zhu-xiaomei

Zhu Xiao Mei, author The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations

[eBook extracts, below]

Here are some of the pieces she describes [click "play" arrow on left of track number

for 30 second sample]; cd media has no preview, though

:::: J.S. Bach: Variations Goldberg

::::J.S. Bach: Well Tempered Clavier - vol. 1 AND Well Tempered Clavier - vol. 2

::::Bach: Partitas BWV825-830

::::Mozart: Works for Piano

::::Schubert & Beethoven: Piano Sonatas

::::Schumann: Davidsbundlertanze, Kinderszenen

::::Sonates Hayden

Venue favorites in Paris

<>enchantment of Place Dauphine | Place de Furstenberg | Place des Vosges (shades of Victor Hugo remain)

<>churches of awe and wonder: Saint Julien le Pauvre | Saint Germain des Pres

Other important sites & pilgrimage spots in the book

Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where JS Bach long worked and finally as laid to rest

Shaoshan, whence the man later who became Chairman Mao grew up (in China)

Brattleboro, Vermont where Xiao-Mei lived, worked and practiced

Reading notes

==page 26 I wanted only one thing: to please the public by playing “Red May” for them.

*lookup

==page 30

Mao had stated that the Chinese people were “poor and blank […] but on a blank sheet of paper the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted.” Instead of beautiful pictures, there was famine: twenty million Chinese starved to death in the years that followed. Officially, the cause was drought in the north and floods in the south—certainly not Mao’s madness.

==page 99

we’ll get in touch with you,” the person had said as he had left. My father was disturbed by the encounter and reported it to the authorities, which he wasn’t obliged to do. This incident, along with my uncle’s departure for Taiwan, had cost our family dearly. It was the reason my two older sisters had been forbidden to enroll in university. Now it was the allegation behind sending my father to a camp. As a young revolutionary, this was a painful lesson for me: if you wanted to survive in this country, you’d best not be honest.

==page 106

In a very short time, my hope of learning and transforming myself into a real revolutionary collapsed. The goal of camp life was not to educate us—it was to break us. Every day was the same, structured around the same hard labor. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would last five years. Every morning, we were awoken at six.

==page 108

self-criticism and denunciation session. This was not an arbitrary rule, and it played a role in our “re-education”: not allowing us to wash was just one way among many to deprive us of our dignity.

==page 116

the idea. Soon, most of us considered this woman laudable: a pig feeds the collective while one’s attachment to a child is an individualist and bourgeois sentiment.

==page 126

Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto. He had written it at the end of a deep depression; it matched the desolate, vast landscape surrounding Zhangjiakou.

==page 133

Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata; it turns out it was Lenin’s favorite piece of music.

==page 137

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.

==page 140

“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.

==page 148

Yes, I was free, but I was anxious and bitter. I looked back and reflected on the lost years: on the music I hadn’t played and the books I hadn’t read. I thought about the love I hadn’t been able to give to my family, how my grandmother had died alone, how I had suspected my father of being a spy. About how my dignity had been taken from me. About the acts I had committed.

==page 150

“You’re not tired? Then continue playing.” I had just finished the Appassionata Sonata and was starting on Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto. When I was done, Professor Pan laughingly chided me, “I know why you’re not tired. It’s because you’re not inside the music. You aren’t moved, you aren’t playing with your heart. You’re not working with your imagination as I taught you.

==page 151

simpler and more challenging. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, and above all Scarlatti.”

== page 154

recordings by Emil Guilels, a powerful but sensitive pianist, who languished somewhat in Sviatoslav Richter’s shadow.

==page 155

The Tangshan earthquake—which killed hundreds of thousands of people—seemed to augur some great event, an imminent change of dynasty. And indeed, on the afternoon of September 9, 1976, when I arrived at the Academy, an announcement was made: “The esteemed and adored Great Leader of our Party, our army, and the peoples of all nationalities of our country, Comrade Mao Zedong, master of the international proletariat, of the oppressed peoples and nations of the earth, has died…”

==page 182

I was uncomfortable in America. The waste, the superficial conversations, the obsession with money. I was confronted with a plethora of choices every day, and I wasn’t used to making decisions. This wasn’t freedom. At any rate, it wasn’t the type of freedom I was seeking.

==page 183

Here, the most universal musical work had been turned into background music. I was shocked. Were these people aware of how fortunate they were? As someone who had always listened to music with reverence, it was as if something sacred were being shattered before my eyes.

==page 195

There was an entire world contained in the pages of the Davidsbündlertänze, one that reached far beyond the introspective Eusebius and the passionate Florestan. A world we took our time to explore—an hour’s lesson for a line of music. “When you play this work, everything must remain even,” he said. “Avoid any obvious effects like changes in tempo, or excessive fortissimi and pianissimi. If you don’t, the whole structure crumbles. Only your attack must vary. This is the only technique you should use to express the piece’s emotion.”

==page 197

Schubert’s Impromptus, Opus 142, and Beethoven’s Opus 111, which he considered to be the single greatest work in the entire piano repertoire.

==page 197

vulnerable and fragile, even those who don’t seem like it—Rachmaninoff, Schnabel, Serkin, Guilels, Lipatti, and Kempff, not to mention Chopin.

==page 203

In both the US and China, people had an unhealthy relationship to money. Either end of the spectrum is excessive.

==page 209

Rudolf Serkin, the legendary pianist... [p.210] By listening to Rudolf Serkin and those around him, I understood how I could add a decisive element to my playing—the pleasure of communicating, of “transmitting” the music.

==page 222

how I approach a musical work. Once I have analyzed the entire piece, I play it evenly and attentively; I never force it or try to grasp its meaning too quickly. I do this until I experience love for each passage and note, until I reach a state of natural and intuitive understanding. Using this method, you understand that the first layer of a work to be uncovered is the tempo. By living with a piece, by not attempting to impose yourself in any way, you begin to breathe with it. One day, completely naturally, a tempo emerges, one that feels organically right.

==page 223

the right tempo is not merely the one with which you breathe naturally, it is also the pace that allows thought to encompass both the forest and the trees. But this is only the initial stage, the elemental stage of grasping a work. The hardest part—the search for meaning—is yet to come. When you have the meaning, you have the solution to every problem involving technique. The search for the meaning of a work is a quest for the essential.

==page 223

the music—propelled forward and shaped by the life-giving bass notes—advances horizontally, and that this horizontality ultimately takes precedence over its verticality.

==page 225

To see down to the bottom of a lake, the water must be calm and still. The calmer the water, the farther down one can see. The exact same thing is true for the mind—the more tranquil and detached one is, the greater the depths one can plumb. Increasingly, I understand that it is precisely by following this path of self-effacement and emptiness that one attains the truth of a musical work.

==page 228

East and the West. In The Importance of Living, Lin sets out what China and France have in common: a sense of humor, depth of feeling, and a genuinely artistic way of approaching life.

==page 247

The Goldberg Variations completely took over my existence. This music contained everything: it had all one needed to live. The first variation gave me courage. I smiled when I rehearsed the tenth, which is playful; I sang to the thirteenth, whose musical line soothes me like no other work. The polonaise rhythm of the twenty-fourth had me dancing, and I meditated during the fifteenth and twenty-fifth, two of the three variations in minor keys: they moved me to tears. Then there is the thirtieth, the famous Quodlibet that I understand as a sort of hymn to the glory of the world.

==page 268

I asked him who was his favorite. “Murray Perahia,”

==page 276

Beijing, I visited Teng Wenji, and we talked about his latest films. At one point in the discussion, he said: “When I first walk onto a film set, I say a prayer before filming.” I asked why, although I already anticipated the answer. “Because we’re disturbing the spirits. We make noise and cause a commotion. No one asked us to come; we have to apologize for our presence.”

==page 278

most stirring of all is the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Bach worked from 1723 until his death, in 1750. It was during this period that he composed his greatest work

More pages (screenshot)