Child’s Play at a High Level

Inside Room 530 at the Juilliard School of Music, Dorothy DeLay is in the midst of cultivating her latest miracle: a 9-year-old violinist named Rachel Lee. The child is dressed in a pinstriped jumper, white ankle socks and shiny black patent leather shoes. Her long hair is drawn back with a velvet bow.

In a barely audible voice, she announces: “I’m going to play Mozart’s Sonata in G major.” Then she lifts her half-size violin purposefully to her chin and begins to play by heart, her eyes cast mostly at the floor or stealing glances at her bow arm, to keep it straight.

Nearby her mother, Karen Lee--eyes closed, head bowed, her face resting on her fist--listens intently. In the corner, Miss DeLay, as she is always called, makes pencil notes on the score. Rachel plays the music brightly, as it was intended, but she does not play like a child. Her fingers are nimble and lightning quick; her violin is indeed singing.

“Thank you!” DeLay says when Rachel finishes. “I liked the way you played that,” she adds with a note of relish, casting a beam of her high-powered charm toward the child, who swallows a whispered thank you, nods and drops her hands respectfully at her sides.

The beloved guru of choice for aspiring young musicians, DeLay, 80, has for more than 40 years coached some of the world’s greatest talents, including violinists Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Midori, Gil Shaham, Nigel Kennedy and Sarah Chang.

DeLay says that Rachel Lee, a Korean American fourth-grader who moved from Chicago to New York in 1996 with her family so she could study at Juilliard, is “one of the most talented students” she has ever seen walk through the door of Room 530. That’s why she introduced the youngster to Neale Perl, executive director of the La Jolla Chamber Music Society and organizer of its annual Prodigy Series, which Rachel opens Saturday. Designed to showcase musicians Perl hopes will be “the great artists of the 21st century,” the series continues through April with 15-year-old cellist Alisa Weilerstein from Cleveland and 13-year-old pianist Arthur Abadi from Rancho Santa Margarita.

It’s difficult to pin down a precise definition of what a musical prodigy is, but DeLay and others who work with talented kids offer a variation on this theme: a child with a rare and precocious ability to execute technically advanced pieces of music, rendering them with an expressiveness that would seem beyond their grasp.

But just how precocious and how talented and at what age? Mozart was a sensation at age 5. Yo-Yo Ma played for Pablo Casals at 7. Yehudi Menuhin debuted with the San Francisco Symphony when he was 8. Midori performed with the New York Philharmonic at 11.

La Jolla’s prodigies have their own credentials: Abadi performed with the Pacific Symphony at age 6. Weilerstein gave her first public performance just six months after starting cello lessons, at 5. And at age 8, when Perl first heard her play, Rachel Lee made the 55-year-old music administrator cry.

Whatever a prodigy’s talent and early accomplishments, all roads do not necessarily lead to Carnegie Hall. The most promising children may become the next great artists, or they may settle into the more ordinary roles of orchestra member or music teacher. They may burn out or lose interest and abandon music altogether.

“Most prodigies don’t make it,” says Ellen Winner, a developmental psychologist at Boston College who studies gifted children. Far less than 1% of all children have what can be called prodigious talent, and only a fraction of those will end up forging impressive solo careers. Of the 330 students now enrolled in the Juilliard Pre-College Division (not all of them considered prodigies), only three have recording contracts at major labels: 17-year-old violinist Sarah Chang, 15-year-old violinist Han-Na Chang and 15-year-old pianist Helen Huang.

On the gray December afternoon of this her first interview, Rachel Lee betrays no interest in the fame that could lie ahead. Instead, every fiber of her 9-year-old self seems just to want to play music and “play good.” She comes home from school every day and makes herself practice (“One thing that helps me work is to keep my school clothes on,” she says). Her favorite musician is the late Jascha Heifetz, despite the Spice Girls worship among her schoolmates (“They will, like, insult Beethoven,” she says with a pained smile. “They say that guy’s old.”). And she has to constantly meet her own high standards.

“I don’t really think of myself as a prodigy. I just play,” she says.

Just a violinist then?

“I don’t think I’m a violinist yet,” she says, without noticing the look of surprise on her mother’s face, “I’m practicing to be one.”

Where do the Rachel Lees of the world come from? To a large degree, they’re self-realized. “Even when he was little, he had a presence, an air of confidence,” says Arthur Abadi’s mother, Deborah, sitting in her Rancho Santa Margarita kitchen, eagerly trying to explain her son’s mysterious gifts. “Arthur’s always kind of been in his own artistic and musical world.”

The Abadis say they were “terrified” at Arthur’s musical aptitude. Before he began playing the violin and piano at age 3, he had the habit of singing full symphonies in his car seat--from memory and perfectly on key. On her third and fourth birthdays, Rachel Lee asked her mother for a violin and cried when she didn’t get one. Alisa Weilerstein waited until her fourth birthday to ask for a cello, and was told she was too young. Both mothers acquiesced at 4 1/2.

“These children have a deep intrinsic motivation to make music,” Winner recently told a conference on developing young artists. Many are playing instruments by the age of 3 and virtually all show musical promise (singing before speaking, recognizing tones) well before that.

The Abadis say their son often wanders back to the piano, even after putting in four solid hours of daily afternoon practice.

“Someone who’s gifted shows a facility for something that’s amazing, but they’re not glued to it,” Marden Abadi, Arthur’s father, says. “To Arthur, the piano--or music--is just like another sense.”

It’s no coincidence, however, that many musical prodigies come from musical families. Mozart had a brilliant sister, as did Mendelssohn and Menuhin. Midori’s mother and Sarah Chang’s father are violinists. Alisa Weilerstein often performs with her pianist mother Vivien and violinist father Donald in the Weilerstein Trio. Everyone in the Abadi household is a pianist.

There are other patterns as well. “You don’t find latch-key children becoming extraordinary musicians,” DeLay points out. “Children, if they’re going to achieve extraordinary things, need one parent at home thinking about them all day.”

That we happen to live in a culture where few parents stay home anymore and where parents are more likely to put a baseball mitt than a violin bow in a child’s hands accounts in part for the demographics: In the U.S., prodigies tend to emerge from a few overachieving immigrant groups. Generations ago, a wave of Jewish prodigies included Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman and Jascha Heifetz. Today, the majority are Asian-born or the children of recent Asian emigres.

“Asians have tremendous respect for artists, and for teachers,” says DeLay. “Becoming a musician means an achievement to them that in this country is not valued as much.”

The kids see it more simply: “I love to play,” says Alisa Weilerstein by telephone from her Ohio home. “If I didn’t love to play, I would never have practiced.”

No amount of natural talent or desire guarantees that a prodigy’s gift will flourish. For that to happen, someone has to be paying a lot of attention.

Barbara Clark, a professor of special education at Cal State L.A. and the president of the World Council for Gifted and Talented Children, says that research on brain development proves it. “We know now that if we’re not actually meeting the child at their level of development, we can either slow that development down or, in all too many cases, we can actually waste that talent.”

“You have to be born with it,” says Arthur Abadi, struggling to explain how he got where he is, seated sock-footed at the piano in his family’s music room, having just finished a thundering round of Chopin. “But it doesn’t just happen,” says the ginger-haired teenager in his quiet voice. “A lot of people think it does. If you’re born with it and [someone doesn’t] teach you, it’s the same as not being born with it.”

Not all parents are equipped to deal with a prodigy. “We had to make extreme changes to accommodate that caliber of talent,” says Arthur’s father, Marden, who abandoned his own solo career to teach his son and run the Orange Country Piano Institute in Irvine. Two years ago, the family relocated to New York for 12 months while Arthur studied with the legendary pianist Byron Janis (Arthur will spend a week in New York with Janis to prepare for the La Jolla concert).

Programs such as Juilliard’s Pre-College Division have been designed to point gifted children toward professional careers, while leaving room for development beyond music. Rachel Lee spends her Saturdays on the Lincoln Center campus; during the week she goes to public school. Weilerstein attends public high school in the mornings and spends her afternoons at the Young Artists Program at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where her parents teach.

DeLay, a former violinist who worked her way through Juilliard many years ago, is just one of 75 faculty members in the Pre-College program, but she is known for her uncanny ability to build brilliant careers.

She views a prodigy’s development as a team effort: Parents must sit in on lessons, and she counsels them about when it’s time to allow the child more independence. “I explain to the parents from the very beginning that they’re not going to make any money from the child. They’re shocked to find out that the income from solo playing is much lower than they thought,” she says. On top of that, only a few will have solo careers at all.

DeLay also stresses the need to praise children, who are often their own worst critics. “I have to keep the parents from saying, ‘Oh boy, did you goof up there.’ It’s important for children to feel successful, because they do do so well.”

DeLay doesn’t want to see her charges in the spotlight too much or too soon. “I try to hold these kids back all the time, because they are extraordinarily in demand,” she says.

But if she sees the combination of charisma and steady temperament necessary to weather the rigors of a solo career, she usually suggests they sign up with management earlier rather than later.

“Agents generally aren’t interested in people over the age of 23 or 24,” she points out. “They feel that it’s easier to sell them when they’re younger, and that if they’re going to be truly great, there will be a sense of recognition and talk about that talent which will already have taken place.”

“I try to pick artists who have an inner spark and an inner push to perform--usually created by the inner talent this youngster has,” says Lee Lamont, a longtime artist manager and chairman of Manhattan’s ICM Artists, which represents Isaac Stern, Yo-Yo Ma, Midori and Sarah Chang, among others. “We try to make certain that they are mentally capable of assuming a career.”

Weilerstein is one of ICM’s clients. Abadi has a Manhattan agent. Lee, though, does not yet have an agent. It was DeLay who arranged for her to play privately for Perl in 1996, and it was also DeLay who told him he’d have to wait a year to put her onstage.

The most careful handling and the best intentions aside, the business of prodigies has many critics and its share of disasters. Bring up the subject at a dinner party, and thanks in part to images generated by films such as “Shine,” which led some to believe all prodigies are mentally-ill victims of controlling parents, it’s not long before the pop psych references to child abuse and exploitation start to fly.

One reason for the suspicion, suggests psychologist Clark, is that the idea that some children are born with greater gifts than others is contrary to our basic belief systems. “We’re very concerned with egalitarianism in this country,” Clark says, “that one child not have more than the other.”

Working hard may be an American virtue, but the spectacle of a child with a lot of responsibility worries us as a culture; it challenges our notion that children ought to be having fun. “People in our culture think anybody who works so hard must be being pushed. We think parents are denying their kids a normal childhood. In reality, the parents are not driving the children,” Winner says. “Rather, the children are driving the parents, and the parents are running along trying to catch up.”

The word “prodigy” itself has reached the height of political incorrectness. “I don’t use the word because it has connotations that are very unfortunate,” DeLay admits, “and it’s not true--that somehow prodigies are not allowed to be children. Sarah Chang had a marvelous answer for that. She said: ‘Well, I’d rather practice and do all this traveling than sit in front of the television four hours a day, which is what everyone does in this country.’ ”

Certainly, being a gifted kid isn’t easy. “When I was a child, all I really wanted was to be normal,” Yo-Yo Ma told a reporter in 1988. “From the very beginning, I was set apart because I played the cello. I was concertizing from an early age . . . and I wasn’t allowed to play any contact sports after the fourth grade. So I felt cut off. I always wanted to be liked for myself, not just for my cello playing.”

Everyone agrees that the most treacherous period in a prodigy’s development is adolescence, what Jeanne Bamberger, a professor of music at M.I.T., has called “the midlife crisis of prodigies.”

“A lot of people who start out seeming like they’re going to be incredible performers, in mid-adolescence, they fall apart,” Bamberger says. “Prodigies are mostly incredible at being able to imitate,” she says, adding that the real trouble starts when they want to start making their own artistic decisions--and don’t know how.

As children get older, they begin to sense the apparatus that surrounds them. If a prodigy gets too caught up in other people’s expectations, their greatest joy can become an overwhelming burden of responsibility.

“When we’re very little,” says DeLay, “we know that if Mommy’s happy, things will go well, and if Mommy’s not happy, things won’t go so well. The kids who are stuck in the first stage--which is ‘I’ve got to be the best or Mommy will be upset’--are the ones who have the problem.”

And not all prodigies are cut out for the spotlight.

Nigel Kennedy, an English violin prodigy who studied with Menuhin and DeLay, is an outspoken critic of promoting young musicians. Kennedy dropped out of classical music altogether before relaunching his career well into his 30s. However else you might nurture their gifts, he believes that children shouldn’t be facing the pressures of high-profile performances. In a British documentary on prodigies, the case of a Terrence Judd, a piano prodigy who committed suicide, came up.

“I understand how pressures build up to want to take your own life,” Kennedy told the interviewer. “It’s like feeling forced into a cul-de-sac or something.”

In fact, for fear of pushing children too hard, some presenters will not showcase them and some critics won’t review them.

“We wrestled with this as much as your readers are probably going to wrestle with the concept,” says Perl about the La Jolla series. But done “the right way”--in a small hall, with lots of personal attention paid to the prodigies and their families--he contends that the experience is a positive investment in everyone’s future. Last year, his series attracted a largely new audience, including more Asians and families.

“Should someone like Rachel Lee be playing in a little community theater? No,” Perl says. “Her gifts far outweigh just that local attention.”

Perl believes that audiences have a right to hear young talents now. “I’ve been going to concerts religiously for over 30 years now and I’ve only heard grown-up prodigies like Yo-Yo Ma and Pinchas Zukerman. The chance to hear a prodigy when they’re a child is an extraordinary experience. You expect to be moved when Pinchas Zukerman plays. But when an 8-year-old plays?”

Back in Room 530, Rachel’s lesson with DeLay is three parts hands-off and one part practical advice.

“All those musical things she was doing? None of it has been suggested by me,” DeLay says later. “You probably noticed today when she played the Mozart, I didn’t say anything. When she played the second movement of Bruch, I said only the most obvious things: ‘Here we have to count, here we don’t slide.’ She has tremendous self-confidence. I don’t want anything to shake that.”

In the end, DeLay believes those who succeed will have devoted themselves to a purpose higher than their own musical talent.

“I think [problems] happen if you have the feeling that there’s only one path, and you don’t understand that there are many things one can do as a musician--very valuable and fascinating things. You [have] to feel what your responsibilities are to the art form, that you’re responsible for making the most beautiful music you can make, and it has nothing to do with being a child prodigy.”

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Rachel Lee, 1998 La Jolla Chamber Music Society’s Prodigy series, Saturday, 7:30 p.m., Neurosciences Institute, 10640 John J. Hopkins Drive, La Jolla. $12.50-$25. (619) 459-3728.