Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - Amy Chua [48]
Two of the most important guests at Sophia’s Carnegie Hall recital were Oszkár and Krisztina Pogány, old family friends from Hungary, who happened to be visiting New York at the time. Oszkár is a prominent physicist and my father’s close friend. His wife, Krisztina, is a former concert pianist who is now very involved with the Budapest music scene. After Sophia’s performance, Krisztina rushed up to us, raved about Sophia’s playing—she’d especially liked her “Juliet as a Young Girl”—and said she had an inspiration.
Budapest, Krisztina explained, would soon be celebrating Museum Night, when museums all over the city would host lectures, performances, and concerts; for the price of a single ticket, people could “museum hop” late into the night. As part of Museum Night, the Franz Liszt Academy of Music would be presenting a number of concerts. Krisztina thought it would be a big hit to have a “Prodigy from America” concert, featuring Sophia.
It was a breathtaking invitation. Budapest is a famously musical city, the home of not only Liszt but Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. Its stunning State Opera House is said to be surpassed acoustically only by Milan’s La Scala and Paris’s Palais Garnier. The venue Krisztina proposed for the concert was the Old Music Academy, an elegant three-story neo-Renaissance building that once served as the official residence of Franz Liszt, the founder and president of the academy. The Old Academy (replaced in 1907 by the New Academy of Music, located a few streets away) was now a museum filled with Liszt’s original instruments, furniture, and handwritten musical scores. Krisztina told Sophia that she would perform on one of Liszt’s own pianos! Also, the audience would be a large one—not to mention Sophia’s first paying audience.
But I had a problem. So soon after the fanfare of Carnegie Hall, how would Lulu feel about another big event with Sophia as the center of attention? Lulu had been pleased with Miss Tanaka’s offer; somewhat to my surprise, she immediately said she wanted to do it. But that did only a little to dull the sting of the Juilliard disappointment. To make matters worse, I hadn’t thought to keep her audition a secret, and for months Lulu had to deal with people asking her, “Did you get the audition results yet? I’ m sure you got in.”
The Chinese parenting approach is weakest when it comes to failure; it just doesn’t tolerate that possibility. The Chinese model turns on achieving success. That’s how the virtuous circle of confidence, hard work, and more success is generated. I knew that I had to make sure Lulu achieved that success—at the same level as Sophia—before it was too late.
I came up with a plan and enlisted my mother as my agent. I asked her to call her old friend Krisztina and tell her all about Lulu and the violin: how she had played for Jessye Norman and then for the renowned violin instructor Mrs. Vamos, both of whom had said Lulu was terrifically talented, and finally, how Lulu had just been accepted as a private student by a world-famous teacher from the world-famous Juilliard School. I told my mother to feel out the possibility of having Lulu perform with Sophia as a duo in Budapest, even if only for one piece. Perhaps, I told my mother to suggest, that one piece could be Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances for Piano and Violin, which the girls had recently performed—and which I knew would appeal to Krisztina. Along with Liszt, Bartók is Hungary’s most famous composer, and his Folk Dances are sensational crowd-pleasers.
We lucked out. Krisztina, who had met Lulu and liked her fiery personality, told my mother that she loved the idea of having Sophia play a piece with her little sister and that the Romanian Dances would be a perfect addition to the program. Krisztina said she would arrange everything and even change the billing of the event to “Two Prodigy Sisters from America.”
The girls’ concert was set for June 23, only one month away. Once again, I bore down.There was a staggering amount of work to be done. I had exaggerated when