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    The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations
    The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations
    The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations

    Written by Zhu Xiao-Mei

    Narrated by Nancy Wu

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Zhu Xiao-Mei was born to middle-class parents in post-war China, and her musical proficiency became clear at an early age. Taught to play the piano by her mother, she developed quickly into a prodigy, immersing herself in the work of classical masters like Bach and Brahms. She was just eleven years old when she began a rigorous course of study at the Beijing Conservatory, laying the groundwork for what was sure to be an extraordinary career. But in 1966, when Xiao-Mei was seventeen, the Cultural Revolution began, and life as she knew it changed forever. One by one, her family members were scattered, sentenced to prison or labor camps. By 1969, the art schools had closed, and Xiao-Mei was on her way to a work camp in Inner Mongolia, where she would spend the next five years. Life in the camp was nearly unbearable due to horrific living conditions and intensive brainwashing campaigns. Yet through it all Xiao-Mei clung to her passion for music. And when the Revolution ended, it was the piano that helped her to heal. Heartbreaking and heartwarming, The Secret Piano is the incredible true story of one woman’s survival in the face of unbelievable odds—and in pursuit of a powerful dream.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    TranslatorEllen Hinsey
    Release dateMar 6, 2012
    ISBN9781455875184
    The Secret Piano: From Mao's Labor Camps to Bach's Goldberg Variations
    Author

    Zhu Xiao-Mei

    Zhu Xiao-Mei was born in Shanghai, China. She began playing the piano when she was a young child, and by the age of eight was performing for Peking radio and television stations. She entered the Beijing Conservatory when she was eleven years old, but her education was interrupted by the Cultural Revolution. After five years in a labor camp in Inner Mongolia, she returned to Beijing, before moving to the United States and finally Paris, where she has lived and worked since 1984. She teaches at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique and has performed for audiences on six continents. She is one of the world’s most celebrated interpreters of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

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    Reviews for The Secret Piano

    4/5

    52 ratings7 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Heart breaking, yet heart warming at the end. She has reminded us how pure life could be and how a passion for art can really elevate and make life worth living!
    • 4/5
      I'm glad that Zhu Xiao-Mei wrote this book of her life and journeys. What an amazing woman. I appreciate her honesty and generosity in sharing her whole story, her personal feelings and the imprint of her experiences on her whole self.
    • 4/5
      Subtitled: From Mao’s Labor Camps to Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Zhu Xiao-Mei was just a little girl when Mao Zedong took power in China. Her family moved from Shanghai, where her father ran a clinic, to Beijing, but were tainted by a family member’s having fled to Taiwan. Still, Xiao-Mei was accepted at the Conservatory of Music to study piano and became a boarder there at the age of eleven. When the Cultural Revolution began in earnest, the teenager struggled with her beliefs – or lack of beliefs – and lost a decade of her youth to “re-education” in various labor camps. Eventually she found her way back to music, and in particular to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

      This is a story that speaks about the irrepressible human spirit and the power of music and art to elevate and inspire. I was completely fascinated and couldn’t put down Zhu’s recollections of her time in China. I found it particularly interesting to read the philosophy of the revolution as espoused by Mao Zedong, Madame Mao and their followers because I was also listening to Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, wherein a similar philosophy of revolution was being espoused (with far different results).

      The book did bog down somewhat for me after Zhu arrived in Paris; the last quarter of the book contains a lot of her contemplations on what she has endured and where she is headed. Her indecision, while certainly understandable, was just not compelling reading (and, truth be told, simply drove me crazy). I flew through the first 250 pages, then took two days to finish the last 50 pages.

      But I’m glad I persisted, because very near the end Zhu writes: “What good is an existence without the hope of growth – an existence that can only imagine before it the darkness of ignorance – and submission, which is ignorance’s handmaiden? … The world needs to reflect on this lesson of the Cultural Revolution: to ensure peace and the future of the world, the absolute first priority is education.”

      Zhu’s memoir has certainly educated me, and I am grateful to her for that.
    • 4/5
      This is an autobiography of a woman who was sent to a labor camp when her music school was shut down. She spent 5 years in these camps, but never gave up on her passion for playing the piano. She is now a world renowned pianist and lives in France.The description of life in China during the "Great Cultural Revolution" of the 60s is striking. Many people were killed, others had their lives destroyed
    • 4/5
      When the Cultural Revolution interrupts a young girl's dream to become a classical concert pianist, she discovers that only music can give her the strength to survive.
    • 4/5
      This is a memoir by a Chinese classical pianist who defected to the West in 1980. It is a moving and affecting work divided into two sections. The first covers her youth in China and in particular the devastating impact of the Cultural Revolution in the Beijing Music Conservatory where she was a student, when western classical music was denounced as bourgeois, and eventually all educational activity superseded by blind following of Mao's Little Red Book. Most repellent was the denouncing by young Red Guards of the professors, who were forced to clean the buildings instead of being educators and, in some cases, subject to extreme physical violence, and even executed or driven to suicide in the case of "Mama" Zheng who founded the conservatory. Xiao-Mei is suspect due to her family's social origins but then temporarily becomes a loyal Maoist and spends five years in a labour camp, supposedly helping the peasantry but in reality having the spirit and her love for music and the piano crushed out of her. After Xiao-Mei leaves China in 1980 for Hong Kong then America, her story centres around her struggles to get used to a very different way of life and philosophical outlook, before trying to re-establish her identity as a musical performer. This was somewhat less interesting for me, but she writes very movingly of what music and traditional Chinese philosophical approaches mean to her, and how they have enabled her to reach a state of spiritual calm and inner peace and kept her going during the oppression of her youth and the doubts of uncertainties of her adult life. 4/5
    • 4/5
      A triumphant tale of one woman’s victory over the back bending and mind shattering abuse of the Maoist regime’s “re-education” camps where she and her family were sent (albeit different ones) during the Cultural Revolution.Born talented and trained from earliest age to become a concert pianist, Zhu’s life is bulldozed by the ideological madness of China’s crimes against its own humanity in the late 60s. After five years spent in performing peasants’ labor, Zhu is released and tries to re-establish her musical career, which requires her to leave her homeland first for Shanghai, then the US, and finally for France, where she lives to this day. Amazingly, her spirit is never broken; instead, Zhu finds strength and courage in music, especially the compositions of J.S. Bach.Using quiet tone and non-hyperbolic language, Zhu manages to tell her story in a provocative but not inciteful way. She explores politics, religion, but best of all her own artistic process in mastering and interpreting scores.I enjoyed this book so much probably because of those insights into her performance preparation. Zhu is a tower of strength and a tribute to the triumph of one person who fights back against a tyrannical government in the most Taoist way, emerging victorious. She more than survived Mao Zedong’s “revolution [that] is not a dinner party; [but] an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”