The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations (8 page)

“All his life Bach wrote for the Church. Do you believe in the story of Mary, the mother of Christ? No? Well, he wrote works about her!”

“Chopin was nothing but a sentimentalist.”

“And Debussy was an idealist.”

Only Mozart escaped this bonfire of criticism. I never really understood why. No doubt this was additional proof of his genius.

A few months later, we were all convinced: from now on, we had to play genuinely proletarian music and to perform it in the countryside, in factories, and in military camps. I went a step further than the others: I wanted to change my life, stop playing the piano, and become a soldier. I wanted to be a real revolutionary! We were shown examples of young university students who had gone to live in rural areas. Among them was one of my cousins—I idolized him. Many were
Chushen bu hao
students who had severed ties with their families. One of my schoolmates had disowned his mother and had gone in search of a new one, in a factory or in the countryside.

By late spring, events had begun to accelerate.

The Little Red Book
had just been published. Purges in the literary and artistic world began. We divided our summer break between a new
Shang shan xia xiang
and a few weeks of vacation before starting at the Conservatory again. On the first day of classes, the director informed us of instructions she had received from the Ministry of Culture. From now on, we would no longer play Western classical music. Only a few volumes of technical exercises would be tolerated—Czerny, Hanon—but nothing else.

Like my other schoolmates, I was neither surprised nor distressed. It was a logical decision. We were prepared for it. In the course of a year, the vast majority of the four hundred students and professors of the Beijing Conservatory had been completely turned around in their thinking. We were now convinced that we should put Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven behind us and only play authentically proletarian music. Mao could be proud: he had accomplished something that no one in history had dared to imagine.

Under such conditions, life at the Conservatory no longer resembled anything coherent. Without scores, music classes no longer had any reason to exist. Mao had invented a “Conservatory without music.” The only classes that were still held were those of general education, as well as denunciation and self-criticism sessions. We discussed the new heroes that the regime provided as examples, first and foremost Lei Feng, a young soldier who had died in 1962 after a life devoted to the revolutionary cause. We read his journals with fervor, and by so doing followed Mao’s slogan: “Learn from Comrade Lei Feng.” Every day we asked ourselves how we could best imitate his example by attempting, in turn, to come to the aid of our family and friends. We were told that Lei Feng had drawn his strength from a close reading of Mao’s writings. It was through his ceaseless study of them before taking any action that he had been able to attain such a level of perfection. I was captivated: Lei Feng dominated my life.

New forms of interpersonal control were put in place. The regime sensed that the relative idleness of several hundred musicians, most of them from bourgeois backgrounds, was a dangerous thing. Each one of us was therefore obliged to be part of a two-person “red team,” where each person criticized the other in order to help him or her progress. The composition of these teams was carefully worked out to match good revolutionaries with those who were less so. To avoid any collusion, the teams changed frequently.

However, the situation created by the ban on Western music soon became untenable. In the autumn, the professors decided to collectively write a certain number of compositions. At least that way we would have something to play.

The works that emerged a few weeks later were inspired by scenes from the life of peasants, workers, and soldiers. The titles included
The Little Shepherd, Return from Shooting Practice
, and
The Wheat Dance
. The most cheerful of them all was
Return from Shooting Practice
.

The scores were dreadfully difficult: using a pentatonic scale, they forced us to rework whole areas of our technique. For months, the “Conservatory without music” resounded with this handful of works that hundreds of students played at the same time.

Concurrently, the administration decided to teach us to dance and to train us in the performing arts. This was so we could participate in the staging of the
Yangbanxi
, the “model works” that Madame Mao—whose political role continued to expand—had decided to commission to compensate for the enormous gap left by the ban on the great Western works. The
Yangbanxi
dominated the programs of every concert given in China, no matter what the venue, whether it was a theater, soldier’s camp, factory, or countryside; and the students from the Conservatory had a duty to promote them. For me, it was a form of torture: physically awkward, I was nevertheless obliged to, by turns, dance, sing, recite, and play the piano. Once again I was severely criticized: if I was incapable of dancing, it was because I didn’t have a real feel for the proletariat.

It goes without saying that under these conditions, any competitive spirit and drive for success disappeared. How one played was now of secondary importance: the only thing that mattered was one’s political behavior.

At the end of 1964, intensification of the class struggle had become the battle cry. Mao demanded that we, the young people, never forget it. The term “Cultural Revolution” was heard for the first time. The whole of 1965 was spent between the monotonous life of the “Conservatory without music” and an increasing number of
Shang shan xia xiang
in the countryside, factories, and military camps. Beneath an outer calm, the storm was brewing.

Early one June morning in 1966, the music that woke us was louder than usual. Jolted from sleep, I sat straight up, filled with a sense of foreboding. We were scarcely out of bed when we were instructed to assemble in the Conservatory’s auditorium.

“Professors, workers, and students,” our director began, as an article from that day’s newspaper was being handed out, “we have just received some very important news. Please read this immediately. We must discuss it.”

The article was a reprint of a
Dazibao
²
that had been written a few days earlier by a certain Nie Yuanzi, a philosophy professor at Beida, Beijing’s largest university. In the article, Nie violently denounced the university’s rector and the municipality of Beijing, accusing both of being revisionists. To defend the Cultural Revolution, she called upon the Chinese people to take up arms.

The reaction in the hall was one of astonishment. The Revolution was in danger! Discussions continued afterwards outside, and we met to examine Nie Yuanzi’s article in greater depth.

Each time someone began to speak, I couldn’t keep myself from trembling: someone was going to accuse me, I was sure of it. My father had hidden something about his past, and it would be revealed; I’d be thrown into the abyss. I tried to calm myself down. We had to trust in Mao, he was right, he was
by definition
right. It couldn’t be otherwise.

But the target was someone much more important—the Conservatory’s director. I was overlooked that day. The few students who had taken charge of the discussions insinuated that she might be a revisionist and an anti-revolutionary. The Conservatory immediately split into two groups: those defending the director and those opposing her. I joined the ranks of the supporters. The person who had made me write my self-criticism, who accompanied us on every
Shang shan xia xiang
—how could
she
be against Chairman Mao?

This was explained to us: because of the Conservatory’s leadership, we had received a bourgeois education, which had cut us off from the lifeblood of the New China—its peasants, soldiers, and workers. The sentimentalism of the works we had been taught had led us to become egotists, concerned only with elitism. We had forgotten about class struggle and had placed ourselves above the proletariat. In doing so, we had jeopardized the central goal of the revolution: to bring dignity and well-being to the oppressed. Hence, we had been trained to be enemies of the revolution and thus enemies of the people.

Wasn’t this in fact true?
we asked each other. I thought back to the old peasant woman who had suffered so much in her youth, and her gratitude to Chairman Mao for everything he had done for her. Under the erroneous guidance of our professors and their admiration of foreign music, we were in the process of cutting ourselves off from her, and didn’t people like her matter the most?

The agitation grew.
Dazibaos,
denunciations, insults, and abuse: the extremist students progressively took over, organizing meeting after meeting, fanning the flames. Most of them were from high-ranking Communist families and had been admitted to the Conservatory based on their political merits rather than on their talent. They were excellent students when it came to general subjects, but their lackluster musical gifts put them in an uncomfortable position with the best of our music professors.

The very professors who were to be targeted next.

We were told to gather on the sports field. When I arrived, I saw our teachers on their knees on the running track, surrounded by Red Guards.
³

“Comrades, here are the guilty ones!” yelled a Red Guard.

He turned towards them:

“You are all bourgeois intellectuals. Because of you, professors, the Conservatory is betraying the Revolution. Because of you, this place has become a temple of elitism. Because of you, a student attempted to commit suicide!”

My heart nearly stopped. I thought he was going to ask me to step out of the crowd. But no, he continued his litany of insults. I caught my breath while the Red Guards required each professor to deliver a self-criticism. They were forced to bow ever lower before us. When the oldest ones attempted to straighten up, a blow to the neck pushed them to the ground.

“That’s not enough! Delve deeper! You are hiding things. Give us details!” they shouted at each person in turn.

Then the violence escalated: the Red Guards took off their belts, swung them above the kneeling professors, and struck them. The buckles scraped, cut, and dug into them.

From a distance, I could see the men and women on their knees. By now, most were bleeding. A violin instructor’s head had been gashed open. He was bald, and the blood dripping from his wounds turned his head completely red. He looked close to death. I was afraid, but at the same time I was ashamed of my fear. To bolster my courage, I thought constantly of the face of the old, oppressed peasant woman. One had to chose between classes—that was the law of the Revolution. I chose to side with the oppressed over the bourgeois and the petit-bourgeois. The bloody scene horrified me, but this was the price one had to pay for New China’s future.

The bloodbath went on and on. Each self-criticism ended with blows and wounds.

“He is guilty,” one of the Red Guards decided.

“He is guilty,” we had to reply in unison, before endlessly shouting, our fists in the air: “Long live Mao and the Revolution!”

I saw Professor Pan in the crowd. He was too young to be on the running track with the other professors, but he no doubt sensed that his time would come. The self-criticism session came to an end. The Red Guards doused each professor in ink, then flour and water, before parading them in front of us as we shouted:

“Long live Mao and the Revolution!”

In the days that followed, the violence spread. We lashed out against the teaching staff. We wrote one
Dazibao
after another, each day searching for something new to say, whether it was based on fact or not: “It is our professors’ fault that we have had a bad education!” “The father of our Russian professor translated Chiang Kai-shek!”

Professor Pan was no longer spared. A number of
Dazibaos
found fault with him. “Pan Yiming has given us a bourgeois education. He invited us to his home. We ate bourgeois food there. He took us traveling.” “Pan Yiming had us work on Chopin’s Ballade No. 2. He told us, without criticizing it, that the piece was inspired by a poem composed by the Polish bourgeois intellectual Adam Mickiewicz.” We wrote so many
Dazibaos
that there was not enough room on the walls for them to remain posted for more than a day.

Our professors were paraded all day long in the school’s courtyard or made to clean the toilets. The most senior among them were suspected of collaboration with the old order; they suffered the worst abuse. Our teachers no longer dared speak to us, and fled when they caught sight of a student. We no longer addressed them, either. When I met Professor Pan, I didn’t say anything and pretended I didn’t know him. Now I understood that what he had given me was nothing compared with the damage he had inflicted by educating me to be an intellectual.

Some didn’t survive. Like a number of other major Chinese intellectuals, two piano teachers from the Shanghai Conservatory—Gu Shengying and Li Cuizhen—decided to take their own lives.

After having been beaten and humiliated in public, Gu Shengying killed herself, along with her mother and brother. It was rumored that she had turned on the gas, sat down at her piano, and played Chopin’s Funeral March. The news of her death came as a terrible shock. She was a very beautiful, delicate woman who had performed at the very first concert I ever attended. That evening, she had interpreted Chopin’s Scherzos with simplicity, fluidity, and lightness of touch. As I listened, I had made a wish: one day I hoped to be able to play like her.

She was followed by another legendary musician: Li Cuizhen. When I was very young, people often asked: “Do you know who is the only Chinese pianist to have all of Beethoven’s thirty-two sonatas and Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier
in her repertoire?” She had dedicated her life to music, and was a role model for us all. She had put on her loveliest concert attire—in which she had given so many magnificent concerts—and ended her days.

Why would such a great artist refuse to take the path that was leading us to socialism? Why hadn’t she trusted in Chairman Mao? Her choice was a sign of cowardice. Every day, at each meeting and in each self-criticism session, we were told: the Revolution is in grave danger, the class struggle must continue. If not, the traitors of the proletariat will reestablish the old order. At sixteen years old, the only thing I could do was to believe this. It was a question of survival, but also one of ideals: at that age one yearns to give oneself, body and soul, to a great cause. And wasn’t the well-being of the proletariat a worthy cause?

The Conservatory had drifted into such a state of anarchy that the Central Committee decided to step in. I was on the front lines, standing at the school’s entrance, when twenty soldiers arrived to reestablish order. We cheered them on, calling out our encouragement. The army had now become my role model. I admired them—the
Chushen hao
, those with “good family backgrounds”—they were courageous, dedicated, and selfless. I was impressed by their uniforms. For me, like many others who were followers rather than leaders, the fact that the military had taken charge of the Conservatory was more than just reassuring: it was an honor.

We were immediately told to assemble in the auditorium for a meeting. A soldier urged us to see reason:

“Order must be restored here! Students, you are not solely in charge of the Revolution!”

A semblance of calm was restored. Each class was placed under the authority of a soldier. To calm the extremists’ enthusiasm, the army interrogated them about the details of their own activities over the “last seventeen years”—as the expression went—that is, since 1949.

But the lull in the storm was short-lived. A new rift appeared, between those who supported the soldiers and those who opposed them. The latter maintained that the army’s intervention was anti-revolutionary. They wrote to Madame Mao, accusing the military of stifling the Revolution. Mao himself took the students’ side, proclaiming that investigations into what they had done in the “last seventeen years” should stop; the only thing that mattered was their support for the Revolution today. A few days later, an order from the Central Committee came down: the soldiers were to vacate the premises.

One by one, I was deprived of my reference points: first the director, then the army…Clearly, I didn’t understand a thing about either the Revolution or the class struggle. I was tired of always being on the wrong side, losing each battle, making a mess of everything. My friends kept repeating that Mao was always right, that the best strategy was to follow him, even if it wasn’t always clear where he was leading us. So, we followed. It was the safest way—the only way—to reassure ourselves. We had to go forward, abandon music, heed Chairman Mao’s call, and seize the initiative of the Revolution.