Life Lessons From Lang Lang—Part Five (July 22, 2025)
From left to right: Lang Lang’s Eight Golden Rules for Studying the Piano; three different performances of the Schubert/Liszt Erlkönig. Kerson Leong, Violin; Yuja Wang, Piano; Jessye Norman, Soprano, everyone with their heart on their sleeve.
RULE NO. 5: Play With Your Heart On Your Sleeve
In order to understand what Lang Lang means in this rule, we need to first look at what the phrase “wearing your heart on your sleeve” means. When I looked it up I found out that the term probably came from medieval jousting tournaments when knights fighting in a joust would attach a token of affection to the part of the armor which protected their arm, which was called a sleeve. They would then carry this into battle with them as a sign of a particular lady’s affection.
The phrase also comes up in Shakespeare’s play Othello, when Iago says that if he ever wore his heart on his sleeve, or openly showed his emotions, people around him would take advantage of him.
By contrast, Lang Lang tells us that we must very much expose our emotions to the listener when we are playing. He says that we should not be interested in just “typing” the notes, but actually re-creating something out of the creation of the composer. He says that a pianist must bring his own love and sincerity into the music.
I couldn’t agree more. I spend a lot of hours of every day practicing, and one of the reasons I do is because I want to make sure that I am putting as much emotion and feeling into the music as I can, while also making sure that I first determine what I consider the message to be and then share it with an audience.
The same work can mean many different things to different musicians. It is why a listener can find himself drawn to different performances of the same work by different artists, because a performance speaks to one listener quite differently than might be the case for another. This is also what makes studying a work for me so exciting. As I listen to different interpretations, I like trying figure out what someone else is saying in their interpretation so that I can better determine what it is I want to say. That does not mean one artist feels exactly the same way about a work as another.
Take a look again at my Blog Post Number 69 from July 10, 2025. Remember how different each performance of the Marcello/Bach Adagio in D-minor, BWV974 was in the hands of each pianist? That’s because they each chose to “feel it” differently based on their own lives and understanding of the work.
It’s also true when a violinist, a pianist, and a singer all perform the same work. Each of the artists in the videos above shows their audiences intense feelings.
Wearing your emotions on your sleeve is what turns playing or singing notes into making music. It gives what you perform the color, emotion and character it needs to touch the spirit—and heart—of the listener.
