In a high key
Gillian Helfgott, wife of the controversial pianist David Helfgott, says she doesn’t give a hoot about the critics. Not a hoot. In fact she spends an hour telling me she doesn’t give a hoot. During which time it becomes clear that she gives many hoots. She loathes them, despises them, detests them, thinks them spineless, passionless, loveless, worthless. “You tell me, who has done more for classical music, Dabid Helfgott or the critics?” She jabs her finger into my chest. I don’t have to think too hard about the answer.
It is midnight. I has been a long evening. But she is relentless. This is one tough cookie. “I get letters from all over the world saying David’s music has helped people. What have the critics ever done? No one ever erected a statue to a critic. They only have the notes; they have no passion, no soul. Audiences everywhere adore David. His light shines on.”
This is a critic-free evening. It is also a journalist-free evening – I am here on sufferance. It is almost an audience-free evening. David has returned to the Royal College of Music in Kensington to perform in front of 150 people, each of whom is paying £200 to hear him, or rather to be with him. His programme is a collective act of will, a participatory event, an affirmation of the human spirit. This is more religious revivalism than music-making: one is here to listen, yes, but also to be touched, physically and emotionally; to be healed.
There are many resonances. David studied at the Royal College of Music in the late 1960s and, as a student, gave a rapturously received performance of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto here, only to suffer a breakdown shortly afterwards. This is only the second time he has performed at the college since.
Healing is the theme of the evening, which has been organised by the Classic FM Charitable Trust to raise money for music therapy. Music helps to keep David intact: his music is tonight raising £40,000-plus to help put others back together. “Music didn’t cause David’s breakdown,” Gillian Helfgott tells her dinner-jacketed audience during the meal that follows David’s recital. “Music could never hurt anyone. It fills them with joy and healing.”
Many resonances; dissonances too. A mentally damaged pianist playing for a well-heeled group of corporate backers: young men in impeccable suits making a mint in the City; fleshy women in fancy frocks; and me, limiting my intake of champagne at the pre-recital reception and trying to make notes unobtrusively when he bounds on stage at 8pm, blinking in the lights, running, sprinting towards the piano.
He sits low, looking slyly right towards the audience every few seconds, drawing us in, demanding complicity. He wears a white, oriental-style shirt; I try to banish the thought it looks like a straitjacket. He carries on a private conversation with himself as he plays, murmuring, growling, pulled this way and that by the music. He furrows his brow, exhaling when he has got through a tricky, trilly passage, congratulating himself – “that was nice, that was nice”. God, this is difficult, his face seems to be saying, but with your help I can get through. You can see why the critics don’t get it.
He plays Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 2, powerfully if a little unevenly. At first the audience seems uneasy. There are a few titters at his asides – but are we really meant to be amused? The end of the piece brings release. He jumps up, faces the audience, rocks back and forth, demanding applause. The audience gives it. Now a bond has been formed: he so obviously enjoys playing and revels in te adulation that we must provide it. Now the audience can relax; when we laugh, we know we are laughing with him, participating in his struggle to make music, to mend minds, including his own.
He plays for 45 minutes, all bravura pieces – or “lollipops” to use the dismissive argot of the professional critic. Gottschalk’s Souvenirs d’Andalousie, Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance, Liszt’s La Campanella: loud, dramatic, fiery, romantic. Afterwards he comes among us – shaking hands, hugging, kissing, thanking, free-associating. “Moss the Boss, Moss the boss”, he repeats to me as he grabs me by the hand.
He greets at least half the audience and then he leaves. He doesn’t want to stay to eat. because he hardly ever eats: he runs on tea and coffee. He is taken back to his hotel to watch TV and wind down, while his audience digs into the standard corporate beano fare of almon mousse and loin of lamb and hears grimly inspiring stories of how music therapy has helped sexually abused and autistic children, has started to bring them out of their wilderness.
David Helfgott’s emergence from his own wilderness was the inspiration for the film Shine. It took director Scott Hicks 10 years to make and cost £6m. It has been a huge hit across the world, has grossed close to $100m, won an Oscar for Geoffrey Rush (who played Helfgott in the movie), and turned the pianist into an international superstar. He has been on the road – more in the air, given the global extent of the tour – since February, playing 65 concerts across four continents.
Audience and critics have given widely differing verdicts on his performances. While audiences have responded with warmth and admiration – inspired by the energy and aggression of his playing but also, inevitably, by his fightback from a mental breakdown that had led to him being institutionalised for 15 years – the critics have been savage. A New Zealand paper described it as “Beethoven on Prozac”. The Boston Globe said “David Helfgott should not have been in Symphony Hall last night and neither should the rest of us.” The Washington Post said “we have reached a point where a disturbed man who can barely play the piano is suddenly the hottest person in classical music”.
The Guardian’s critic left at the interval of Helfgott’s concert at the Royal Festival Hall in May. “He was due to play Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata in the second half, but I could not bear to stay to hear it.” He played, Andrew Clements added, “without shape or meaning”; it was not a musical event but a “disgusting exercise in commercial exploitation”.
Helfgott will tonight play his signature piece, Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto – which, if the film is to be believed, precipitated his initial breakdown while at college – in a sellout concert at the Royal Albert Hall. The frontline critics, who doubtless will interpret sellout in a rather different way, are unlikely to attend. They have written Helfgott off as a cheap trick; a pianistic no-hoper who would be nowhere without the mythical, semi-mystical status that clings to him and the solid commercial backing of a highly successful film.
I am not able to ask David what he thinks of being frozen out by the musical establishment. He speaks, publicly at least, in rhymes and riddles; the movie is awesomely exact in its representation of his speech patterns. According to Gillian and his manager, Austin Prichard-Levy, in private and when he gets to know you he is far more coherent, coming out from behind his nervous defences. But an interview is impossible: the irrepressible Gillian will tell his story for him. She has become the incarnation of his triumph and the standard-bearer in his battles with the thin, joyless bands of (predominantly male) critics across the world for whom art and heart are, she suggests, irreconcilable.
“If they don’t like David’s playing they have every right to say so,” says Gillian, “but how many music reviews have you seen where they discuss the performer’s medication? Some of the reviews didn’t even mention the pieces that David had played. I will defend the critics’ right to say what they like about the music – and if he doesn’t like David’s singing I understand that completely – but to say that David is exploiting the public, that he’s a fraud, that he’s dishonest is absurd. He hasn’t got a dishonest bone in him. His music is his passion and his life.”
She and David’s manager both subscribe to a conspiracy theory. Helfgott’s comeback has been gathering steam since his marriage to Gillian in 1983 – he had previously been in and out of mental institutions and had had a short-lived marriage to a woman called Clara, an episode ignored in the movie. In the 10 years leading up to the film’s release he had received perfectly respectable notices for his concerts in his home town of Perth, his increasingly popular tours across Australia and a disc of him playing which EMI released in 1990. It was only after the film, they insist, that the critics turned on him as a manufactured artists – an average performer who was attracting adoring crowds because of the non-musical hype, the quasi-religious fervour that surrounded him.
Shine has thus created David’s international success but it has also, those closest to him argue, made it impossible for critics to treat him even-handedly. They are perhaps being a little naive: despite the odd good notice – including critic Norman Lebrecht’s view that “his approach, if not fully coherent, is sufficiently original to lodge uncomfortably in the memory – the consensus is that without the news value of his story, the tear-jerking tale of his comeback after years of mental instability and personal tragedy, he would not have made it as a top-flight pianist.
Gillian, who at 65 is 15 years older than David, believes absolutely in his greatness. She has nursed him for 14 years, started to make him whole again, seen him return to the concert platform. She compares him with Glenn Gould, with Horowitz, with all those idiosyncratic artists for whom passion and personal commitment to the music matter more than the artistic control beloved of critics. But while it is easy to empathise with her love and her longing for him to inherit the mantle of greatness that i=once seemed his for the taking as a child prodigy in Australia and a star pupil at the Royal College of Music, her estimation seems wide of the mark. He is a quirky, dynamic performer capable of great moments, but he is not a great pianist, capable of performances of sustained genius.
Gillian is keen that he should rein in the manic rocking of his body and waving of his hands that accompany his bows, but there is an irony here. That is part of the uniqueness of his performance, part of his demanding the audience’s love. If he were to take a standard bow, greet the audience’s approval with Pollini-esque brusqueness, his appeal would diminish dramatically.
Fans turn up in their thousands to witness music makig this damaged man whole again; they want to live the miracle. Take that away and the edifice could fall, as others in the large promotional entourage now gathered around the Helfgott phenomenon must recognise. If David was just another pianist – which, given his apparently untreatable nervous condition, he never can be – he would find the going much harder. Ironically, winning over the critics might mean losing his unique appeal to an audience largely outside the classical loop.
The Helfgott story is fascinating on many levels. Much is contested. How accurate is the film for one thing? His sister Margaret disputes the portrayal of their father Peter as a tyrant; she says there were no beatings, that David was not ostracised, that his breakdown was not connected to his performance of “Rach 3”, that he was in long-term mental decline unconnected to his playing or his treatment by his family.
Helfgott’s brother Ben was excluded from the film at his own request, though he wished later he had been included. David’s first wife Clara – she was in her early fifties, he was in his mid-twenties when they married – also plays no part in the film, for reasons which may be legal or artistic; accounts differ. The bar owner who first got David playing again also threatened to sue if he was represented in the film – hence the change to a female bar owner – and apparently still feels bitter about the way he has been treated.
As well as being wife, lover and nurse, Gillian has become David’s voice. She represents his past, present and future, and has had vitriol poured on her by those who think they have been pushed out of the picture. She collaborated with Scott Hicks on the movie, has written David’s biography, dominates all interviews. It is her version, powerfully articulated, passionately adhered to, that we hear. But she never knew Peter, David’s father, who remains the key to the story. She entered, as it were, in the third reel, and has had to understand the plot backwards.
The film was an extraordinary achievement: moving, disturbing, inspiring: the life is, if anything, even more complex. I have heard a tape of David playing a Mozart piano concerto at the age of 14: wistful, precise, poised, technically perfect. He doesn’t play like that any more; indeed, he doesn’t play Mozart very much any more. He plays like a man who has suffered mental anguish, lived in desperate circumstances, performed in nightclubs, lost his bearings; and his playing now finds its expression in the great romantic, soul-wrenching works of Beethoven and Liszt. His music kept him afloat, but learning the art of survival changed the way he made music.
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