by Anna Freer
It was the beginning of July when I opened an email in my inbox I’ve never expected to see there…
C O N G R A T U L A T I O N S!
Your application to the International Max Rostal Competition
has been accepted – we look forward to seeing you in Berlin in October!
After a whole adult lifetime of insisting I’m not interested at all in competitions and everything they stand for, I have spent most of May preparing rabidly for the pre-selection round of this one. I send off the application video with a feeling of distinct relief – that’s done with. Now to enjoy summer – wait, what? The complete unknown of a new kind of preparation stage is about to begin.
The kind of intense preparation that musicians most commonly do for competitions and auditions is something of a loaded topic. When you make the choice to go down a slightly different path in your musical life, this becomes relegated to another world – of square perfection, of accuracy, of intonation intonation intonation. Paganini caprices and Ysaye sonatas played so cleanly you could eat your dinner off them, figuring out how to balance preparing the first round (the only guaranteed chance you have to play) with the recital round, the concerto round – it’s a whirlpool, a minefield for me, having spent the last years mainly concerned with finding my musical voice and programming recitals and concerts dynamically and interestingly, to give audiences new experiences of music. This is not to say that I haven’t been interested in – obsessed with – excellence. if something is to be new, dynamic, and interesting, it has to be executed at the highest level possible. But this, this? A competition? Sending the confirmation of my participation feels like jumping off a cliff where the sea below is just all the things I am most uncomfortable about in my violin playing.
Over-dramatic? Yes, very. Unfortunately that’s the only way I operate. But now, a few months away from July, and two weeks away (in the other direction) from Berlin, I can see the stages of grief preparation more clearly – for me, at least, they go like this.
One. Excitement
I can’t overemphasise how unexpected this was. I have never thought of myself as a violinist that competition juries would be interested in, so although I profess to think most competitions are rigged and a waste of time, progressing in one is a strange sort of validation. And a new experience! I vow to work as hard as I can and not be attached to the results, to use it to push myself as a musician. I vow to be balanced about the whole process. Famous last words.
Two. Trepidation
I’m going through the repertoire list – it’s big. Long. Virtuosic. A Paganini caprice in the first round, something I’ve always been too scared to play in public. A wildly varied recital in the second. A concerto I’ve not played before for the final. I make a plan, go home for the summer, my friends tell me they don’t want to see me until I’ve done my work for the day. I am still balanced!
The work proceeds – well, I think. I feel like I am coming to terms with the repertoire, waking early to turn on my parents’ loud old coffee machine before anyone else is up, spending the mornings with Schumann and the afternoons at the community garden watching my friends’ fearless toddlers climb trees. I play in all sorts of places – the church meeting room, my friend’s bar, a freezing hall in the hills. How exciting! How scary! It’s getting there. I come back to Zürich for lessons before the semester officially begins, and get through – for me – an astonishing amount of repertoire over three days with my teacher. We change a lot in the music, we work hard. I am so tired. I play it all directly after in a class lesson with all my colleagues listening, thinking not about the music but about the changes I have to make and how exhausted I am, how my body doesn’t feel like I am controlling it. I give up on myself and the music within the first two minutes and somehow still have to play for thirty more. It is an unmitigated disaster.
Three. Despair
This doesn’t last forever, just the week of the terrible class lesson, but it begins to tinge everything I do. My intonation is terrible. What’s the point in being a good musician if you can’t play in tune? The spiral begins, bringing not quite another stage, but a sub-stage:
Three-A. Obsession
I begin to sleep less but practice in a more desperate way. Balance? That was a nice concept for someone who had more time, someone who could play in tune, someone who wasn’t a disaster, someone who was on the way to executing the music like she heard it in her head. The whys began to pile on – not only why am I doing this competition, but more why am I playing this instrument, why am I banging my head against a brick wall? All the advice – from teachers, friends, myself, the internet, to sleep more, drink enough water, seem so stupid – still so much to do and all of it sounding bad.
I sleep through my alarm one morning, finally giving my body the break it’s screaming for. I wake with a twinge of…
Four – Surprise? Hope
Multiple rehearsals that day, one I am especially dreading with our class pianist for the concerto. To my shock, I find myself having fun, enjoying playing. Nothing is as bad as it had seemed the day before – it feels like my fingers have finally registered all the work I have been putting in. Maybe the stupid advice wasn’t so stupid after all – maybe water and sleep really do help (Nuh. Duh.)
This leads to where I am now, I think:
Five, Acceptance
I have begun, in small stages, to realise there is no point in flogging the horse of where I ‘should be’ in relation to this competition, in music and ability and comparison with others. Everything I play stands where it stands in this moment – ever able to be improved, ever changing, I hope, in the life in music I hope to have. Of course it is not quite what I hear in my head – but will it ever be? I have to believe it is where it is for a reason – and that it and I have something to give within that.
I keep thinking that somehow, when the balance got muddled up around stage Three and Four, I lost sight of the fact that I didn’t enter this competition to win – I entered it to have a new experience, to push myself. It puts me in mind of the process of the audition for the orchestra whose blog you’re reading this on. The concept of the Theresia audition was a totally new one for me – both parts of a whole quartet to prepare in a short timeframe, on an instrument – the baroque violin – I had only recently become comfortable playing. The stages were the same! Excitement, trepidation, despair, obsession, acceptance. The end of the Theresia audition came with a successful result (and I’m happy it did), but I remember walking out of the audition feeling that the success was mine whether I got it or not – because with the last stage, the acceptance, came a wonderful feeling of freedom – and with the freedom came the ability to go onto stage and make music.
It is a strange thing, this process of preparation that we do. It’s a strange thing for music, this thing that is somehow both knowable and unknowable, to be linked to fame and money and success and career – to survival. I am not saying it’s better to somehow be ‘above’ that and not participate – that’s a fantasy that removes music form the human world and removes its grounding. If you work in a vacuum you never improve, and some diamonds are indeed formed under pressure – but this concept of winning can be so all-consuming, so stifling, that we forget we have the ability within a really privileged job to keep progressing all our lives, to keep listening, to keep seeking out new experiences – to accept where we are in each moment and to make music from there. I’ve done it before – I hope I can do it again. Let’s see.
