How did we get from Fu Cong to Lang Lang?

Fu Cong, UK, October 1966 (image: Watson/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

This is not the title we came up with, this is Norman Lebrecht’s title. Norman Lebrecht is an English music and culture critic, novelist, and classical music blogger. He was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph and editor of the London Evening Post.

Even after the Chinese world first reported the death of Fu Cong, some articles in the foreign media began to appear. Yesterday, Norman Lebrecht looked back at How did we get from Fou Ts’ong to Lang Lang on his classical music blog with this interesting headline. We are not sure whether he is asking the Chinese piano community or the world.

“After the news of his death came out, the famous Chinese pianist Lang Lang formally expressed his condolences on his Micro blog. Although anything that appeared on Lang Lang’s social media was written about by someone else, it was considered important for the present-day Pretender to lift his hat to a pioneer, the first Chinese pianist allowed to participate in the Chopin competition.”

He added: “From Fu Cong to Lang Lang, there is an insurmountable gap. One is an elaborate, introspective interpreter, and the other is a showman. One lives a life of great humility, the other lives entirely outside the material world. One is a pianist of pianists, and the other is a brand King. One was fatally tortured under the Chinese regime and the other was its poster boy.”

He also spoke with Jessica Duchen about Fu’s Farewell to Fou Ts’ong on his 60th birthday. Jessica Duchin learned the piano from Fu cong’s wife, Zhuo Yilong, from ages 10 to 17. Let’s translate the following:

“I’m always a beginner, I’m always learning…”

Fu cong tells Jessica Duchin about his childhood in China and the extraordinary story of his escape to the West.

The world is very different. “My childhood was unusual anywhere,” he began, “but especially in China, where more than 90 percent of the 450 million people were farmers, a small percentage of intellectuals.” Fu Cong belongs to this smallest group. He is the son of Fu Lei, a famous Chinese scholar. Mr Fu travelled freely to Europe, studied in Paris for five years and was well versed in both classical Chinese and modern philosophy. His works include the Chinese translation of Romain Rolland’s masterpieces Christophe and the Complete Works of Balzac. (The Chinese best-seller “Letters from Fu Lei’s Family,” featuring letters between father and son and young musicians’ progress on the piano)

“Jean Christophe had a huge influence in China, far more than in Europe,” Fu said. “I think it’s because it represents personal liberation. For China, this is a crucial question — and it remains unresolved to this day. My father was an extraordinary man, a Renaissance humanist; This is how I grew up. When I was very young, my father himself taught me classical Chinese, which was very rare even in my generation. My father would quote Aristotle, Plato, Bertrand Russell, or Voltaire when he taught me Laozi or Confucius.”

“It was a very crazy time in China, we were occupied by The Japanese in 1941-1945 — four years, my father never left his house. There was little food, only coarse grain. This is a very difficult period, but also a very hopeful period, because the whole of China is in a turbulent period, everyone feels that fascism is evil, evil and good is very clear. We are fine, so we fight for the cause.”

Fu cong’s family also owns a large collection of classical music records. Fu grew up singing songs by artists such as Alfred Cortot, Edwin Fischer, Wilhelm Furtwangler and Pablo Casals. He was fascinated by music from a very young age, but it wasn’t until he was 17 that he began to take the piano seriously as the focus of his life. At the age of ten, he was given an introductory piano lesson by one of his father’s students, a young woman who had studied with a Russian pianist in Shanghai. Her loving and encouraging manner brought “the greatest joy of my life” to a child who had been brought up strictly. He had made rapid progress, but when he was sent to work with the Italian pianist and conductor Paci — he had been Toscanini’s assistant at the Miranska Theatre and the founder of the Shanghai Orchestra. Thanks to his love of gambling, Toscanini was stuck in Shanghai. He found himself faced with a very different approach, one that robbed him of all pleasure. He got nothing but a year of practice and had to endure the indignity of balancing a coin on the back of his hand.

After his family moved to Kunming, in Yunnan province, Fu cong became a rebellious teenager, passionate about the ideals of the Communist revolution. His father, one of the first Chinese to recognize the truth of Stalin and the lies of Bolshevik communism in Russia, played “the Cassandra of his time” and predicted disaster. His son disagreed, and eventually the family broke up. When his father returned to Shanghai, Fu Cong was kicked out of the school again and again in Yunnan alone. Finally, at the age of 15, he was forced to apply for Yunnan University. He signed up to study English literature, but spent his time “making revolutions everywhere, always falling in love, drinking and playing bridge!”

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The 17-year-old impressed his father with his difficult two-month solitary journey. His father agreed to help him continue his studies to become a concert pianist. Because fu’s classes are so few, they have a surprising tendency. A piano teacher moved to Canada three months later; Next, he did learn something from a violinist rather than a pianist: the aged Alfred Wittenburg. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he was the music director of the Berlin Opera and the chamber music partner of Artur Schnabel. After Wittenberg’s death, I learned by intuition, by thinking, by reading. I taught myself and made my debut a year later. It caused such a stir in Shanghai that when the central government wanted to send people abroad to audition, they came to Shanghai and asked me to be one of the candidates.”

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“I am a great forger because I manage to hide all my troubles through my unique fingering, through my imagination, in some way. I always wanted to fulfill whatever vision I had in mind — and in ways I didn’t know, I found it in my own way. Unless the vision is presented in a way that doesn’t show its flaws, I won’t allow it to be presented. In a way, it was my own downfall, because I pretended to be too good. In some ways, this is also good, because my approach is original. But my struggles with the piano over the years have been incredible, even to this day. I had to practice very hard. I admire pianists who are highly skilled because I wish I had more time to play more music. I am very greedy in music!”

Fu hoped to extend his stay in Poland as long as possible because it was already too dangerous for him to return home, and China’s anti-rightist movement — “the prelude to the Cultural Revolution” — began to criticize him and his father. “It’s a matter of life and death.” He was eager to go to Russia, where a new friend and supporter was doing his best to help: Sviatoslav Richter, who had written an enthusiastic article about Fu for A communist magazine called Friendship, which was jointly published in China and Russia. Richter hoped this would help Fu to officially come to Russia, but although the article appeared in The Russian version, it was never published in China. In the end the plan went nowhere. Fu didn’t know about it until many years later.

His dramatic escape to Britain was achieved only with the help of more prominent figures: Wanda Wilcomiska, who helped persuade the Polish authorities to “turn a blind eye”; Oberon Herbert, a wealthy British musician with a passion for music, helped arrange an invitation for Fu to perform in London and was granted a visa. And Julius Kachin, the pianist who lent him his plane ticket. In an effort to get away from the Chinese communist authorities, a “farewell” concert announced at the last minute that Fu cong would play two concerto s on Saturday night, December 23, in Mozart’s K503 C major and Chopin’s F minor (both pieces he learned in a week). Another distraction, a farewell recital, has also been announced for a later date, though both the pianist and the organisers know this is unlikely. The next morning, in a Catholic country, it was Sunday and Christmas Eve, a day when “even the most hardened gendarmes get a little slack!” — Fu Cong flew to London on British Airways. He became free and became a celebrity in the West. During China’s Cultural Revolution, Both Fu’s parents committed suicide.

Today, looking back on this extraordinary story and his changing fortunes since then, Fu cong has some sage advice for future young pianists. “First, you have to have a good sense of self and know what you’re made of. If you have real talent, not just talent, but real ambition, it means you’re ready to sacrifice your life for it, to give it your all, and that’s almost more important than talent. Even with these two, you must be prepared to accomplish nothing in terms of worldly “success.” You know what you’re up against! I don’t advise anyone to go on for the wrong reasons.

“I consider myself very lucky, although I would not consider my career so easy, partly because I have my own shortcomings, and partly and largely because of my character. My wife Patsy(pianist and teacher Zhuo Yilong) said to me, “You shouldn’t complain, because you create your own destiny.” It’s true. Today I said to myself, thank God, now I really start to understand music. But I consider myself a beginner. I’m always a beginner. I’m always learning. I think I’m lucky because I’ve never been so successful that I’ve been blinded by my vanity. In music, you are lucky. When I was very young, I wrote to my father from Poland to say that I was sad and lonely. He wrote back: “You’ll never be alone. Don’t you think you’ve been living with the greatest soul in human history? ‘That’s how I’ve always felt.”