Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua

Author:Amy Chua
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 9781594202841
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Published: 2011-01-10T10:00:00+00:00

19

How You Get to Carnegie Hall

Sophia and her taskmaster (with my father watching)

My heart sank. The score looked disappointingly sparse, a few staccato notes here and there, not a lot of density or vertical range. And such a short piece: six scruffy xeroxed pages.

Sophia and I were in Professor Wei-Yi Yang’s piano studio at the Yale School of Music. It was a large rectangular room with two black Steinway baby grand pianos standing side by side, one for the teacher, one for the student. I was staring at “Juliet as a Young Girl” from Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, which Wei-Yi had just proposed that Sophia play for an international piano competition that was coming up.

When Wei-Yi and I first met, he explained that he’d never had a student as young as Sophia, who was barely fourteen. He taught only Yale piano graduate students and a few Yale undergraduates of unusual caliber. But having heard Sophia play, he was willing to take her on with one condition: that she didn’t require any special treatment because of her age. I assured him that this would be no problem.

I love being able to count on Sophia. She has wells of inner strength. Even more than me, she can take anything: exclusion, excoriation, humiliation, loneliness.

Thus began Sophia’s baptism of fire. Like Mrs. Vamos, Wei-Yi had expectations that were of an order galactically beyond what we’d been used to. The stack of music he handed Sophia at her first lesson—six Bach inventions, a book of Moszkowski études, a Beethoven sonata, a toccata by Khachaturian, and Brahms’s Rhapsody in G Minor—stunned even me. Sophia had some catching up to do, he explained; her technical foundation was not what it should be, and there were some gaping holes in her repertoire. Even more intimidating was when he said to Sophia, “And don’t waste my time with wrong notes. At your level, there’s no excuse. It’s your job to get the notes right, so we can work on other things during the lesson.”

But two months later, when Wei-Yi Yang proposed the pieces from the suite Romeo and Juliet, I had the opposite reaction. The Prokofiev didn’t look demanding all—it didn’t strike me as a competition winner. And why Prokofiev? The only thing I knew about Prokofiev was Peter and the Wolf. Why not something hard, like Rachmaninov?

“Oh, this piece,” I said aloud. “Sophia’s old piano teacher thought it was too easy for her.” This wasn’t entirely true. Actually, it wasn’t even a little true. But I didn’t want Wei-Yi to think I was challenging his judgment.

“Easy?” Wei-Yi boomed contemptuously. He had a deep baritone voice, which was strangely inconsonant with his slight, boyish frame. He was in his thirties, of mixed Chinese and Japanese descent, but raised in London and Russian-taught. “Prokofiev’s piano concertos hold up the sky. And there is nothing—not one note—that is easy about this piece. I challenge anyone to play it well.”

I liked this. I like authority figures. I like experts. This is the opposite of Jed, who hates authority and believes that most “experts” are charlatans.

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