283. Toward Acceptance - Jonathan Biss
Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians (1921)
First, tell no lies. It is the closest thing I have to a guiding principle, as an artist and person. It is my Hippocratic Oath, if Hippocrates were Sophocles. It is not as self-evident as it sounds.
(excerpted from Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven)
First, tell no lies.
It is the closest thing I have to a guiding principle, as an artist and person. It is my Hippocratic Oath, if Hippocrates were Sophocles. It is not as self-evident as it sounds.
Being a classical musician is a strange and daunting vocation: you have the responsibility of bringing someone else’s notes—ideas—soul—to life. Until you play, that soul stays silent. But can you ever really know someone else’s soul? When those notes come from the greatest composers, the ones with uncommon insight and the skill to translate that insight into sound, they pose more questions than they offer answers; they are more like koans than declarative sentences. You can spend a lifetime looking for the truth in them, and still fall short.
If you’re a professional musician, though, you can’t wait a lifetime—or even for the moment of inspiration—to play your concerts. They arrive when they arrive, planned one or two or three years in advance. And when they do, your uncertainties and insecurities are of no relevance to your audience, who have paid their money and made their choice to spend the evening listening to you and thus not reading Proust or watching the Kardashians or re-alphabetizing their spices. You have to play, or that audience hears nothing.
If that audience is going to hear and, more to the point, feel something, you had damned well better project certainty about what it is you want to say, even though the music, in its complexity and its foreignness to you and its maddening imprecision of notation, is bound to fill you with doubt.
So, what do you do? You perform. You perform conviction in your choices, even when others start to seem equally or more valid. You perform the belief that you are up to the task, even though when the task is bringing a great work of art to life, that belief is egomaniacal and probably a little delusional. You perform unequivocal delight at doing what you are doing, swallowing back the fear of exposing yourself so thoroughly, the exhaustion and loneliness of an itinerant life, and the bemusement at the utter oddness of walking onto a stage wearing uncomfortable shoes, bowing to an assembled group of strangers, and then playing for them without ever looking them in the eye.
You perform. You bare yourself before the audience, but you do so in costume. It’s a paradox and a high-wire act, one that feels exhilarating when it succeeds and completely shitty when it fails. And then there are all the other concerts, the in-between ones, in which some things work better than others, the small failures feeling larger than they are. And when those small failures begin to deflate you, you wear your performer’s instinct like armor, working so hard to project the music to the hopefully unwitting audience that you not only worry that you are no longer telling the truth—you forget what the truth is.
So. Telling no lies turns out to be very difficult. To have so much as a fighting chance of doing so, you must accept that even when you want very much to do something—the “something” in this case being to play the music you love most, not just more than most other music, but than most other things, and to play it with vividness and precision and enough fantasy to make it seem like it is being imagined in real time, and enough insight to make it sound emotionally coherent even though it springs from someone else’s imagination, and then also to be admired and loved for that vividness and precision and fantasy and insight, because for all your talk of serving the composer, of being merely a vessel through which the music flows, you have the ego of an artist, which is to say a monster—you must accept that failing to do so is not a catastrophe.
The only hope is in acceptance. It will not save you from failure, but it will help you fail honestly and well. If you’re lucky, it might even help you find the art in failure, and the strange euphoria—the art and the euphoria that come only when you truly let go.
- Jonathan Biss
