she leave the drink back at her desk.

Yet, ironically, he still gets what he calls “a modified version of stage fright,” rambling and losing focus when it’s his turn to perform. He procrastinates when the next presentation looms, because, frankly, he would rather not think about it. “The high irony is that I train people to give presentations and make sure they practice like crazy.”

I returned to the piano when I was forty-nine, prodded by my youngest son, Jesse, who had just discovered jazz. I had occasionally accompanied the other boys—Ben on flute and Max on violin—until each surpassed my sight-reading skills. It had been one of my favorite things to do with them when they were little, as long as no one was sitting and listening in judgment. But Jesse was demanding something more. He wanted me to improvise along with him on the clarinet, and he refused to accept my protestations that I had no knowledge of jazz and no idea where to begin. Finally, after months of prodding, I called an acquaintance whom I knew to be a fine pianist, someone who played both jazz and classical, to get some pointers.

Because it had been so long—thirty years—since I had sat down and actually practiced, Landis Gwynn suggested I brush up with some classical music for a couple of weeks. It would help get my hands back into shape. I went back to the Mozart Sonata in A Minor, the one I had first played for Mr. Weiss, and the
Bagatelles
by Alexander Tcherepnin, which my aunty
Maddy had played for me when I was a toddler lying under her piano. I started picking my way through a Brahms intermezzo, a Bach prelude and fugue, and the first movement of Beethoven’s
Waldstein
Sonata.

At my first lesson, I was so nervous that I could hardly play through a line without a blunder. My hands shook. I apologized almost nonstop. “My God, Sara, what did they do to you?” Landis demanded. I took lessons with him for six years and never did move on to jazz. He taught me how to practice in new ways, to take apart seemingly impossible passages and deconstruct them in various rhythms. I was his only student—he made his living as a tech writer—but he prepared for our lessons with a commitment that matched my own. He listened to multiple recordings of whatever piece I was working on at the time, scrutinized the score, and sight-read it through before coming to our weekly lesson with specific ideas about how I should approach the music.

Landis was a burly man who had played offensive tackle on his Connecticut high school’s undefeated football team, and even in his fifties he had a robust metabolism. He sweated profusely during our lessons, and it became a custom for him to laughingly excuse himself, usually around the halfway point, to wash up and change his shirt. We were unprepared for how serious and important these lessons would become to us both. By now, I was practicing two or three hours in the evenings, tackling increasingly difficult music, and surprising myself and my teacher with my appetite for work.

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 their 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.”