Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [42]
Whereas Juliet eluded me for a long time, I always knew I could get Romeo. His moodiness required a number of different playing techniques. At times he was sonorous and confident. Then, just a few measures later, he was desperate and pleading. I tried to train my hands like Professor Yang said. It was hard enough being both a soprano and a prima ballerina for Juliet; now I had to play the piano like a cellist.
I’ll save the conclusion of Sophia’s school essay for a later chapter.
The competition Sophia was preparing for was open to young pianists from all over the world, anyone who was not already a professional musician. Somewhat unusually, there was no live audition component. The winners would be chosen solely on the basis of a fifteen-minute unedited CD containing any piano repertoire of our choosing. Wei-Yi was emphatic about our CD opening with Sophia playing “Juliet as a Young Girl” followed immediately by “The Street Awakens,” another short piece from Romeo and Juliet. Like the curator of an art exhibition, he carefully chose the other works—a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody, a middle-period Beethoven sonata—that would complete the CD.
After eight grueling weeks, Wei-Yi said Sophia was ready. Late one Tuesday evening, after she had finished her homework and practicing, we drove to the studio of a professional audio engineer named Istvan to record Sophia’s CD. The experience was traumatizing. At first, I didn’t get it. This should be easy, I thought to myself. We can redo it as many times as it takes to get a perfect version. Totally wrong. What I didn’t understand was (1) pianists’ hands get tired; (2) it’s extremely hard to play musically when there’s no audience and you know every note is being recorded; and (3) as Sophia tearfully explained to me, the more she played and replayed her pieces, trying her hardest each time to pour emotion into them, the emptier they sounded.
The hardest part of all was invariably the last page—sometimes the last line. It was like watching your favorite Olympic figure skater who looks like she might actually win the gold medal if she can only land her last few jumps. The pressure mounts unbearably. This could be it, you think, this is the one. Then the crash on the final triple axel sends her bouncing and sprawling all over the ice.
Something similar happened with Sophia’s Beethoven sonata, which just wouldn’t come out right. After Take 3, when Sophia omitted two entire lines near the end, Istvan gently suggested that I go outside for some air. Istvan was very cool. He wore a black leather jacket, black ski cap, and black Clark Kent glasses. “There’s a café down the street,” he added. “Maybe you can get Sophia a hot chocolate. I could use some coffee myself.” When I returned with the drinks fifteen minutes later, Istvan was packing up, and Sophia was laughing. They told me they’d gotten a Beethoven that was good enough—not error-free but very musical—and I was too relieved to question them.
We took the CD containing all of Sophia’s attempts at each piece and gave it to Wei-Yi, who made the final selections from all the takes (“the first Prokofiev, the third Liszt, and the final Beethoven, please”). Istvan then cut a submission CD, which we FedEx-ed to the competition.
And then we waited.
20
How You Get to Carnegie Hall, Part 2
It was Lulu’s turn! There is no rest for the Chinese mother, no time to recharge, no possibility of flying off with friends for a few days to mud springs in California. While we were waiting to hear back about Sophia’s competition, I shifted my attention to Lulu, who was eleven at the time, and I had a great idea: As Mrs. Vamos had suggested, Lulu would audition for the Pre-College program at the Juilliard School in New York, open to highly talented kids between the ages of roughly seven and eighteen. Kiwon wasn’t sure Lulu was quite ready technically, but I was confident we could get up to speed.
Jed disapproved and kept trying to change my mind. Juilliard