When Isaac Stern visited China in June 1979, he was among the first
Western musicians granted access to the country as it emerged from the
Cultural Revolution. A few years earlier he would have been demonized
as a representative of the imperialist West; now he was welcomed for
bringing a breath of fresh artistic air to a country that had spent
13 years rejecting any foreign influence on its culture.
His visit was documented in the 1981 Academy Award–winning film From
Mao to Mozart. The last 15 minutes of the film show a ten-year-old
pupil at the Shanghai Conservatory earnestly playing his cello before
the distinguished foreign visitor. Twenty years later, Stern describes
the cellist as "one of the finest young instrumentalists of our time."
This is the story of his extraordinary journey from a closed society
to an international career on the concert platform.
Sitting opposite Jian Wang in his small, neat apartment on the South
Bank of the River Thames in London, I reflect on the fact that many
famous instrumentalists share something in addition to talent and musicality:
they were born into countries governed by oppressive political regimes,
from which music was their means of escape. Could this explain why so
many distinguished soloists have emerged from the East?
"That's a very good analysis," Wang replies. "In England or the United
States, youngsters can do so many things because they have so many choices.
But I was born in a country where life was difficult, where music was
one of the few things you could study. When people leave China to study
somewhere, they don't back off or say, 'I don't feel like doing this
any more; it's becoming too difficult,' because usually that's not an
option. We have to succeed. So I think you can say that the disadvantages
of being born in a country where life is difficult become an advantage.
We're driven because we have no choice."
Wang was set a powerful precedent by his father, who comes from a land-owning
family that lost most of its assets when the Communist Party came to
power. Refusing to become a peasant farmer, he ran away at the age of
15 to the city of Xian (home of the famous Terracotta Warriors) and
found work there. One day, while walking through a square, he heard
Chinese music being played by a symphony orchestra and was spellbound.
Deciding that music was to be his life, but having no one to teach him,
he set about educating himself.
Wang's father bought an er-hu, the traditional Chinese two-stringed
violin, and eventually enrolled at the Shanghai Conservatory, where
he studied the cello. He also met a flautist whom he married after they
both graduated. However, as Jian explains, the prospects for talented
young musicians in China were very limited. "During that time, the height
of the Cultural Revolution, all Western music was banned except for
a strange phenomenon called the Model Plays, which could be described
as a mixture of Chinese opera and Western musical theater. The music,
by Chinese composers, was set to stories by Communist ideologues that
described the life of soldiers, peasants, and government officials.
They used a full-sized Western orchestra with some Chinese instruments
in it.
"In those days, too, the government decided where you worked when you
graduated. Because my father was one of the best players in the Conservatory,
he was assigned to a Model Play company in Shanghai. Naturally, my mother
wanted to stay with him. But she was given a job teaching in a school
near Xian, so she couldn't. She applied for permission to join him,
but this was refused. In the meantime I was born.
"When I was three years old, my parents decided that life in Shanghai
would be better for me—it was the richest city in the country, and if
you could get in you'd have a much brighter future. So I went to live
with my father, while my mother continued to apply to join us." (It
was not until nine years later that permission was granted and the family
was permanently reunited.)
The move to Shanghai marked the beginning of a plan to cultivate music
in the young child and thus to equip him for as full a life as possible.
While Jian was still an infant, his father gave him a violin with a
stick planted in its end to form a makeshift miniature cello, simply
to see what the child could do with it. The results were immediate and
encouraging—he could in fact do quite a lot—and serious tuition began
soon afterwards.
It is easy to imagine the frustration Wang's father must have felt
during this period: a promising musical career redirected, if not curtailed,
by the authorities; separation from his wife; and sole responsibility
for bringing up their only child. Little wonder that, recognizing his
son's instinctive gift for music, he threw himself into training the
boy. Perhaps he might one day enjoy the freedom denied his father.
But how did such an ambitious plan become a reality?
"Now that I'm famous in China," says Wang, "everyone wants to know
what happened. In fact, a Chinese publisher wanted my father to write
about how I grew up. For a long while he refused, but eventually he
wrote something and it was published in a newspaper. When I read it
I was amazed, and very touched, because I'd always thought all those
ideas I had about playing came from my own head. In fact they came from
him. But because he made me feel that I had come up with them,
I was always very confident. That's why he was such a good teacher."
There remained a major hurdle, however: entry to the Shanghai Conservatory,
where young Wang could have the type of schooling necessary for a musical
career. More than ever before, music was being seen as an escape route
from conscription or forced labor in rural China. (Many people who were
sent to live and work on peasant farms never returned, Wang explains
sadly.) At the same time, restrictions on learning Western music were
gradually being lifted. As a result, the Conservatory was inundated
with applicants. Fortunately, Wang met the strict entry requirements,
for at the age of nine he was already an accomplished instrumentalist
and had perfect pitch.
"I'd like to think that we received a full education there," he reveals,
"but the truth is that we did not! They taught us mathematics, basic
physics, and history (which was linked very closely to Chinese politics).
But the rest was music: solfège, theory, and composition. We'd
practice in the morning and have classes in the afternoon, or vice versa;
practice sessions were 45 minutes each, and teachers would circle around
to make sure we weren't being lazy. It was very regimented."
Wang's father negotiated a special arrangement with the staff of the
Conservatory. Lacking the right kind of papers to be his son's "official"
cello teacher, he was nevertheless recognized as holding the key to
the extraordinary progress of their star pupil, and was allowed to come
in each day to coach him.
It was at this point that Isaac Stern entered the picture and, through
the film of his visit to Shanghai, brought Jian Wang to the attention
of the West. In a way, Wang recalls, Stern caused his own cultural revolution
among the pupils at the Conservatory. "China was so closed up, and everybody
was rigid and afraid. There were a lot of talented musicians in the
school, but the general feeling among them was that 'this is not our
thing,' and 'better to be right and boring than interesting and wrong.'
Mr. Stern changed all that. He was funny, he was sarcastic, he spoke
in metaphors. He did things with the violin that made the students love
him.
"I was ten years old at the time," Wang continues, "and not sophisticated
enough to understand everything he said. But when I saw him playing
his instrument I just had a gut feeling that this was what you're
supposed to do on stage. This was what you're supposed to give
an audience. Before then, the feeling had been simply, 'I have to play
all the notes correctly and get the intonation right.'"
Wang points out that in his early days at the Conservatory, many on
the teaching staff wanted to change the way he played because it was
"incorrect." His father resisted this, believing that if something worked,
it shouldn't be changed. Fortunately, the president of the Conservatory
agreed and allowed Wang to do his own thing. "It was the funniest thing
when Isaac Stern visited us," he recalls, "because everybody whispered,
'How can he play the violin like that? He does it completely the wrong
way!' Of course, when Isaac Stern plays as well as that, and it's the
'wrong' way, what can you say?"
Wang maintains that he was a slow learner, largely because of his father's
philosophy of teaching. It was a step-by-step approach that built solid
foundations through playing scales, exercises, and passages rather than
"stretching" the technique with difficult works. Later, when Wang was
given small, complete pieces, the emphasis was on playing them as musically
as possible. A mature but naturally cautious child, he accepted this
method and was unimpressed by the outwardly showy efforts of his classmates
when they performed technically demanding works. "To be honest," he
remembers, "I listened to them playing all these concertos—often so
badly—and said to myself, 'I don't want to do that. I'd rather do something
simpler.' I was so serious! But that's my personality, I guess. And
I've never had big ambitions. Actually, when I was 16, all I could play
was the Haydn C-Major Concerto, the Saint-Saëns No. 1, the Tchaikovsky
Rococo Variations, and one movement of the Dvoràk Concerto.
Apart from a lot of small pieces, that was it."
Stern now confirms the value of this softly-softly approach. "Jian
has the ability, given to very few young people, to, as the French say,
'live well in his own skin.' In other words, he doesn't bedevil himself
with false hopes and great wishes that may or may not be attainable.
This means that he attains, happily, things he doesn't expect.
"His greatest gift is his utterly natural and profoundly good musical
instinct. He understands the inexplicable connections within a musical
line because he sings naturally on his instrument. And that's
the most important attribute in a musician. What I'm telling you about
are mature attributes that one discerns later on, but what one could
hear even then was his original instinct for music."
In 1982, at the age of 13, Wang left China for the first time and toured
the United States in one of two music groups from the Shanghai Conservatory.
Quite apart from the pace of work (his trio gave 57 concerts in 60 days),
the culture shock was enormous. Disneyland, the addictive qualities
of Coca-Cola, and the sense of freedom—being able to get into a car
and drive anywhere, or board a plane or train freely—overwhelmed him.
Less positively, he was surprised by the immaturity of American schoolchildren.
"The 13-year-olds, and even some 15-year-olds, behaved like nine-year-old
Chinese people, and this shocked me a little bit. They had no idea what
they were talking about!"
Back home in China after the tour ended, Wang had no way of knowing
that he would return to the U.S. for a much longer period, thanks to
another individual, as influential in his future career (albeit in a
different way) as his father had been. Sau-Wing Lam, a music enthusiast
who had left China in 1948 and built up a large and prosperous business
in the U.S., saw From Mao to Mozart and was fascinated by the
young cellist. Through the director of the Shanghai Conservatory, an
old schoolmate, he made inquiries about the boy and learned of his exceptional
promise. Lam then wrote to China's Minister of Culture, proposing to
help Wang further his studies in America. The door was slammed in his
face. China was proud of its budding cellist, he was told, and saw no
reason to send him abroad to complete his training.
By 1985, however, Wang had become frustrated with life at the Conservatory.
Needing to accomplish more in his playing, but realizing that none of
his teachers could tell him how, he was losing motivation to continue.
There were occasional visits from foreign musicians that lifted his
spirits, but they were not enough. Lacking inspiration, he was being
starved musically.
By this point the political situation in China had relaxed somewhat,
and Lam wrote to Wang's father, offering financial assistance to secure
the boy's future. "This guy wasn't related to us, and we'd never met
him," Wang says, "but he said he would sponsor me. I could choose any
school I wanted, and he would pay for everything. He would give me a
cello and money to live on. He promised my father (I still have the
letter he wrote): 'I will treat him as if he were my own son.' It was
unbelievable.
"When I explained that I wanted to study with Aldo Parisot at Yale,
because I really loved the way he taught when he visited Shanghai, Mr.
Lam said, 'No problem.' He contacted the school, deposited money for
my fees, picked me up from the airport, and took me to his home. Then
he drove me to Yale for my first lesson. He was a remarkable man."
Wang's studies at Yale included technique—he admits that only within
the last five years has he been able to achieve everything he wants
technically—and interpretation, including colors and dynamics. One of
Parisot's main tasks was to free him to be more expressive in his playing,
for some of the rigidity of his Chinese training still remained. However,
Wang emphasizes that he is essentially an introverted performer. "If
I had the choice between playing as if I were coming out and hitting
you over the head with a big club to impress you, or just sitting there
quietly as if to say, 'Maybe you'd like to hear this story . . . ,'
I'd go for the latter. But of course Mr. Parisot taught me well, so
I could come out and hit you over the head if I wanted to."
The teacher was alternately intrigued and exasperated by his new student.
Wang's father's method had been thorough and effective, but it arguably
left the teenager overconfident in his own judgement. It had certainly
not opened him to the suggestions of others, and when Parisot asked
him to do certain things with which he disagreed, he usually refused.
Eventually a compromise was reached. "He's such a wonderful teacher,"
Wang explains, laughing at the memory of his own stubbornness, "and
he'd say to me, 'Okay, if you don't want to do this, then you must show
me how you can do it differently.' So I'd do it my way. Sometimes I
succeeded, but mostly I didn't.
"It took me a long time, but eventually I began to think. I remembered
everything he told me, and decided that if my way didn't work, I'd always
try his. And I'd always do it well. That's why he liked me. He used
to say, 'It's difficult to get you to do something my way, but once
you do it, it's always very, very good!'
"However, I'm still afraid of doing something I don't believe in. If
I did everything on stage that I liked and felt was good, and
the public didn't like it, I'd be upset, but I could live with that.
However, if I went up there and did something I didn't believe in, simply
because my teacher had told me to do it, I'd feel terrible because it
wouldn't be me that the public disliked. I've never wanted to
do anything that's not mine."
Unlike many prodigies, Wang first encountered much of the cello repertoire
as a teenager rather than as a young child. When I ask if there were
works that made a particular impression on him, he replies without hesitation,
"The Shostakovich Concerto No. 1. I have a tape somewhere of Rostropovich
giving the U.S. premiere of the work and playing like a god. I remember
that when I first heard it, I told myself half-jokingly, 'I'm going
to stop! It's impossible: nobody can play the cello like that!' I was
so impressed by the Concerto—and by Rostropovich, of course. He's definitely
the cellist that I respond to."
After three years at Yale, Wang moved to New York to continue his studies
at the Juilliard School. Still supported by the family of Sau-Wing Lam,
who died in 1988, he enrolled for a Bachelor's Degree course but was
gently kicked out after three years because he was giving too many concerts
to attend classes! By this time the qualities of his playing—the precise
intonation, the throbbing intensity of his vibrato, and the ability
to draw long, lyrical phrases from his instrument—were obvious. While
based in New York, another fortuitous bolt had arrived from the blue
when he formed an unexpected musical partnership with violinist Augustin
Dumay and pianist Maria João Pires. Thanks to the persistence
of Wang's French manager, the duo had eventually agreed to play a single
movement of a piano trio with him while they were all in France for
the Montpellier Festival. None of them, it seems, was prepared for what
happened next.
"During the rehearsal it was as if I could feel everything they were
doing, and could respond to them," Jian remembers. "And when I did things,
they would respond. I couldn't believe it. Really, we sounded
as good together as we do on our recordings! I could tell they were
very happy. Later on Augustin came to me and said, 'We've enjoyed so
much playing with you. We'd like to form a permanent trio with you,
to record for Deutsche Grammophon and to play this concert and this
and that . . . ' My jaw dropped open. It was a fairy-tale meeting."
Their first recording, of Brahms's Piano Trios Nos. 1 and 2, was released
by D.G. in 1996. "In Jian Wang," wrote Gramophone's critic, "the
duo of Augustin Dumay and Maria João Pires have found themselves
a true soul mate."
After leaving Juilliard, Wang settled in Europe. For a while he lived
in Portugal, and then in Paris, but now he has made London his home,
for personal and professional reasons: his Portugese girlfriend is studying
at Oxford, and—as both a performer and an audience member—he thrives
on the bustle of the musical scene in the English capital. Last November
there was a chamber concert with Dumay, Pires, Gérard Caussé,
and Gordan Nikolitch at the prestigious Wigmore Hall, before Wang set
off for Kuala Lumpur and Seoul, with dates in Paris and Bilbao scheduled
for the end of January 2001. And then there is his growing discography.
In 1990 he made a now-forgotten début recital Cd (with pianist
Carol Rosenberger) for Delos; ten years on, he is an established Deutsche
Grammophon artist. His recording of the Haydn Cello Concertos was released
early in 2000, followed by the Schumann Piano Quintet (with Pires, Dumay,
Caussé, and Renaud Capucon). Later that year he gave a number
of performances of the Brahms Double Concerto in the U.S. with Gil Shaham—an
old friend, orchestral colleague and chess partner; they will record
the Concerto for D.G. when they, and conductor Claudio Abbado, can find
a mutually convenient date. "I'm also supposed to record all the Beethoven
Cello Sonatas with Miss Pires," he says, "but you never know with her.
I'm ready any time she is, though!" Meanwhile, D.G.'s recent release
of Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps, in which Wang is
partnered by Shaham, Paul Meyer, and Myung-Whun Chung, is gathering
mixed reviews, its deficits doubtless a reflection of the time constraints
in preparing and recording a CD these days.
Poised on the threshold of a major international career, Jian Wang
retains great personal warmth and charm, displaying as much humility
away from the limelight as he does authority and dynamism when in it.
"He's an adorable human being," Isaac Stern confirms. "Everywhere he
goes, he elicits two things. One is an affectionate embrace from everybody
who's met him, and the other is a return engagement. That's the clearest
sign of his talent." Wang seems genuinely grateful for his success,
and one senses in him an awareness that his life could have turned out
very differently indeed—as it must have done for many of his compatriots.
How, I ask, would he summarize the influence of his Chinese background
on his playing of Western music? "It's funny," he smiles, "because when
I'm in China I feel more American than anything. When I'm in America
I feel more European. And when I'm in Europe I feel Chinese! It's very
complicated. But let me answer your question this way.
"Chinese people are very moved to see somebody who has a difficult
life but keeps a smile on his face. That touches us much more than somebody
who's suffering but complaining about it to everybody. So I'd say that
I prefer to speak to people through music in a very quiet way. Western
culture is a bit more dramatic—look at paintings, for example. In the
West, they're full of color and drama and battles, and they always show
people. The majority of Chinese paintings are watercolors, and most
of them are black and white. And they're about nature, not people. For
me, that's the difference."
