Pulling off a miracle
Chiao, who began studying piano at a very young age, devoted much time and energy to analyzing the traditions and styles of the various European and American schools of piano performance. In 2007 he completed an enormous book collecting together interviews with over 50 of the world’s leading pianists, The Colors Between Black and White. That he was able to do it at all has been called “a miracle.”
Why would he want to spend five years flying all over the US and Europe to record the thoughts of pianists?
Chiao Yuan-pu says his original motivation was “a sense of frustration.” “Whenever I went to concerts or compared different recordings, lots of questions would pop into my head: ‘Why isn’t he following the score here?’ ‘Why did he decide to play that part in that way?’ Naturally the answers could only come from the pianists themselves; that’s the richest source of first-hand information.”
But how did a mere graduate student, with no impressive institutional credentials, persuade renowned pianists to take time out from their packed schedules to sit down and chat?
Chiao Yuan-pu says the first 10 pianists were the hardest, but once he started to build up a reputation, people he had already interviewed would vouch for him to their colleagues, and after that scheduling interviews became much easier.
Writer Yang Chao, likewise a connoisseur of classical music, states in the preface to Chiao’s book that while sincerity and patience were certainly parts of the story of Chiao’s success, what he really relied on was his ability and knowledge. These great masters of music “learned to respect his musical knowledge and perspicacity, so they took him seriously, and you could even say they began to consider it important to have the opportunity to speak with him…. They could tell that he was, in terms of character, depth, and taste, ‘one of us.’”
“At opportune moments he would come up with very specific questions for the pianists about this or that recording of a piece,” relates Yang, “such as ‘In the 18th bar of the second movement, why did you decide not to use the pedal?’” When world-class pianists get asked questions like this, they can’t help but focus their attention, take the interviewer very seriously, and give serious thought to how to answer.
Take for instance Krystian Zimerman (born 1956), an internationally respected pianist who had refused to be interviewed for 20 years. After seeing that Chiao had prepared over 30 in-depth questions for him, he willingly gave Chiao his telephone number and said, “We can do the interview, but you have to give me 20 hours, that’s the only way I can answer these questions in detail.”
During their conversation, the two discussed how Zimerman’s childhood had been scarred by war, the impact of the Chopin Competition on musical education in Poland, the “Piano Concerto” that the modern Polish composer Witold Lutosławski wrote especially for Zimerman, the reasons for his 15-year abandonment of solo piano recording, and his moral courage in publicly denouncing the US invasion of Iraq.
It was originally thought that this book would interest only a small audience, and would probably just go through one print run and stay on the shelves for a year before disappearing, but in five short months it has gone through six printings, which tells you something about Chiao’s musical tier and his ability to write in an engaging style.
Music as a vocation
Through writing, lectures, and radio programs, Chiao Yuan-pu does what he can to spread knowledge about music. And his lectures are by no means your typical “music appreciation” stuff. “If I always played Pachelbel’s ‘Canon’ or Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’ during my lectures, or the theme was always some familiar work by Beethoven or Mozart, then the comprehension that the audience has of classical music would always be stuck at a superficial level, and they wouldn’t want to invest any further effort or time to get a deeper understanding.”
For the present, Chiao will continue with his global interview series, and he already has a writing schedule laid out for the next six years. As our own interview with Chiao closes, he also mentions doing a series of music documentaries. He aspires to follow in the footsteps of French director Bruno Monsaingeon, who made now-invaluable documentary interviews with great pianists like Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter who have since passed away.
Having found his ideal existence in the world of classical music, Chiao Yuan-pu wants to make for the rest of us a textual and visual record that will make our own journeys to that world more enjoyable and enriching.