The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Allow me to express my immense gratitude to Alex Ross.

If you are coming to the blog from the print edition, the posts he mentions are

Psalm and Dissertation

and

Pulitzer

and

Release 

Please feel free to browse the archives or use the slider, above… (“Older”) to dip at random into the past. I get scared when I do this. Sometimes it feels like some other Jeremy Denk wrote all that stuff.

As a performer, I would like to play Every Piece Ever Written with The Most Conviction Ever so that people run weeping from the hall and change their lives and poverty ends and rainbows and leprechauns come sprouting from the earth and rivers run pink with Cosmos that never give you hangovers. But apparently this is unrealistic.

This last weekend, I found myself (on Saturday) playing the Tchaikovsky Trio and (on Sunday) the Brahms G major Violin Sonata. Now, these are two Romantic pieces that should never (ever!) be on the same program. I would say: even on the same weekend, it feels pretty dubious. They don’t make each other look good; they’d sneer across intermission at each other. It would be like casting Laura Linney and Al Pacino as lovers. I think it is clear that, of those two, Laura Linney would be Brahms (I loved her in You Can Count On Me, I’m a sentimental fool). Actually–now that I think of it–a biopic with Al Pacino as Tchaikovsky would be something to see. The subtlety and sensitivity he would bring to the question of the composer’s private life …

Tchaikovsky (like Pacino) has faith in that which is proclaimed (passionately enough, strongly enough, with inspiration); Brahms (like Linney) has faith in that which is hidden (craftily enough, subtly enough, with inspiration).

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I think it would be fascinating to study the relationship between all the love we lavish on buildings and the misery we cause human beings in the process. I say this as a resident of a really crappy building which is undergoing extensive renovations. (And also as an occasional viewer of Flip This House, etc.) Now, I know, and anyone else with some spiritual sense knows, that this building I live in can never be rescued from its shabby and outworn aura, no matter how many laundry rooms and fitness centers you squeeze into the basement. But the owners of the building are clearly self-deluding; they want to revise a Danielle Steel novel for a month or so and make it into For Whom the Bell Tolls. The best they can hope for, I think, is a kind of impossible, imaginary, but timely sequel, something like On The Road, SRO Style: 50 Years Later. My wonderful neighbors across the street, off whose dinners I perpetually mooch, did a magnificent imitation of the sort of soul-stripping noises the industrious, masked renovators are making, a kind of keening metal-scraping crashing clumping clustering orgy which takes form not in flesh but in concrete and occurs when orgies should not and when coffee should calmly be poured down your throat like coating balm.

Speaking of orgies and delusions, I have been in, or am in the middle of, or am still embarking upon, a certain Period Of My Life. As Charles Rosen puts it in The Classical Style, “Sonata form could not be defined until it was dead.” And so I am reluctant to define my Period, for fear of killing it. Friend B and I have lavished happy minutes in loud bars towards naming this Period, and have refrained from settling, but the contenders are:

Ballistic for Balzac
or
Bonkers for Balzac
or
Balzac Fever, Balzacmania

… and others which are even more juvenile, like nicknames for a literate, but still keg-happy, fraternity. We are open to suggestions.

Yes, my friends, I have been insulted and demeaned for not reading Balzac in the original French across several continents and in the company of many magnificent persons (thank you, Steven Isserlis). I have spilled precious white Bordeaux (at least that is French, right?) trying to prevent theatre directors from knocking over a whole table of drinks with my copy of The Black Sheep. I have fondled Lost Illusions in subway stations while eating Sour Patch Kids, fallen asleep on cliffsides while reading A Harlot High and Low, and giggled over Stefan Zweig’s biography while smelling forbidden apples in train cars. There seems to be no end to my appetite.

What had prevented me from loving him before? I had always had in my mind that horrible accusation of Joyce (no fact-checker here, am I getting this right?): that the main character in all of Balzac’s novels is the 20-franc piece. But somehow the constant rain and drought of money does not currently depress me. There are far worse flaws in Balzac than moneygrubbing, and somehow, paradoxically, bracingly, the eternal spinning out of control and spiraling down the drain of so many of his characters is life-affirming.

So, as my friend E can tell you, this Ballistic for Balzac period has birthed its own buoyant catchphrase:

That is SO Balzac.

I say it 5 to 7 times a day. It is amazing how often peremptory flashes of Balzacitude hit you in everyday life, once you have surrendered to him/them. For instance, a friend of mine, a very gifted composer, was lamenting a typical composer’s lament, that he didn’t know exactly how he was going to proceed with a certain piece, and then, with melancholy droop to his gaze, he outlined a sort of “cynical” or usual way he might go about writing an effective piece for the occasion. I was listening, with sober sympathy. We were huddled on a bench in a bar, surrounded by young, hip theatre people in the East Village (natch). It was nearly impossible to hear. A canister of barbecued crickets, brought from Thailand, sat on the table next to us (along with my copy of The Black Sheep). Our host had implored us each, upon arrival, to compose a scatological dissertation on what these barbecued crickets might taste like… (I can’t say more.) The candlelight, the free-flowing wine, the clusters of animated intelligent 20-and-30-somethings around us, their hijinks, ironies, and methods, the whole drunken yet guarded milieu, the arrival of a playwright who described his upcoming satirical play, various sexual tensions and boredoms huddling in various corners and behind glittering eyes, but most of all my friend’s account of composing a piece: it all called inevitably to mind this passage from Lost Illusions, where Lousteau, amid Parisian hubbub, counsels young, impressionable Lucien how to write an attack piece on a novel he actually deeply admires:

“You must turn its beauties into faults…

In the first place, you begin by saying that you consider the book a fine piece of work, and you can amuse yourself by writing what you really think about it. The reader will think to himself, ‘This critic is not jealous, he must be impartial.’ …

Here you digress, for the benefit of the bourgeois reader, into a eulogy of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Buffon. You go on to explain that the French language is ruthlessly exacting and prove that it is like a varnish spread over thought. You let fall a few axioms like, ‘a great writer in France is always a great man, for he is held within bounds by a language that compels him to think; this is not so in other countries’—and so on …

Once on that ground, you can put in a brief summary, for the benefit of the ignorant, of the principles of our men of genius during the last century, and call their works the ‘literature of ideas.’ Armed with that phrase, you hurl all the illustrious dead at the heads of living authors. And then you explain that nowadays a new literature is growing up that relies upon dialogue (the easiest of all literary forms) and descriptions, that dispense with the necessity for thought. You contrast the novels of Voltaire, Diderot, Sterne and Le Sage, so trenchant, so compact, with the modern novel that consists of nothing but descriptions, so dear to Walter Scott. In such a genre there is scope for invention, but for little else. ‘The novels of Walter Scott are a literary fashion, but not a literary style,’ you will say. You proceed to fulminate against this lamentable fashion, in which ideas are diluted, and beaten thin, a style easily imitated by anyone …

Then you allow the weight of this argument to descend upon Nathan, showing that he is an imitator, who has only an appearance of talent … you proceed to prove that instead of giving us ideas the author has given us events. Action is not life, and pictures are not ideas! Be liberal with phrases like that, and the public will repeat them.

… don’t forget to say in conclusion that you regret that Nathan, a writer from whom contemporary literature may expect great things if he mends his ways, should have fallen into this mistake.”

Lucien was dumbfounded as he listened to Lousteau; as the journalist talked, the scales fell from his eyes, and he realized literary truths that he had not so much as suspected

“But everything that you have just said is full of good sense and perfectly true!” he said.

“If it were not, how could you hope to batter a breach in Nathan’s book?” said Lousteau. “Listen to me, my boy; that is the first type of article that is used for the purpose of demolishing a book—the pick-axe method. But there are plenty of other formulae—you will learn them in time.”

An extended quote, my apologies. And yet it is wonderful, isn’t it? This is Lucien taking his bite of the forbidden apple of Parisian journalism of the 1830s: a moment of truth from which he will never recover, after which his life will be irrevocably spoiled, a careening wreck. This is Balzac painting cynicism cynically, immersing us in pools and layers of deceptive truths, setting us down amid the endless facades of the world, dubbing this hall of mirrors “reality,” and not promising a way out.

My love for Balzac is getting out of control, it’s not site-specific, it’s totally all over the place! Yesterday I happened to be playing a concert in Beacon, New York, in the wonderful but sleepy Howland Cultural Center, and friend E was there. I don’t even remember what triggered it—some description of some weird people in the antique shop, some frosty woman and her snippy personal shopper—but I said it again (“it’s SO Balzac”) and she started laughing in this wonderful way, and indeed there was a pretty ridiculous distance from this small town in the Hudson Valley and its community arts center to Paris in the glories of the 1830s. And yet good old crazy Balzac was there, I felt sure, even in the quaint, countrified Little Pie Shop, where a woman with bulging eyes was gazing at an innocent, checkered wall as if it were her mortal enemy.

I have a great idea. I will launch a therapeutic practice. People will come in and tell me their problems. No matter what their problems are, I will say, “that’s SO Balzac.” I will pull a book off the shelf and we will read the corresponding passage, and commiserate, and laugh, and say isn’t that the way the world works, and keep reading until the end even though we have other appointments and things to do which all fall disastrously by the wayside. My secretary will embezzle all the money. The success of the venture depends entirely on my assumption that most people haven’t read that much of him, and don’t know how his characters typically end up. (He’s no Oprah; he’s light on healing.) In other words—like the renovation of my building—this whole therapeutic enterprise is deluded, a ridiculous scheme with a flaw in the foundation. Need I even say it? That’s SO …

When you watch the sun rise in a strange apartment (where you did not plan to awaken) you watch nothing at all in the apartment move, just like in your own apartment. But why is it that things in your own apartment seem less still, seem to sway in your orbit, seem alive, and things in other people’s apartments watch you warily, quietly, seemingly inanimate?  If anything they only hover at incredible speeds, like hummingbirds.

The clock seemed to sit rigidly still, like a nervous student, and the painting whose corner I glimpsed through two doorways also sat still, the frozen image even more captured on its canvas than the night before. I threw off my covers as quietly as I could and padded over to the window and the street was also still, an absolute absence. The lonely night’s last sullen stare. I am addicted to early morning still lives, and the first scurryings of nobodies. Then from the window I saw my shoes, sitting, a pair, like two black birds next to the two neat kitchen chairs, just where I left them, and my book open on its spine, and two wine glasses on the coffeetable, just where they had been, looking sadder and wiser in the morning, like they wanted to be poured out.

I went into the bathroom, did my thing, threw water at my face and came out … I swear the apartment was just as quiet, waiting. Wanting me to get spooked. Two glasses, two shoes, like eyes of two different inanimate creatures left behind in the apocalypse of late-night talk.

You wake up there where you did not expect, and even your own tiptoeing accuses you: you have done something wrong. The whole body language of the moment is stealth, aftermath, even burglary. You lie in bed as best you can, thinking, I have beaten the system, I have broken the rules, I have done something I could not predict and told the world to go fly a kite … and … transgression-elation. It goes with morning whisper, gray light’s soothing hand—so much more austere than candles and night, sofas and wine.

I couldn’t get over the window and the grayblue light it was letting in, so plain, plain-spoken. That gray oncoming light which sometimes seems like reality’s printed rebuke. A weird luminescence, a glow emerging rather than a light trained upon the world. You say no I am here I have done something wonderfully unpredictable and the still apartment seems unaffected but you say again no I am here, look out, i am crazy, anything could happen, and people start to wake up next door and do the things they do every day of their lives, doors rattle and showers drain, sounds which are singing, boring refrains of versical lives, and still you say no I am wild I don’t belong to you, I broke the rules, and the vision out the window (the empty street) seems to be the world’s rules, the rhythms of motion of people in mass and the vision in the apartment seems clear, cold, plain, like ice water, rules of respect and place, but the third vision bursting inside you is disrespectful, a snotty kid whose arrogant careless smile is nonetheless not entirely irritating. You have broken whose rules? The world’s only partly; mainly, your own. You are so happy to disobey yourself, proud bleary rebel.