Healing: Retrospective and Resolution
2022 finds me at a crossroads, reflecting on my personal experiences within our collective planet-wide upheaval of the last two years. I was soaring in late 2019, ridiculously overextended but enjoying the bustling freedom of freelancing after three years in the German opera house system. For a freelancer, a full calendar is enviable - until a pandemic strikes.
De-Da Productions
In the first few months of 2020, as the world gradually shut down, so did my own personal artistic and professional momentum. Simultaneously a cherished relationship came to a close and at one and the same time I received a medical diagnosis that made me confront my own mortality. It may or may not be true that “’tis better to have loved and lost,” but in early 2020, as I navigated the German health care system, I was at least certain that in my life I had loved and been loved.
Even after months of tests I never expected to have to ask, “how long do I have?” Fortunately I had incredible doctors and superb German health care. So effective was my treatment that I was able to begin rehearsing and performing - even in the pandemic - before finishing my six months of treatment. And thanks to science, medicine and that indefinable concept of grace, I’m fully recovered and can look forward to a normal and healthy life. [To my compatriots, please take it from me: you don’t appreciate universal health care until you really need it, and I pray that our country finally acknowledges the moral imperative that health care is a basic human right.]
There were some dark months, when the only thing I could do was drag myself to the piano for some Bach. I kept my diagnosis private except for my innermost circle, and together we - over the space of two continents - had a reading group. The busyness of the previous few years had stifled the ravenous inner bookworm that had accompanied me since childhood. Among our reading was Dante, Cervantes, Homer, Virgil, Zola, The Bhagavad Gita… And as I recovered I learned and relearned and later performed the first book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. (I’ll do the second book in a few years.) This was the silver lining of my 2020.
The artist’s journey has many detours, with occasional soaring highs and bleak lows. Now on the other side of one of those lows, I’m rededicating my life to the art and the craft that goes into it, and moreover, to sharing it with others without hesitation. One of my personal challenges is balancing the necessity of long private preparation with the social rehearsal process and then the brief public performance. Overcoming an inclination towards privacy is a requirement of the art: sometimes uninhibitedly (Tristan Act 2), sometimes with devotion (the E-flat prelude of the Well-Tempered Clavier 1). And if it is true that an artist needs equal shares of humility and confidence, then I’ve often errored too far in the direction of humility. My experiences during the pandemic have encouraged me to chase off those pesky demons of paralyzing self-doubt and misplaced perfectionism who have whispered into my ear far too long. (Somehow the demons always fly back on my shoulders and I have to shoo them away again.) My resolution is to live more openly and expressively, to share with fervor the art and the craft to which I’ve devoted so much of my life, to stoke my flame and warm anyone who drops by my fire.
Fortunately I wasn’t only occupied with existential questions during the pandemic. I’m fortunate to work in a broad variety of the repertoire. But nevertheless there are milestones of the canon - Schlüßelwerke (key works) - that penetrate one’s very being and illuminate everything else we do. In addition to the Well-Tempered Clavier, the pandemic afforded me the time to properly study the Schlüßelwerk of all Schlüßelwerke, Tristan und Isolde, which I learned for Simon Rattle and an all-star cast in Aix-en-Provence. For anyone who has learned Tristan, life is thereafter divided into B.T. and A.T. (before and after Tristan.) It challenges your emotional reserves, intellect and stamina (and tear ducts) in a way that leaves you changed - transformed by its hitherto unknown depths.
My recovery coincided with returning to my beloved Berlin, and with a deepened commitment to my life’s work. And as I think back over the last two or so years, the overwhelming sentiment that I feel is gratitude. So to those near and far who have shared their journeys with me and allowed me to share mine with them, from the bottom of my heart I offer thanks and love.
