A Sacred Madness

The first symptom is a slight trembling of the shoulders. Then comes a weakness in the legs, then a sweating of the palms. Chills, fever, even nausea sometimes follow. Some victims regularly employ mild doses of alcohol for temporary relief. The more imaginative resort to yoga and hypnosis. Whatever the antidote, the common malady known as stage fright is accepted far and wide as a natural part of the performing experience.

It need not be, says Pianist Charles Rosen, a sometime author who won a National Book Award earlier this year for The Classical Style. In the current issue of the literary journal Prose, Rosen argues that for concert performers, at least, stage fright is an outgrowth of the questionable principle that recitalists must perform from memory. Playing by heart may make the performance seem a spontaneous creation of the virtuoso himself. But since the audience already has in mind an idealized notion of the music, an inevitable gap opens between concept and realization. Public humiliation awaits the performer who lets the gap get too broad.

"The silence of the audience," writes Rosen, "is not that of a public that listens but of one that watches--like the dead hush that accompanies the unsteady movement of a tightrope walker poised over his perilous space. At every performance of a Beethoven sonata, the audience is aware of a text behind the sound, a text which is approached, deformed, illuminated. The significance of the music as performed starts from this tension. The physical sign of this tension is stage fright." Like epilepsy, he says, "stage fright is a divine ailment, a sacred madness."

Separation. It was not always so, says Rosen. Until the mid-19th century, pianists, for example, regularly played from the score or improvised. With the score sitting right there on the piano, how could anyone question the pianist's veracity? If he were improvising, virtually composing on the spot, who was to challenge him? Thus stage fright was all but unknown. But then along came Clara Wieck (soon to become Robert Schumann's wife), who did away with the score at public performances. The result, eventually, was an absolute separation of composer and performer.

Rosen suggests that it is too late to do anything about the problem unless performers are allowed to bring back the scores and the great art of improvising. Ideally, they should have the abandon of the jazz saxophonist or the Serbian bard hatching his epic. Another solution, it might be added, would be luring composers from their suburban comfort to play their own music. Until then, he notes, one thing that can alleviate stage fright is "the absolute certainty of a botched performance." In coming upon a piano with a sticky pedal or a defective hammer action, says Rosen, "one is reduced to doing one's best."

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