The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations (15 page)

Officially, we were working on the
Yangbanxi
. We had also been given Beethoven’s
Appassionata
Sonata; it turns out it was Lenin’s favorite piece of music. But it wasn’t enough. Where could we find more scores? Our previous ones had gone up in smoke in the Conservatory’s courtyard.

I had an idea. I went to see my friend, the daughter of Zho Henli, who had explained
Capital
to me. Could he perhaps send us scores?

My friend wrote to him. It was incredibly risky, far more dangerous than sending commentaries on class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Western music was still forbidden, and censorship still very much in place. But Zho Henli didn’t say no; what’s more, he was amazingly efficient. His strategy was to send many packages, one after another. Most of them never arrived, of course, but a few miraculously made it past the censor. For us, it was a veritable renaissance. We gathered around the scores as if they were buried treasure, gazing at them at length before hiding them again. What would happen if we were found out? We tried not to think about it.

The surviving packages that arrived contained the first book of Bach’s
Well-Tempered Clavier
, Chopin’s Scherzos and Ballades, Beethoven’s Sonatas for Cello and Piano, Grieg’s Concerto, and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. And then there was Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, whose haunting strains had accompanied me in my darkest hours. As soon as a score arrived, I began to play it on the nearest table, singing the orchestral accompaniment where needed.

How we fought over those few scores! It was fine to organize a schedule for passing them around, but how much better it would be if each of us had the full set. This time I called upon my mother for help: I asked her to find music paper for me. Once again, she managed, I don’t know how. Secretly, shaking with fear, I copied out all of the scores one by one. In order to save the precious paper, my notations were so cramped they were almost illegible. I took the greatest care with the first book of
The Well-Tempered Clavier
; I wanted each polyphonic voice to be clearly distinguishable.

This was how the camp and its surroundings came to resound with the music of Bach, Chopin, and Rachmaninoff. Some of the soldiers were skeptical. We reassured them that it was the
Yangbanxi
—and Albanian music as well! We sensed that they had their doubts, but no one expressed outright suspicion.

Huang Anlun, for his part, had managed to get hold of the theoretical writings of Walter Piston, a student of Nadia Boulanger’s who had taught at Yale for many years. His books had always held a mythical status for us. Now, thanks once again to Huang Anlun, I was able to diligently work on harmony, counterpoint, and musical analysis. I learned how to write fugues, and I compared my efforts with those in
The Well-Tempered Clavier
. One thing was entirely clear—I should immediately end my career as a composer and return to playing the piano in my refrigerator!

The refrigerator became my refuge. Despite the danger and the cold, I was happy there. For the first time, I could play what I wanted, for my pleasure alone—with no thought of the future. My relation to the piano was simple, and my desire to play and to learn the repertoire was insatiable. I felt at peace, weightless. A sensation of balance and fullness appeared, the kind that only comes with complete detachment from the purpose and usefulness of what one is doing.

I endlessly worked on my technique. At the Beijing Conservatory, I had labored tirelessly under Professor Pan. But the teaching there was very restrictive, and I was forever being advised for or against this or that work, based on whether it was “right” for me. Here, I was building my own technique, devising my own solutions to the challenges in Bach, Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff. For Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, with its formidable passages in octaves, I learned to keep my hands as close as possible to the keyboard, in order to soften the attack. I practiced it constantly, taking it as a sort of challenge. At the Conservatory, I was always told that my hands were too small to ever play Liszt well. Now Huang Anlun and I enjoyed playing the octave passages as fast as possible.

It is an incredible thing to relearn technique: to forget everything, to study it anew with an open mind, to seek out and find solutions. Arriving at a result within the limits of my physical resources, uncovering the music’s clarity—in the end, an activity as natural as eating and drinking—I learned this at Zhangjiakou. Montesquieu wrote: “I have never known any distress that an hour of reading did not relieve.” If one substituted the word
music
for
reading
, the exact same dictum applied to me.

Late in 1971, a few friends and I decided to give our first concert. The official program was
Yangbanxi
and Albanian music. Thousand-Drops unsuspectingly gave us permission—or so it seemed.

The night of the concert, twenty of my friends packed into the refrigerator to hear what, only a few months earlier, would have been unthinkable. Huang Anlun announced the real program: Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio, Dvorak’s Cello Concerto, and piano concertos by Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky. A highly romantic selection, reflective of the repertoire we loved. As the last chord sounded, I glanced around me and witnessed an emotion barely held in check. On each face there were the same questions:
Why were we being denied a future? Why had we been shut up here, without the right to practice our professions?
We could neither speak nor disperse. That night we drank, using alcohol to drown a host of feelings—happiness at our rediscovery of music, anguish at our powerlessness, and despair for our lost youth. By allowing us to glimpse something unattainable, Thousand-Drops had unwittingly kindled our fury. Our situation was now intolerable.

The next day, life returned to normal—the fieldwork was as exhausting and monotonous as ever. We planted and harvested. The passage of time was only perceptible to us by the births and deaths of the animals around us. A dog died, five pups were born. But we were still there.

We believed less and less in what we were doing. During collective study sessions of
The Little Red Book
, we pretended to read the assigned texts while studying scores hidden in our jackets. We became obsessed with freedom. No one gave a thought to
Fenpai
, the “posting” that would free us from the camp. A dog belonging to a local peasant family gave birth to two pups: we named them Fen and Pai.

From a nearby camp, the news came that someone had attempted suicide. A painter had twice tried to cut his wrists. Then Lidi, one of my roommates, became pregnant. Since sexual relations were strictly forbidden, she was forced to have an abortion, and a meeting of the entire camp was held to hear her self-criticism. But it wasn’t working anymore. We were not so easily fooled. Weren’t we men and women like everyone else? Human beings now old enough to form couples? After the meeting, we found Lidi in tears in a corner of the camp. The daughter of a revolutionary, she had always been a role model for us, and here she was—a poor sick girl who had been crushed and humiliated. In a clumsy attempt to console her, we pooled our money and bought her a chicken—the traditional Chinese gift for a young mother. Too late we realized how clumsy our gesture had been. Poor Lidi. She later married the father, but they never had another child.

The departures continued sporadically, as if to heighten the misery of those left to rot in Dayu. Early in 1972, shortly after the concert we gave together, Like left the camp. He promised to plead my case in Beijing, but deep inside I sensed that I would be the last to leave.

The day after his departure, despite a mounting feeling of despondency, I forced myself to trudge to the refrigerator to practice. When I opened the door, I saw that the entire floor was covered in huge bags. Like had left me a supply of coal that he had stolen before leaving. I tried not to think too much about him, about our friendship and the works we had played together. There was only one remedy for my despair—to practice the piano incessantly.

As always, my mother supported me. Once, I wrote to her that I didn’t understand the indications in foreign languages on my scores. A short time later, I received a small notebook filled with her sober, beautiful handwriting. She had somehow managed to borrow one of the rare dictionaries of musical terms that was still being clandestinely circulated in Beijing, and she copied it out—without knowing a word of Italian, German, French, or English.

In November of that year, I was suddenly told to move the piano. My new space faced directly north, and was even colder than its predecessor. This time, it was a real refrigerator! The keys felt like they were made of ice. Despite this, I tried to practice. I played powerfully and fast; that would surely keep me from freezing. After a few moments, I had to stop. I was chilled to the bone. I ran around the camp courtyard in an attempt to thaw out, but nothing worked. I then remembered something that Professor Pan once said: “The best way to warm up your fingers is to play the fugues from
The Well-Tempered Clavier
, and to clearly bring out each of the polyphonic voices.”

How in the world could a slow fugue produce that effect? But once again, my first teacher was correct. Over and over, I played the Fourth Fugue in C-Sharp Minor and the Twenty-Second in B-Flat Minor. They are the only two fugues in Book One in five voices, and the Fourth Fugue has three subjects. Here was meditative music whose polyphony achieved a sort of mineral-like density. To bring out all of its power and beauty, my hands—so often condemned to a sort of immobility—had to coax feats of poise, flexibility, independence, and phrasing out of my fingers. Very quickly, I felt the beneficial effects of this exercise: my mind became calm, energy began to circulate in each finger, and then in the rest of my body. The music gave rise to a sort of non-action; it was like Tai Chi, a martial art based on balance and concentration, and on “action without action.” An inner strength slowly awakened. That day, I understood that limbering up one’s fingers is more about mind than matter.

At Dayu, I did not spend all my time with musicians. I also made friends with Fu, a brilliant painter. When he arrived at our first camp at Yaozhanpu, he painted large murals to the glory of Mao and the Revolution that were so beautiful we were left speechless. He talked to me about Rembrandt and Van Gogh, and I taught him about music. He spent whole evenings listening to me play Bach and the
Appassionata
Sonata.

One evening as we stepped out of the refrigerator and crossed the courtyard, he stopped short.

“How many colors are there in the sky?”

I gazed intently, my brows knitted. I could only see one. He also looked upwards.

“I can see seven.”

As I stood there, unhappily still only perceiving one color, he gave me a piece of advice that I have remembered all my life:

“Every night, glance upward and observe, and you, too, will finally see the seven colors of the sky.”

I followed his advice. And for the first time in my life, I began to observe with awareness. Up to that point, everything had been relatively straightforward. People, things, and actions were either good or bad, black or white. By contemplating the sky, I began to understand that life was not like that. I discovered the meaning of nuance. Some nights I could see nothing. I was patient; the next time I was able to see what only the night before had been invisible.

And, of course, I also understood what Fu was trying to convey—the palette of the sky varied according to my mood.

Teng Wenji was another very good friend. He had been a student at the Cinema School. Like Guo Baochang, the man who stoked the boiler at Yaozhanpu, he would become one of China’s greatest film directors.

He was short and incredibly animated; he was also a consummate actor. He made us laugh, even here, within these isolated prison walls. He introduced me to cinema, excitedly explaining the quarrel between Stanislavski and Meyerhold, the two giants of early twentieth-century Russian theater. Stanislavski, the founder of the Actor’s Studio, advised actors to take on their characters’ emotions, in order to make the scene come alive. Meyerhold, on the other hand, preferred stylization over naturalism. Chekhov once said that he “gave free rein to his imagination to avoid imitating life: everything except reality.” Teng Wenji tried to persuade me:

“How can you not side with Stanislavski? When you act, you have to be
inside
the character.
Inside
!”

He described the films he loved, such as Eisenstein’s
Alexander Nevsky
. Standing before me, he acted out the famous battle scene on the ice of Lake Chudskoe. He explained framing, how the sky loomed menacingly over the warriors at the start of the sequence, about the brilliance of the montage, the epic feeling that it creates. He was so convincing that I was able to visualize the whole scene: the ice breaking beneath the Teutonic knights with their helmets pierced by narrow eye slits. Terrifying.

Teng Wenji was among those who came to hear me play. One day, he remarked:

“It’s too late for me to study music. But one day we’ll leave here. When I have a son, I want you to teach him.”

Teng Wenji had married right before leaving. He and his wife, who was in another camp, were separated by a great distance.

In time—and against all odds—our group was transformed into a sort of Villa Medici. We were a gathering of artists in the wilds of rural China, practicing one of Confucius’s precepts: “When three men are walking together, there is one who can be my teacher.”

Towards the end of 1973, I received an alarming letter from my mother: her stomach troubles had taken a turn for the worse, and she was afraid she would never see us again. I quickly made up my mind: I had escaped once, I could do it again.

One morning, I slipped out of camp by the latrines and hurried to the station to catch the train for Beijing.

It was the first time my sisters and I had seen each other in five years. But the Cultural Revolution had not changed certain things—we were no more expressive with our feelings than before. There were no reunion celebrations, no complaining, no pity. We had more important things to attend to. Mother needed an operation, and since Father was in a camp under close surveillance, we had to take matters in hand. The surgeon told us the worst—it was cancer. She had a year at most to live. We didn’t know it, but she had overheard everything.

“Too bad,” she told me. “I’m not going to treat it, and I don’t want a drastic intervention; I just want to be left in peace. All I want is to see Shanghai again.”

While my mother was resting at home before leaving for Shanghai, a milestone event occurred. At the invitation of Mao’s wife, the Philadelphia Orchestra, under the baton of Eugene Ormandy, was the first American orchestra to tour China since the start of the Cultural Revolution. Madame Mao had personally chosen the program for the orchestra’s three concerts, with Beethoven’s
Pastoral
Symphony as the centerpiece.

It was my dream to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra. In China, it had the reputation of being the best in the world. I was eager to expand my horizons. I wanted to do more than just play music by myself: I wanted to learn from Western musicians how it should be interpreted. Naturally, the audience was drawn from the ranks of soldiers, workers, and peasants, and there was no way to legally buy a ticket. I decided to risk going, no matter what. This was a rare opportunity.

The night of the first concert, there was an enormous crowd outside the hall. I joined the line, trying to look like a spectator who was confident about getting in. The crowd surged forward; the entrance drew nearer. I saw everyone showing their tickets, and quickly jumped out of line. Outside, I went around the entire building, trying to find another way in, but there were guards stationed at every entrance. Two hours later, the far-off thunder of applause put paid to my hopes.

I came back the next night, more determined than ever. But, like Tamino at the gates of Sarastro’s temple in
The Magic Flute
, the doors remained shut a second time. When I saw the crowds leaving the hall, however, I noticed that some people discarded their used tickets. All of a sudden, I had an idea. I had a friend who was a painter: if I picked up one of these scraps, he could easily forge the next day’s date on it.

When the counterfeit ticket was finished, my friend asked me once again:

“Are you sure you want to take the risk?”

“I’m dying to go; I know what I’m doing.”

“OK. But if you get caught, don’t say I did it!” he responded jokingly.

That evening, I returned to the concert hall, excited but anxious. My plan would only work if at least one ticket-holder didn’t show up! I got past the ticket check and headed immediately to the toilets—the best spot to wait. When the silence told me that the audience had all gone in, I slipped into the hall just before the doors closed. I looked quickly around me. There was an empty seat in the last row, and I rushed to take it. Eugene Ormandy made his entrance on stage, greeted the public and raised his baton. For the first time in my life I was hearing what a real orchestra sounded like. What an impression it made on me—the tonalities, the miraculous beauty of the string and wind sections! But I was gripped by fear. I glanced discreetly around me. What if I were to be arrested? What would I tell the police? What would happen to my parents? I was so nervous that I couldn’t really appreciate the concert. I left, frustrated but with the feeling that I had been given a lesson in music. What an orchestra! How splendid it was.