Chapter Ninety: An Unbelievable Performance

Many in the audience who knew nothing about the piano could not help asking what was going on, and why the students from the piano department all looked as though they had seen a ghost.

So someone began explaining that the piece ranked second in difficulty worldwide. Another person asked, did not the one just performed rank sixth in the world? Second and sixth were hardly worlds apart!

The amateur expert quickly shook his head with feigned profundity. No, the gap was enormous. This piece was several streets ahead of Mazeppa. One belonged to the realm of human beings; the other, to that of gods. How could the difference not be vast?

Yet Wu Di, seated below, did not quite believe that the overweight man onstage could perform such a work. He had heard that someone had played it at the Chopin International Piano Competition the year before, but for some reason no video had ever circulated, and the first and second prizes that year had both been left vacant. The third-place winner, said to be a Chinese American, vanished after the competition and even failed to collect the trophy.

Among the judges below, watching Cheng Xiaoyu sit there with closed eyes in deep thought, few believed he could play it. Not him, not at the drama academy, no, not even across all of China had anyone performed this piece. Those who understood all thought Cheng Xiaoyu had merely bought the score to show off.

For this fiendishly difficult piano work, Insonr-ns, composed by the British composer Michael Finnissy, could be said to make the entire piano world keep its distance. It was not that people did not want to play it, but that they did not dare. Merely looking at the score, with its pages seeming like a masterpiece of abstract painting, was enough to make the eyes swim. Many had even suffered mental collapse after attempting this piece, so most pianists would not dare touch it before reaching a certain level.

Cheng Xiaoyu opened his eyes, drew a deep breath, and turned slightly toward Pei Yanchen. "I will turn the first few pages myself. After that, help me."

Pei Yanchen looked at the densely packed notation, like some celestial scripture, and felt as though merely looking at it might break him. He said with a complicated expression, "All right."

The piano piece Insonr-ns, created more than thirty years ago by the British composer Michael Finnissy, was called the most difficult piano work to perform because it demanded extraordinarily high technique, as well as extreme finger agility and reaction speed. In some measures the score packed in as many as three hundred notes, and playing it required not only fingers but elbows as well.

After the entire concert hall had been stunned by the name Insonr-ns, Cheng Xiaoyu suddenly, before anyone could prepare, brought both hands down upon the keys at speed.

A burst of sound, to ordinary ears little more than noise, exploded abruptly against every listener's eardrums. Most people felt the chaotic notes must be utterly without structure, and some even covered their ears.

Then someone saw Cheng Xiaoyu, his expression almost deranged, striking the keys with his elbows.

Seen from the side, his right hand remained in a standard parallel line with the keyboard, the distance between them exactly the length of his fingers when bent. As his wrist shifted across the keys, it showed not the slightest rise or fall, and in transitions from one position to another its movement was almost imperceptible.

As he played, Cheng Xiaoyu suddenly lifted his right hand to turn the page, and the rustle of paper sounded like part of the music itself.

Most of the lay audience did not think he was performing at all; they felt only that some lunatic was battering the keys at random.

Then another string of even more dissonant arpeggios rang out, and the music grew sharper, more conflicted, as though contradictions were being driven ever further toward violence. The dissonant chords in the upper register seemed to proclaim the performer’s inner excitement and fury.

Then, in places where the music ought not to have fallen still, it settled again into a strange calm. The tones were beautiful and pleasing on their own, yet together they became peculiarly eerie, like the suffocating score of a horror film, low and sinister, leaving every listener as though stranded in a dark forest ringed with ghostly shapes.

After a brief spell of soothing and chilling calm, fierce noise, like quarrelling and fighting, once again echoed through the hall.

This piece was terrifying. At first hearing it seemed to have no order at all, yet one could not pull oneself free from the spell of its lightning-fast piano lines.

The seven judges wore solemn expressions. Wu Di looked grave. He Mingzhe felt somewhat uneasy. Those who truly understood the piano knew that Cheng Xiaoyu was not playing a single note carelessly.

Every technique he used was flawless.

But for the vast majority, the work was too obscure to comprehend. They could not understand that the piece was in fact probing new possibilities of expression for the piano as an instrument.

It mainly presented timbre rather than the traditional musical elements of melody, harmony, and counterpoint. The piano possesses an extraordinarily rich range of tone colors, and this work exposed the tones of different registers in a highly exaggerated manner.

To understand such modern music, one should pay more attention to the sensation of sound itself rather than to melody and harmony.

Cheng Xiaoyu did not know that everyone had been stunned by his possessed performance. Those who understood were frightened by the technique; those who did not were alarmed by Cheng Xiaoyu’s own apparent madness.

From this point on, he could no longer turn the pages himself. The score was crammed with notes in every measure, and the extreme speed of the performance left him no time even to breathe. He had to lean over the keyboard just to keep his fingers moving in step with the flow of the melody, and he was forced once more to use his elbows.

At the instant he struck the forceful chords, Cheng Xiaoyu’s entire upper body trembled with the motion. The movement looked crisp, vigorous, and powerful. To an untrained eye it may have seemed merely like a bodily flourish for effect, but only professionals like Li Yunling understood its meaning: in that instant, most of the body’s weight was explosively released and smoothly transmitted through the arms to the fingertips, creating the visual effect.

It was somewhat like the "quivering force" spoken of by martial practitioners. This was an exceedingly advanced skill, yet in the hands of most it was either mere semblance without substance or performed inadequately. Only those with truly superb piano technique could employ it with ease.

A rapid trembling line, following the rules of mathematics, crashed through the concert hall, and then came an inexplicably cold, rebellious, even frenzied loneliness of melody, drifting through the room like a curse. Everyone’s skin crawled, yet the melody was also beautiful, a piece that made the feeling of bipolar disorder unmistakably tangible.

When Cheng Xiaoyu played those two crisp, explosive chords, Li Yunling could not help but marvel. She knew that gesture all too well; it appeared in many pieces, and she knew the technical difficulty behind it inside out.

Wu Di looked at Cheng Xiaoyu onstage, expressionless, and all the pride in his heart shattered. He had never imagined that apart from Su Yuxi, there would be a teenage pianist stronger than him.

He had once believed that on the road to the summit, only Su Yuxi was worthy to be his rival. But now it seemed there were plenty of geniuses in this world, and just as many madmen. Cheng Xiaoyu was the kind of madman who made him feel fear.

Such a performance had already transcended the realm of mortals and reached into God's domain. If not a lunatic, what else could it be?

And most of the judges were delighted that the drama academy had gained yet another genius, one even more formidable than Wu Di. The sudden surprise was like winning first prize in a lottery.

Though Li Yunling had a thorn in her heart that pricked her uncomfortably, she had nothing to say, nor any grounds to refuse, before such a genius.

But for most of the audience, they had no idea what Cheng Xiaoyu was playing. Only the judges in the front row, each leaning forward as though facing a great enemy, made many who knew little about the piano too afraid to make a sound.

This piece could not be understood, let alone performed, without an extremely high level of mastery. Without knowledge of modern compositional techniques, of the twelve-tone system, of atonal music, without even the slightest understanding of modernist basics, and knowing only whether there was a pleasing melody or not, one could never grasp it.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, rhythm, chords, and even sound-producing instruments had diversified, and music had no longer been satisfied with beautiful melody alone, turning increasingly toward impressionistic music.

This piece, translated into Chinese as British Country Music, was, as everyone knew, associated with a rainy nation. Through impressionistic feeling, it was not hard to sense the character of the British countryside. Music can certainly be appreciated, but it does not follow that what ordinary people cannot appreciate is not good music.

The Polish composer PNR, in his 1960 work Elegy for the Victims of Hiroshima, used throughout the entire eight and a half minutes the well-known new timbres, making use of thick clusters of semitones and glissandi through tone clusters. Most people might simply think, well, that is how foreigners do it.

But Tan Dun, without exaggeration, can be called the foremost Chinese composer. His work Paper Music has been performed abroad to great acclaim, and it too is modern music that ordinary people cannot understand.

Modernism is not one specific school of form, but rather a collective term for the many and varied musical ideas of the modern era. It is, above all, about expressing oneself with fewer constraints and with newer, more novel methods. Not everyone can become a composer, and writing random notes does not make one ultramodern. Any modernist composer could casually write what you would consider good music.

The melodic changes in Insonr-ns naturally follow some rule, though that rule may be philosophical, mathematical, or logical; what is certain is that it was not written to make the melody beautiful.

Yet however one looked at it, such a piece could not be understood by the masses, and so it could only be called a divine work. Only a tiny handful standing at the summit of piano performance could comprehend it, though that did not mean they could accept it.

When Cheng Xiaoyu’s final notes suddenly burst from the piano, and the audience still did not know when the work would end, it came to an abrupt stop in a way no one could understand.

Without the slightest hesitation, Cheng Xiaoyu rose from the stool and looked down at the confused audience, their eyes wide and blank.

For most people, the feeling was simple: this lunatic had been pounding randomly at the piano, and had finally finished.

Many students did not take it seriously, thinking Cheng Xiaoyu really was a shameless young playboy, and that after such a chaotic performance he still had the nerve to stand onstage. They were just about to boo when they realized something did not seem quite right.

Even many piano students could not quite tell how well Cheng Xiaoyu had played; they could only sit in silence, staring in unison at the judges’ table.

The entire hall fell into an eerie stillness. Cheng Xiaoyu onstage and the audience below seemed like two enemies preparing to strike each other a fatal blow, holding their breath and gathering strength, waiting only for the trumpet to sound.

The judges, watched by all, did not applaud either. Their expressions were grave as one by one they slowly raised their scorecards: all ten points, except for Li Yunling, who gave ninety-nine.