Life Lessons From Lang Lang—Part Six

From left to right: Lang Lang’s Eight Golden Rules for Studying the Piano; three very passionate performances of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-Flat Minor, Op. 23: Martha Argerich/Charles Dutoit; Vladimir Horowitz/Arturo Toscanini; Sviatoslav Richter/Herbert von Karajan

RULE NO. 6: Tap Into Your Passion

Ask any pianist why they play, and they will probably tell you it’s because they really love it. There is a connection between the performer and the instrument that allows the pianist to express feelings through the piano. This is not always evident at first because when one first starts out he is so focused on things like fingering, technique, sightreading and memory that there is not really enough time to think about being passionate. The process of getting everything right is something that can take years for a pianist to achieve, but that kind of focus is fundamental to mastering the instrument, the same way that when you are learning to ride a bike you’re more concerned about making sure you don’t fall off than enjoying all the scenery around you.

There comes a point however when you have mastered enough of the fundamentals that you can not necessarily take them for granted, but you can trust yourself to do enough things automatically so that you can focus on giving more feeling to what you play. It is the same way for an actor, who has to learn the lines of the play so that they are in his head before he can give them the meaning he wants them to have.

Playing with passion comes after really studying a piece and knowing it so well that you can focus on the notes not as things you need to get in your mind and fingers, but as ways to express the intentions of the composer.  

If you look up the word “passion” in the dictionary, one of the definitions is “intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction.” The idea suggests that you have ideas about the emotional framework of a piece you are interested in conveying.

Without that passion a pianist cannot really hope to convey the full power of a work, and as Lang Lang points out, I think correctly, you have to keep the “flame” of the music alive for the music to take on the kind of vitality a pianist wants it to have for an audience.  He also describes this passion correctly when he calls it “the engine of success.”

Please just listen to the first five minutes or so of the videos listed today.  You will notice that although each of them is very different, they all are performed with a great deal of passion. 

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