China’s piano fever

Petroc Trelawny

Wednesday, 4th June 2008

Petroc Trelawny visits the world’s largest piano factory in the country where under Mao it was dangerous to play the instrument

Lessons are taken extremely seriously, parents sit in and make copious notes, students are expected to practise for three or four hours a day. Shirley Young, a leading Chinese-American businesswoman who has returned to live in Shanghai, explains how rigorous the system is. ‘In the West, the premium is on study being fun, but here it’s about discipline. This is not casual learning — you don’t wing it or charm your way through.’

Lang Lang and Li Yundi, the current darlings of the CD industry, are both products of this intensive approach. They are formidable musicians, although critical opinion is still split as to the emotional depth of their playing. Lang Lang’s parents made huge sacrifices to support his studies, living hundreds of miles apart for many years.

A combination of the one-child policy and new prosperity may help to explain why today’s Chinese parents are so fiercely ambitious on their children’s behalf — but there is another reason. When they were growing up themselves, during the Cultural Revolution, learning the piano was inconceivable. Madame Mao’s ‘Gang of Four’ saw it as the most dangerous of all Western instruments. The instrument was once described as being akin to a coffin — ‘a black box in which the notes rattled around like the bones of the bourgeoisie’.

Few of those I encounter who lived through this terrible period want to discuss it; smiles turn to grimaces, the subject quickly changed with the offer of another cup of tea or a question about concert life in Britain. It’s not surprising really; in just a decade so many lives and careers were ruined. The pianist Fou Ts’ong, for example, was forced to seek exile in London, where he later heard his parents had fatally poisoned themselves rather than face the horrors of the mad regime.

Back in Guangzhou I meet a man who is happy to talk, and over three hours pours out his appalling story. Liu Shih Kun came second in the 1958 Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow. China’s musicians were only just beginning to cause a stir internationally, and he returned home to a hero’s welcome, not unlike the ticker-tape parade that greeted that year’s winner, Van Cliburn, when he landed at New York. Less than a decade later, because Mr Liu played Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, he was labelled a ‘counter-revolutionary revisionist’, and sent to clean the lavatories at the Central Conservatory of Music. On one occasion a Red Guard beat him so hard with a belt that his arm was fractured.