Word: frights
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There was a historical Dracula, however, and according to the authors of In Search of Dracula, he was a fright to believe in. The book clears him of one notable charge: by examining Rumanian, Russian, German and French folklore of the 15th century, in which Dracula figures vividly, it establishes that he was not a vampire. That was Bram Stoker's libel; needing a monstrous name and a far-off place for his fantasy, he chose Dracula and Transylvania. The real Dracula, son of Dracul (the name means dragon), was a Christian prince and mass murderer who lived...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...