The key to success

The Chinese pianist Lang Lang is a phenomenon: flamboyant and confident, he seems to combine 19th-century romantic virtuosity with the sexy energy of an MTV star. Since he burst on the international scene in the early 2000s, other Chinese pianists have followed, winning important competitions and gaining wide renown. The best-known names are only the tip of the iceberg. In the past 15 or so years, China has seen an explosion of interest in western classical music and especially the piano, which verges on a collective cult or mania. There are an estimated 30m-35m piano students in China. When I mentioned this number to a group of Chinese musicians, I half expected them to dismiss it as paranoid western exaggeration; instead, they thought it was an underestimate.

What lies behind this phenomenon and what explains this degree of musical fervour? A visit to the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing where Lang Lang, among many others, studied provides some clues. The conservatory was founded in 1950 and consists of two distinct parts. I first visited a modern building, lavishly appointed by the standards of most music schools. Each section (strings, brass, wind, piano) has its own small but elegant auditorium. In the piano section, each teaching studio has not one but two Steinways. Clearly the school, and the aspect of cultural life it represents, is important to the Chinese authorities. A music lesson I witnessed was interrupted by visiting officials from the culture department of Beijing, who wanted to know if the teacher was satisfied with the facilities.

Behind the new buildings, the original part of the school consists of lovely, traditional Chinese structures set around a serene courtyard. The symmetrical enclosure emanates a sense of aesthetic calm but it was here that the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s campaign against bourgeois values, came to the conservatory in 1966. Like elsewhere in China, teachers were assaulted and humiliated by students, instruments were smashed, pianos locked away, and most of the teachers were sent away for “rehabilitation”.

But before that terrible period, there was another phase in China’s relationship with the west. No one embodies it, or summarises the various stages of China’s recent musical history, better than Zhou Guangren, one of the conservatory’s most distinguished members.

In her early eighties, Zhou, widely recognised as the doyenne of the piano in China, is warmly informal with a cosmopolitan graciousness of manner. Her English is flawless, as is, apparently, her German. She was born in Germany, where her father, who believed in European education, was studying to be an engineer. The family came back to Shanghai when she was four and her love of classical western music was nurtured by records played in their house.

In her youth, she studied with a succession of European teachers who were then active in Shanghai. However, when the People’s Republic was established in 1949, Zhou gave herself enthusiastically to the project of building a new China. In 1953, when told “she was needed” at the Beijing Conservatory, she responded to the call. She was one of the few Chinese musicians allowed to travel through eastern Europe – a formative experience. But in 1958 came the Great Leap Forward, China’s attempt to transform its economy, followed by famine and the Cultural Revolution.

Zhou says she was lucky in being less savagely persecuted than most. She was sent away to the countryside only for a year, when she did farm labour and cleaned pigsties, and was called back because Mao’s wife Jiang Qing wanted to organise a music school on communist principles. Zhou’s husband, however, committed suicide in 1968 as a result of humiliating persecutions.

Western music, during that terrible time, was almost entirely forbidden; the hunger for it now must partly be fuelled by that deprivation. Zhou, who has started piano schools and teacher training programmes in recent years, thinks that the love of the piano now is at least in part fed by a need for emotional sensitivity and for beauty. The piano, and especially its 19th-century romantic repertory, offers delicacy, full expressiveness, subtlety.

But Zhou’s own story reminds us that before the Maoist repressions, there was a brief period of modernity in China, attended by intense interest in European cultural developments. The current musical enthusiasm may partly represent a reconnection to that interrupted past.

There are also less exalted reasons for the Chinese piano craze. During the Cultural Revolution the piano was condemned as the bourgeois instrument par excellence and today, in an ironic turnround, it functions as a symbol of upward mobility and middle-class achievement. There is no ambivalence in China about conspicuous consumption or displaying the signs of success. More is better: more wealth, more achievement, more status, more glamour.

The world of music is also unabashedly competitive. Children often start music lessons at the age of three and are made to practise several hours a day. In the era of one-child policy, children are treasured and coddled; at the same time, they are driven, often relentlessly, by parents who invest all their ambitions into their offspring. The teaching methods also tend to the authoritarian or, at least, to tough love. A music lesson I witnessed was conducted largely through a kind of teasing that verges on mockery.

But the results of such discipline are sometimes astounding. Shanghai is often considered the real hub of piano activity in China. During a visit to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, I met Keng Zhou, the energetic artistic director of the International Piano Festival of Shanghai. His wife, Beihua Tang, one of the conservatory’s leading piano teachers, allowed me to hear three of her best students in an informal performance. The youngest was seven and, although his feet hardly reached the pedals, he sounded not unlike Vladimir Horowitz. The incongruity between looking at him and listening to him was uncanny. The two others were 11 and 12, and would have passed muster as soloists in many of the world’s concert halls.

It is often said that the emphasis on virtuosity and technique is gained at the cost of musical depth and authenticity. Yet I also heard performances marked by great sensitivity and talked to young pianists who are very serious about their art. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between the two. Beihua Tang is also the founder of the Shanghai Piano Ensemble, five young women who perform arrangements of well-known classics on five grand pianos. I expected no more than light entertainment, yet the panache was hard to resist.

The five pianists combined individual skill with perfect co-ordination, headlong speed with feathery delicacy. The effect was akin to the kind of thrill produced by, say, a Busby Berkeley extravaganza. Sometimes, I thought, nothing succeeds like excess. And, as with so much of the music mania in China, the brief performance was hard to judge according to the usual criteria. Was it exciting or kitschy, old-fashioned or postmodern?

The Chinese cult of the piano seems to bridge the divide between high and low culture, between popular appeal and elite aestheticism. It remains to be seen whether this is a passing cultural phase. In the meantime, there is clearly pleasure as well as pressure in the music making and, among the 35m or so piano students in China, there are surely some who may bring a new infusion of unexpected life to a great musical tradition.