The Soloist

Mark Salzman was born in Connecticut in 1959. He divides his time between writing, practicing martial arts, and playing the cello. He and his wife—and their cats, birds, and fish—have adapted to life in Los Angeles, especially since mastering the freeway system.

Books by
Mark Salzman

Iron & Silk

The Laughing Sutra

The Soloist

Lost in Place

Lying Awake

It is my privilege to thank several delightful people for their help with this book. For questions about music and the professional musical life I turned primarily to Martha Salzman, harpsichordist, music teacher and cherished mother. This book’s dedication reflects my gratitude to her for having taught me to enjoy music, to work hard but not too hard at all things, and to value kindness above all else.

I also benefited from the advice and hilarious anecdotes of the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who is as warmhearted, gracious and articulate as he is talented. Dr. L. Jolyon West of the Neuropsychiatric Institute of UCLA treated me to invaluable insights from his experiences as one of our premier forensic psychiatrists, gave me a crash course in the history of the insanity defense, and offered terrific solutions to problems I was having with the story—all in one unforgettable afternoon. Karen Gee, deputy public defender, Ryan H. Rainey, deputy district attorney, and Luis Li, lawyer and mountaineer, tutored me from scratch about how trials work in California. Karen was good enough to read the nearly finished manuscript during one of her rare vacations, and then return
it with such detailed comments that I considered submitting her notes to the
Yale Law Review
.

Others who kindly shared their expertise on subjects ranging from life in organized Zen communities to the optics of lunar eclipses are Tek Young Lin, James and Van Loc Tran Doran, Shiho Ito, Drs. Christine and Armand Guigui, John Ahouse and Joseph Salzman. I owe special thanks to Victoria Steele, head of the Special Collections Department at USC Library, who worked tirelessly to help me locate the best possible materials and informants whenever I had questions or problems. She is a real treasure, as anyone who has had the pleasure of meeting or working with her will attest.

More than a dozen good friends and an almost equal number of family members agreed to read early drafts of the manuscript in spite of my preposterous requirement that they be honest with me only if they loved it. All of them managed to compliment the book so skillfully that I hardly realized I was being corrected, and for this I am deeply grateful. I would like to give special mention to two friends—both artists in the very best sense of the word—who gave the manuscript more attention than I can adequately thank them for, and whose thoughtful compliments resulted in the most corrections: Timothy Steele, poet, and Terry Sanders, filmmaker. My editor at Random House gave me excellent advice that strengthened and clarified the story and made this, at last, a real book. I also want to acknowledge my incalculable debt to Eric Ashworth, Rebecca Saletan, Neil Olson, Michael Siegel and Andrew Reich, without whose guidance and persistent efforts on my behalf I would probably have gone back to working in Chinese restaurants by now. I would also like to thank Professor Hugh M. Stimson for his friendship, his good-natured prodding, and for his singularly heartening
concern for this and other projects of mine over the last sixteen years.

Finally, I must say that it would not be possible to thank Jessica Yu—filmmaker, writer and wife—enough for her assistance during the two years it took to write this book. As always, she gave unfailingly constructive advice and criticism from beginning to end, and if she ever got tired of hearing about or discussing the book, she never let it show. She is an inexhaustible source of brilliant ideas and has a priceless sense of humor; fortune smiled on me when we crossed paths.

This morning I read an article suggesting that Saint Theresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic noted for her ecstatic visions, suffered from a neurological disorder known to cause hallucinations. I found the article while browsing through my colleague Martin’s bookshelves the other day. He subscribes to more journals and magazines than our department library, and enjoys having visitors to his office, so I wander down the hall at least twice a week to read and chat with him. I expressed surprise over the content of the article, but Martin said he’d suspected as much for years. “I’ll bet it’s just a matter of time before they prove that most of those saints had their wires crossed. Along with a lot of artists. They’re pretty sure now that Van Gogh had a kind of brain disease that made him see everything as if it were saturated with yellow light. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that William Blake was epileptic.”

Maybe scientists will discover that musical genius is an allergic reaction to sound or a symptom of a vitamin deficiency in the brain. If so, I’ll have a lot to think about; as a child I was accustomed to receiving standing ovations in thousand-seat halls but now I play for an audience of one—
and she can’t tell me what she thinks. Was I stricken or healed when my gift faded?

I’ll be thirty-six years old this spring, which is young for a retired concert soloist but old for a virgin. I started out as a musical prodigy. When I was three years old my mother took me next door to meet our new neighbor, a young schoolteacher who had just moved to Poughkeepsie. I remember that she had a wandering right eye, which frightened me. While she and my mother talked I slipped away and discovered a small upright piano in an adjacent room. Although I’d never seen a piano before, within minutes I was able to pick out the melody of a song I’d heard on the radio. By the time my mother noticed my absence and came looking for me, I had worked out the harmony as well.