Last year, David Helfgott was a rmer music student who had fallen victim to a crippling mental illness. This year, he is the most famous pianist in the world. All because of a movie.
Shine tells the story of Helfgott’s unusual life, depicting him as a prodigy raised in Australia by a cruel and twisted father. David endures years of abuse, attracts regional renown, and finally breaks with his father to study in London. But he is unable to cope with estrangement from the man who shaped him and, after winning a competition with his playing of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto, goes mad. He is then returned to Australia, where he is confined to a series of institutions. In time, he finds a wine bar in which to entertain customers and meets an astrologer named Gillian, who marries him, improves his health, and steers him back to the stage.
The facts of the movie are in dispute — Helfgott’s siblings, for example, say that the portrayal of their father is a travesty, and many contend that Helfgott is as sick as ever — but the 50-year-old pianist is now an internationally beloved example of triumph over adversity.
As the movie became a hit, the Shine team — led by Gillian Helfgott and the filmmakers — organized a North American tour for Helfgott encompassing 10 cities. Every one of the concerts sold out immediately. In the same period, Helfgott’s recording of the Rachmaninoff concerto shot to number one on the classical charts, and even made an appearance on the popular charts, too. It is one of the bestselling albums in the history of RCA — a label whose catalogue boasts the likes of Arturo Toscanini, Artur Rubinstein, and Leontyne Price. But not everyone has rejoiced at Helfgott’s success. Music critics, in particular, have been unsporting. They have been angry, crabbed, and confused.
When Helfgott played his first concert, in Boston, the critical reaction was fierce. Helfgott was not an ordinary professional pianist, and he was far from “cured.” Instead, he was a babbling, tic-filled sufferer from what physicians term a “schizoaffectire disorder,” and his playing reflected that condition. Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe decried “a sad spectacle” and “a morally bankrupt atmosphere,” concluding that “Helfgott should not have been in Symphony Hall last night, and neither should the rest of us.” Tim Page of the Washington Post wrote that “the whole event seemed profoundly exploitative” and that the pianist “was excruciating to watch” (an interesting word, that last, in a review of a piano recital).
As the Shine Tour continued, virtually the entire American critical establishment heaved with indignation. They were frustrated by Helfgott’s appeal, annoyed at the thousands who flocked to him, and suspicious of the handlers and packagers who shared in his profits. Many were protectively pitying, like Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote that ” guileless as Helfgott surely is, guile surrounds him.” The Associated Press found a Juilliard teacher who said, “He’s not a man who should be making money playing the piano,” but one who “should be playing at home for therapeutic reasons.” The New York Times — which ran several Helfgott pieces — took the rare step of publishing an editorial, which remarked that Helfgott’s “tour is more about the powers of celebrity and empathy than about great musicianship,” and that he “seems to be the captive of an entrepreneurial enterprise being manipulated for maximum profit.” The Post’s Page, invited on National Public Radio, said, “I really wondered why he was being exhibited when he could be being helped,” and then demonstrated exactly what has stuck in so many craws: “We have reached the point in . . . the history of classical music in this country that the hottest person in classical music is a disturbed man who can hardly play the piano.”
Page and the Post were close to obsessed with Shine-dom. The paper printed not only a feature piece and a review by Page (both long-ish, and excellent), but a weird little item titled “On Tour, Helfgott Hits Many a C- Note,” in which Page toted up the costs of the tour in an effort to determine how much money it was making. Moreover, the Post ran an extraordinary review — this one in addition to Page’s — by the harpsichordist Igor Kipnis. It was odd that Kipnis would have agreed to write such a piece. For one thing, it opened him to charges of envy and pique, for Kipnis, a superb musician in an unglamorous field, will never achieve anything like the recognition and riches that have come Helfgott’s way. Kipnis wrote that Helfgott’s playing “was so uniformly devoid of poetry and rhetorical thrust, and so full of unwanted and unmarked accents, as to cause one to wonder what in the world musically sophisticated listeners might make of it all.” Kipnis himself should have been caused to wonder why he, who has his faculties and a fine life, was writing public criticism of a man who is not his peer but a symbol of perseverance and hope. The review, in a sense, was more embarrassing than Helfgott could be at his feeblest.
The Shine phenomenon reached a high pitch on Oscar night, when Geoffrey Rush, who plays the older Helfgott in the movie, picked up the Best Actor award and defended the tour against accusations that it was a “circus.” Helfgott himself was on hand to play The Flight of the Bumble Bee. He was obviously nervous — as performers of all kinds tend to be on such an occasion — and he played poorly, but he got through it and warmly accepted the audience’s lusty cheers. Two days later, David Daniel in the Wall Street Journal was witty and merciless: “Bumble bees had a right to picket,” though “the audience seemed to love it anyway, as no doubt did several gazillion TV viewers,” in a “mass demonstration of tin ears and false sentiment.”
One thing about Shine that the tincared and falsely sentimental masses are in love with is the Rachmaninoff concerto, which is a star of the movie. This magnificent work has always lived in the shadow of its predecessor, the Rachmaninoff Second, whose concluding theme was transformed into the song ” Full Moon and Empty Arms.” A moviegoer encountering the concerto for the first time will naturally march to the record store, if he is interested, and buy . . . which recording? The Helfgott, of course, and why not? There are better recordings (meaning all of the others), but the moviegoer doesn’t know that, and, if he did, he wouldn’t care.
Nor should he: The point of his purchase is not the performance but the music. Yet the critics begrudge even this. Eliot Morgan, also in the Wall Street Journal, said that the Helfgott recording’s success “shows that people can be fooled at least some of the time,” and Scott Cantrell of the Kansas City Star wrote, “What’s sad is that hundreds of thousands of people buying this disc . . . will think the piece really sounds like this.” Well, it does — the assertion that the concerto is unrecognizable in Helfgott’s trembling hands is simply false, something that no one with a grip on himself could say.
Funny thing about the Helfgott recording: It doesn’t sound like the playing of a crazy person. It isn’t maniacal or uncontrolled (like some performances). Rather, it is reserved and mousy. Indeed, it is far and away the tamest, most tepid recording ever made of this mercurial and majestic work. But there is magic in it, magic put there by Rachmaninoff, and the fans who are buying it and loving it are not wrong to do so.
It is perhaps normal for elites to balk at the introduction of high art into popular culture, where distortion and degradation lie in wait. Musicians surely winced when Rush strode to the stage to accept his Oscar: He was accompanied by a soupy Hollywood-orchestra arrangement of the opening theme of the Rachmaninoff. Pianists stubbornly refuse to refer to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 as the “Elvira Madigan Concerto,” as it has been widely known since the appearance of that movie, which used it. Ordinary People and Platoon made lollipops out of Pachelbel’s Canon in D and Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and Apocalypse Now turned a Valkyrie ride into a clownish cliche. But the marriage of music and the movies can be beautiful, as in the recent Romeo and Juliet, which closed with Leontyne Price’s recording of the Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. To employ music untraditionally is not necessarily to sully it.
David Helfgott should never have been judged as an ordinary pianist. He, manifestly, is not. And if people go to hear him “more for the madness than the music,” as the New York Times editorialized, so what? Concertgoers have innumerable motivations, and Helfgott is an exceptional experience amid hundreds and hundreds of everyday ones. I, for one, would rather hear Helfgott play once than, say, Emmanuel Ax play banally yet again.
And Helfgott, though unwell, is not a victim; neither are those around him his victimizers. He is better off on stage, where he both delights and is delighted, than drooling unnoticed on a couch in Perth. Gillian Helfgott, astrologer or not, analyzes keenly when she says, “I think there are people who are coming to see a man who has fought his way through the wilderness [rather than for planism]. But if they come for that reason, I think they leave deeply touched. Critics have a right to express their views, but people have a right to express their views, too.”
For his part, David Helfgott seems not so damaged as to be unable to speak for himself, and what he says, in his flighty patter, will ring true to anyone who has been fortunate enough to touch a musical instrument: “It’s a miracle. I’m very lucky. One mustn’t be so serioso. It’s all a game. Must be grateful.” Yes, must be.
Associate editor Jay Nordlinger is the music critic of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
