It’s said that you’re only young once—and sometimes not even that.
“Canada’s
piano superstar is 8 years old,” proclaimed the Canadian Broadcasting
Corp. earlier this year. The superstar in question, Kevin Chen, passed
the country’s piano teacher exam and is studying at the Royal
Conservatory of Music. Five-year-old Ryan Wang, a fellow Canadian
pianist, has performed at Carnegie Hall. Ten-year-old pianist Laetitia
Hahn has been delighting German concertgoers with her Chopin and
Beethoven for over three years. British 9-year-old Alma Deutscher
started playing the piano at the age of 2 and the violin at 3 and now
composes operas, having acquired an early taste for the trade by writing
Nokia ringtones. Conservatories in Europe and North America report an
increasing number of preteens who turn up for auditions flawlessly
performing repertoire previously considered the domain of 25-year-olds.
Welcome
to the awe-inspiring age of underage marvels who rattle off Chopin’s
tricky études as well as entire piano concertos. “Musicians are doing
more advanced things at a younger age than ever before,” says Yoheved
Kaplinsky, a professor of piano at the Juilliard School in New York City
and head of its pre-college division. “It’s the Olympics syndrome:
Records exist in order to be broken. Today kids are recording the Chopin
études at the age of 10. When I was young, nobody played them until
they were adults.”
The trend is most obvious for the piano,
though string players are also showing impressive skills at an
ever-younger age. In a nod to the youthful trend, the prominent Van
Cliburn piano competition recently announced that it will add contests
for 13- to 17-year-olds. The American Protégé competition already
features a category for players from ages 6 to 10, and next year New
York’s Kaufman Music Center will hold its second International Youth
Piano Competition, open to players ages 7 to 17.
“Today
most young musicians winning competitions are Asian,” notes Murray
McLachlan, a teacher at Manchester, England’s famous Chetham’s School of
Music. “They dominate music making at both the school and the
conservatory level.” With China reportedly having 30 million young
pianists, the fact that a number of them are winning competitions may
not be surprising. But, says McLachlan, an acclaimed performer, Chinese
children succeed at the keyboard because their families value the work
ethic that piano playing demands. An increasing number of Chinese
prodigies attend European and American music schools and conservatories.
Move Over, Beethoven
There
have, of course, always been prodigies. Six-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart dazzled 18th century dukes and monarchs with his skills on the
keyboard and the violin, and already had several compositions under his
belt. Daniel Barenboim, the Argentinean-born pianist, performed in
Vienna when he was 8, and Anne-Sophie Mutter, the German violinist, made
her international debut at 13. But they were true prodigies, young
musicians who combined technical brilliance with promising artistry.
Today, by contrast, there are so many young star performers that age
alone seems to mark their value. Would Kevin be performing on the CBC,
and Alma on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, if they were 15 or even
10 years old? “The danger is that we’re creating machines that can play
any piece at any speed,” says Gabriela Montero, the celebrated
Venezuelan pianist, who was herself a child prodigy.
“It’s a worrisome trend because it highlights early
achievement rather than substance and artistry,” says Kaplinsky. “I see
16-year-olds who are lamenting the fact that they haven’t performed at
Carnegie Hall yet.” But the age race is hardly surprising: It’s much
easier to measure years than artistry, and it makes for better
headlines. On a recent visit to China, one leading impresario listened
to several young virtuosos seeking European concert representation,
among them a 9-year-old. Against such competition, a 10- or 11-year-old
almost seems like a loser.
In the 1996 film Shine,
Geoffrey Rush plays David Helfgott, the British pianist who as a teen
buckles under immense pressure to succeed and suffers a mental
breakdown. That’s an extreme reaction, but prodigies don’t always go on
to great success as adult artists. In fact, childhood success has little
impact on a musician’s career. “Early accomplishment means nothing in
the long run,” says Kaplinsky. “Child musicians delight audiences
because it’s fun seeing somebody so young doing so much, but some of
them burn out.” That may provide some consolation—or schadenfreude—to those 16-year-olds who’ve yet to play Carnegie Hall.
For
those who lack artistic goals and have simply mastered the technique to
wow parents, teachers and audiences, the fall from child star to
teenager will cause anguish, along with anger at mums and dads who took
their tiger parenting too seriously.
The proof of the
real talent of prodigies is whether they’ll blow audiences away with
their performances in 20 years’ time. Mozart went on to have a pretty
respectable career, and Barenboim—now also a conductor—remains a titan
of the music world, as does Mutter.
“The transition
from child prodigy to adult artist is a very difficult one,” says
Montero, who made her concert debut at 8 but gave up playing the piano
10 years later. “As an artist, you have to have something to say, but
you don’t have anything to say if you’ve spent your life in a practice
room.” Armed with life experience and an artistic voice, Montero
returned to the keyboard at 20.
Kaplinsky says that
conservatories should support early achievers only if they exhibit
artistic potential as well. “We’ve had kids come in to audition and play
note-perfect, but we felt there was a musical vacuum behind their
performance and didn’t offer them admission,” she says. Juilliard
occasionally offers a place to a young musician who’s not technically
brilliant but shows artistic potential.
Nevertheless,
with 9-year-old virtuosos now run-of-the-mill, it may take more than
practice, practice, practice for future prodigies to get on The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
Most musicians would agree with Montero, who calls musical performances
without personal interpretation simply a “numbers game of faster and
younger.”
“Obviously, musicians have to work hard, and
the younger the better,” says McLachlan, “but the main thing is to be in
love with music.”
There is, in other words, still hope for those 14-year-old stragglers.
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