THERE is a good reason that learning to play the piano is generally considered child's play. Not because it is easy but because, on the contrary, it requires years of patient practicing that few adults have time for.
The fingers must be strengthened by hours and hours of exercises - scales, chord progressions and the ubiquitous drills designed by the French composer Charles-Louis Hanon, whose 1873 book, "The Virtuoso Pianist in 60 Exercises," is still the most widely used hand workout in print. There are fingering patterns to memorize, sounds to recognize, motor skills linking the brain and the body that can be refined only by continuous repetition. Right?
Right - unless you are a movie star, in which case a combination of camera tricks and extraordinary training techniques can take you from "Chopsticks" to Chopin over the course of a few weeks. Like gaining 80 pounds for a role, feigning piano virtuosity is one of those transformations that consistently wins Oscars. From F. Murray Abraham's portrayal of Mozart's sidekick Salieri in "Amadeus" to Geoffrey Rush's of the pianist David Helfgott in "Shine"; from Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw Szpilman in "The Pianist," and Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in "Ray": the pianist role, when skillfully executed, leaves audiences mesmerized and full of questions.
Is the actor faking it? Are those hand-doubles? Did he really learn how to play? And if he learned, could I learn?
Would-be pianists may find hope - if false hope - in the new French film "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," Jacques Audiard's adaptation of the 1978 James Toback movie, "Fingers," in which Harvey Keitel played a debt collector torn between a life of crime and classical music. In the updated story, Romain Duris plays Thomas Seyr, a 28-year-old Parisian who makes his living running seedy real estate transactions and collecting debts - violently - on behalf of his washed-up dad.
But Thomas, whose dead mother was a famous concert pianist, had shown great promise on the piano as a child. Now, fed up with his brutal life, he schedules an audition with his mother's former agent and hires a Vietnamese immigrant, Miao Lin (played by Linh Dan Pham) to help him relearn the instrument, which he hasn't touched for 10 years.
In real life, meanwhile, Mr. Duris, 31, had a much bigger challenge: to learn an instrument he had never played at all. He followed a well-worn path for film actors: learn to play the piano - actually play, not just pretend to play - even though the audience will hear a professional performance while the actor strikes the right keys on a mute instrument.
Margie Balter, a Los Angeles-based pianist who has been the crash-course coach behind many famous on-screen pianists, explains that this approach is much more popular than using hand-doubles. "The actor needs to feel like a musician," she said. "They need to be able to read some music and understand the mind-set of a musician in order to look realistic."
Ms. Balter, who has been an actor herself, had her first major film-coaching gig with Holly Hunter, for her Academy Award-winning role in "The Piano." (Ms. Hunter was already a skilled pianist but needed brushing up.) Ms. Balter has also worked with Tom Cruise for "Interview With a Vampire," Scarlett Johansson for "The Man Who Wasn't There," Sandra Bullock for "The Net," Barbara Hershey for "The Portrait of a Lady" and, most recently, Paige Hurd and Djimon Honsou for "Beauty Shop."
Such students usually come to Ms. Balter with what she calls "Chopsticks"-level skills, a month or two set aside for daily training, and the charge to master segments of well-known piano works - typically, Beethoven sonatas or Chopin nocturnes - that have been chosen by a film's director or music consultant.
The hardest pieces for nonpianists to learn, Ms. Balter says, are fast pieces with big hand stretches - by Schubert, say, or Liszt. Yet while a two-part invention by Bach may seem straightforward in comparison, it presents its own difficulties. Since the right and left hands move in counterpoint throughout, Ms. Balter says, "it's like splitting your body into two halves." (The alternative to this "split" would be something like a waltz, where the left hand maintains a consistent pattern while the right hand plays a melody.)
For his role in "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," Mr. Duris - like his character, Thomas - labored over Bach's Toccata in E minor (BWV 914), a technically demanding piece that leaves no room for error or approximation.
But Mr. Duris didn't need to look far for a coach. His sister, Caroline Duris, 36, is a professional pianist and piano teacher in Paris. He worried at first that working with his big sister would be too comfortable, that it wouldn't be intimidating enough to make him practice.
"But I love her perceptions about music so much," he said, "and I realized that being a good student with her would be a question of the family's honor."
Ms. Duris did more than teach her brother; she played the music heard throughout the film. And an accidental moment of frustration that was captured during one of her recording sessions, in which she complained that her heart was beating too fast, made its way into the movie, depicting the voice of Thomas's mother on an old tape he listens to again and again.
Mr. Duris worked with his sister for three hours a day over two months, usually at their parents' house or at a music shop in Paris, where they had a practice room.
Like his character, he stayed up late in his flat playing a rented digital piano with headphones. But training his fingers was only part of the learning process. Mr. Duris says he wanted to understand what kind of mental space a pianist inhabits.
"When they sit down to play, are they nervous?" he asked. "Are they inspired?"
To find out, he watched videos of famous pianists. He learned that there were few physical rules, that each pianist had distinctive gestures and a personal style. "They all fed me," he said.
In the film, Thomas repeatedly watches a black-and-white video clip showing the fingers of Vladimir Horowitz curling down the piano in a long run. This obsession with watching performance videos was just one detail from Mr. Duris's real-life study that inspired Mr. Audiard's piano scenes in the movie.
Another source of inspiration was the real-life rapport between teacher and student, which informed Thomas's scenes with Miao Lin. She speaks virtually no French in the film, so she and Thomas communicate through imitation, repetition and body language. Even this, Mr. Duris says, mirrored his lessons with his sister, though they had the luxury of speech communication.
"Speaking or not speaking, it's the same," he said. In any music lesson, the teacher models good technique, watches, listens, waits and says, "Again" (one of the few words Miao Lin speaks), many, many times.
The speech-free method also resonates with Ms. Balter's Hollywood approach. While she describes herself as "wild" and "willing to do anything" in a lesson, she feels she learned more about music instruction from a Chinese musician who taught her to play a zither, she says, than from any classical piano instructor she has had. (Ms. Balter's childhood teacher was Lincoln Maazel, the father of Lorin Maazel, the music director of the New York Philharmonic.)
For a year during her studies in ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, Ms. Balter entered the Chinese teacher's room each week, bowed, then imitated everything he played. "He'd shake his head, and I'd try it again," she said.
Another speech-free technique Ms. Balter uses is to play a piece directly on top of a student's hands. "The body has its own memory," she said, explaining that the repeated manipulation of posture (centered), elbows (slightly out) and wrists (flat, never bent) can go a long way toward making a rookie look like a professional. But the most telltale sign of a real pianist, she says, is that the fingers always stay on the keys.
Still, for all this intensive training, an actor-pianist is the master of only a few bars here, a fragment there: not bad for a couple months' effort but not the same as really knowing how to play. Mr. Duris admits that most of the Bach toccata would be impossible for him.
"They gave me the beginning of the fugue," he said. "But to play the part that comes 30 seconds later, I'd need 10 years of training."
Fortunately, the repetition of just a few well-chosen segments, artfully arranged with subtle cuts and fades throughout a film can give an audience a rich illusion that the actor is playing a lot of serious piano.
Mr. Duris's success in playing the role of late-blooming virtuoso has not led him to any major delusions about a real-life musical career. But he says he wouldn't mind having a piano around, just in case.
"How do you call the one that is grand but not very, very grand?" he asked, searching for an English translation. A baby grand?
"Yes," he says. "I want a baby grand. Steinway. Black, Maybe somebody in America will read this and be very, very nice."
No comments:
Post a Comment