Author: Hélène Grimaud
Author's Introduction
About the Author
Internationally renowned pianist, born in 1969 in Aix-en-Provence, France, she was admitted to the prestigious Conservatoire de France at the age of thirteen, and won the first prize of the Jacques Rouvier Classical Music Competition at the age of sixteen. Rouvier Classical Music Competition at the age of 16, published her first solo recordings in her childhood, and at the age of 18, held her first piano recital in Paris, which was a great success and internationally acclaimed, but also with her beauty to give people a sense of infinite lightness and ease.
Hélène's rich life experience and unique talent have filled her with imagination and inspiration as a source of creativity. This book is the second autobiography after Wild Variations.
Introduction
Elena? Grimaud was born a rebel, and started playing the piano to vent her excess energy, but accidentally discovered her talent and became an internationally renowned pianist; a chance encounter with a she-wolf in the wilderness, and the wolf unexpectedly lay down in a rare way to be intimate with her, and from then on began the story of her relationship with the wolf ...... Elena? Grimaud, the beautiful young, internationally talented pianist and guardian of the wolf is as charming as she is strange and quirky; one is almost enamored of her. Her writing skills are as good as her piano skills, and in this beautiful autobiography she talks about music and life and the journey of the soul ......
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French piano beauty "The Wolves" is a beautiful, beautiful, international pianist. p>French Piano Beauty 'Dances with Wolves***'
Originally published in The New York Times, November 5, 2006, by JAMES R. OESTREICH, compiled by Wen Li
Hélène Grimaud, the French pianist, was born in 1969 in Provence, France. was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1969. She studied at the Aix Conservatoire and the Marseille Conservatoire with Jacqueline Coultin and Pierre Barbizet respectively, and at the age of 13 she was admitted to the prestigious Conservatoire de France, where she studied with Jacques Rouvier; at the age of 16 she won the first prize in the Jacques Rouvier Classical Competition, and that same year released her first solo recordings of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 and the Piano Solo, and at the age of 18 she gave her first solo piano concerts in Paris, and at the age of 18 she gave her first solo piano concert in Paris. At the age of 18, she gave her first solo piano concert in Paris, which was a great success and she became internationally famous. 2002 she became a contracted musician with DG Germany. She has published Rachmaninoff's Piano Sonata No. 2 and Beethoven's Tempest Sonata, which won the "Record Society" award. This was a rare honor for the young Elena. She now lives in the United States.
Elena Grimaud was a rebel by nature, and began playing the piano as an outlet for her excess energy, but accidentally discovered her talent and became an internationally renowned pianist. A chance encounter with a she-wolf in the wilderness, the wolf was rare to lie down and intimate with her, from then on began her story with the wolf, but also in New York City founded a "Wolf Conservation Center", protection of red wolves, Mexican wolves and other wild species of wolves, and open to the public, popularization of education. The wolf became Elena's totem, representing her freedom, unconventionality, and perseverance.
She is bewitchingly beautiful. She was both a piano prodigy and had an endless story to tell with coyotes. Her favorite music is Brahms, in which she plays with coldness and pathos; when she is with the wolves, she is gentle and innocent. Her writing is sensual and spontaneous. After her first autobiography "Wild Variations", she published this year a prose book documenting her spiritual travels, "Journey of the Pianist's Soul". This is the saga of French female pianist Elena Grimaud.
"Music changed my faith, the she-wolf liberated my wildness"
In 1991, while Elena Grimaud was living in Tallahassee, Florida, she took her friend's dog out for a walk late one night only to have it change her life. She saw a lone animal figure slowly approaching, traveling in a nervous and secretive manner she had never seen before. The dog she was leading became frightened and fled into the bushes. It was her first encounter with a wolf, a she-wolf. In her first biography, Wild Variations, Grimmer wrote, "It came up to my left hand and sniffed it. I just held out my fingers and it hid its whole head and shoulders under my palm. I felt like a spark had rubbed off on me from something, and it traveled quickly throughout my body. It filled me with tenderness all at once. A mysterious song came from within, like the power of an unknown wildness." "I fell in love with the she-wolf." She later wrote.
Grimaud thought wolves had been treated as the embodiment of evil for no less than several hundred years. But she didn't see it that way. In her view wolves maintain the balance of the species, are a strange, fascinating animal, and have much to teach humans. She feels a responsibility to change people's misconceptions about wolves.
In 1999, she opened the Coyote Conservation Center in South Salem with photographer Henry Fair. The 29-acre site is now home to 17 coyotes. Four of them, as "ambassadors," are open to the public for tours. The other 13 are isolated from humans so they can eventually return to nature. "The first two years it was open, we had 500 visitors a year, and now we have 20,000 a year."
Her coyote conservation work has generated some naysayers in the classical music world. Some feel she "lives in her own imagination of what coyotes are." The time she spends on coyote conservation has also affected her refinement of her piano career. By her own admission, it's only been in the last three years that she's really focused on her music, before the Coyote Conservation Center took up too much of her time and energy. Nowadays she continues to do tours around the world, working with the world's top orchestras as well as musicians. However, in late 2005, she suffered a new setback when she developed pneumonia and it led to chronic fatigue syndrome that even affected her heart. Her first autobiography, Wild Variations, was first published in France and quickly became a bestseller, consisting of an assortment of chapters. Grimaud saw herself as a lonely outsider to her family, the music world, and even society, and struggled internally. When considering where to establish a coyote protection center, for example, she writes, "Preferably somewhere else, and I've always hoped it would be somewhere else."
What role do classical music and coyotes really play in her life? In Grimmer's opinion, both saved her. "Music changed my faith," she writes, "and it saved me." When referring to her first encounter with a she-wolf, she also states, "It saved me, too." Founding the Coyote Conservation Center freed her, in her opinion, from the shackles of using the piano as a tool, "I became wild."
Born in 1969 in Provence, France, Grimaud began playing the piano at age 6, and at 13 was the youngest student at the Paris Conservatoire. Another passion since childhood has been raising small animals. Before the piano filled her life, she even dreamed of becoming a veterinarian and living in a zoo, and later a biologist. "I used to be interested in primates." An encounter with Arava, a she-wolf, got her involved in the world of coyotes. She began studying animal behavior, auditing college classes, attending conferences and visiting animal experts.
In addition, she is fluent in French, Russian, and English, and has a wide knowledge of French, Russian, and American literature, history, and philosophy. Her passion for music never waned, and she started her day with Bach. However, this did not prevent her from immersing herself in Romantic literature.
She also loved the music of Chopin, calling him "my composer". She admired Chopin for freeing the pianist's left hand "to create dexterous music." But it was Brahms who was closest to her heart. Most of her early recordings were of Brahms, a not-so-young, non-French, not-at-all-feminine composer, very different from the impression she left on the surface. "I love his intense movements," she wrote in Wild Variations, "his pain and gloom, his moody grief, and the despair he savors in his relationship with the world." Brahms' intense and daunting Concerto No. 1 is her favorite work. She said she had a hard time recovering from the pathos for hours after playing it, "Brahms expresses grief so perfectly that the pain is enough to take your breath away." Mr. Salonen, who worked with Grimaud***, said, "She was half sensible, half passionate, a rare figure. She always had well-organized ideas, plans, before a performance, but often let the music flow naturally in concert."
"If love can't be shared, may I be the one who uses it to the fullest"
Successful characters are either blessed with extra favor from God or a blessing from a previous life's practice. Elena Grimaud is one such fortunate person, and no one could have existed more swimmingly, harmoniously married, with a growing reputation in the piano world she knows so well, and, most remarkably of all, with a pack of wild wolves waiting for her to frolic with them after exchanges with Chopin and Rachmaninoff.
And yet is it not also rare to have a faraway look back when you have everything that mere mortals envy. After music has become the keynote of life, where do all the other favorites fit in? Music, loneliness, love and those wolves ...... from which moment to betray the oath? And most importantly, what is this oath? These mutually inclusive and intertwined contradictory issues after the entanglement, out of the main character of the heart of the matter, and this seems to break the boat trip becomes a search for the key to heaven.
Destined to be a game with the mind, the programmed life can no longer give Elena inspiration and freedom, a self-exile trip can bring new breath? Like a good fable, the beginning of the story is the end, and the farmer's dream of treasure begins and ends under the fruit tree, where the dream begins and ends, and the only thing that needs to be banished is the tired mind, and there is no better medicine than to look up and take a deep breath.
Unfolding every fold of the heart, anyone's life can be more exciting than Rousseau's Confessions, let alone the internationally acclaimed pianist. The Pianist's Journey to the Heart is a spiritual journal of the characters, with layers and echoes of various characters like an SPA in an ancient forest, whether it's Audrey, who is encountered at the beginning of the journey, or the professor whose name is unknown, the stranger in the café ...... is either divinely inspired or has invisible wings, and each of the people in each stagecoach stop is a part of the story of a man's life. The people in each stagecoach are all like having the dreamy color of angels, if they are not there, when they are supposed to appear, they jump in front of the eyes. The book is skillfully divided into different chapters by the characters of the callings. There is the professor who appears as a spiritual guide, like a Santa Claus carrying gifts, who guides Elena through a reflection on freedom and an understanding of music before retiring quietly with his mission accomplished. Then there is Beatrice, who is quite immortal in her beauty and appearance, who appears more like Dante's Beatrice, evoking thoughts of beauty, and who in the book comes to this place near the sky in search of innocence. This coincides with Elena's realm of musical perfection.
The wolf has always been more of a metaphor, and like the music, the Wolf Conservation Center she founded in New York has always been close to her heart. The wolf is almost a stand-in for her rebellious nature, and her fate is justified. Since Elena's natural rebellious character has been thrown out in the pursuit of art, there is no longer the joy of relaxation, with freshness, wildness, and favor, the wolf makes her space to become full of tension and vitality, and in a sense has become Elena's original god or mascot.
With the author's musical reputation, China's Yundi Li or Lang Lang might be comparable to Elena, but Chinese artists are used to finding inspiration in the hustle and bustle of the world, and apparently have no interest in turning to the origins of music, the highlands and fields. Apparently it's a case of different paths, and to borrow the words of the book's hitchhiking professor, "We are our own destiny singing the music."
Weston Hugh Auden, quoted on the book's title page, "If love cannot be shared, may I be the one who uses it to the fullest," is, in a sense, a sign that Elena and the reader have become one.
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Book Review #1: A long ethereal vacation, a soulful exploration of ghosts
Elena? Grimaud, who met the she-wolf Arava, made her first piano recording at 16, gave her first solo piano concert at 18, and wrote beautifully and thoughtfully in her world-wide autobiography Wild Variations, is still caring for a whole family of children. Today, she still tends to an entire wildlife refuge, letting coyotes be coyotes for real.
This is the second of her autobiographies, but it is not the kind of autobiography that the world usually sees piled up with accomplishments, trivia, letters and years, but rather a purely spiritual journey that asks about the nature of art and life. It is from this core that the story is made up of encounters, embellished with a multitude of fable-like vignettes, with a main vein of mission running through the beginning and the end. It belongs to her, and it can belong to everyone.
"Every encounter is a winning bet." The pianist, exhausted from a busy schedule of performances and recordings, steals a moment to relax, dithering between three choices: Africa, Europe or the American forests. A short story about a fast-food waitress helps her make up her mind to go to Europe. Immediately after, she meets a cool and honorable literature professor in the Italian countryside. The question the professor left her with was, if you have played music brilliantly, "have you experienced it better?" The next day, she receives a small package left by the professor. Continuing the conversation from the previous day's encounter, and asking her to take a delicate music box, or perhaps also to pass it on to a German named Hans. By this point, the otherwise empty and aimless vacation not only had a theme, but was also assigned a route.
On the way, she meets Beatrice in the gardens of Assisi Abbey, who tends the abbey's gardens and is also cared for by them, and asks, "Why can't people ever create new musical instruments again?" Another encounter with the pessimistic young man in a café, questioning what freedom and love exist in the midst of pain and loss? Listening again to a collector in a small Swiss town recounting the antecedents of music boxes, the old man doesn't mind if there's an apocalypse, speaking angrily about all sorts of, proceeding tense extinctions ...... These exchanges expose the positive and negative wisdom that characterizes unhappy human beings, and the process by which she listens to, understands, and argues with them is precisely the pathway to the self-inquiry for answers .
Like the lost man who pursues the hints of the Divine Comedy in search of life at the forks of destiny, cherishing the guidance of each unfamiliar nobleman. Eventually she meets Hans, a blind pianist blinded by a car accident, "I realized that I had been blind long before the accident, and that I was so desperate for self-satisfaction that I couldn't see anything except my work, my praise, and my quest for absolute perfection, which bordered on self-absorption." Couldn't this be where the female pianist was at this point in her life? When the lights came up, she realized that Hans, the blind musician, looked like a brother. It's the second "resemblance" since the professor, and a ghostly, mysterious atmosphere pervades, lost in coincidence, or textually engineered encounters that gradually cool down.
Immersed for years in the rhythmic and life-affirming poetry of classical music, Elena's writing has an otherworldly, classical quality. As she writes, "the artist agrees to break down the self into art," and words and music are only a part of the art, which is never separated from the world and from nature. Wolves and music are the most important elements in her life, but it is not enough to be a medium for music, or an object of the wolf's hospitality. A busy schedule can also create a void in a person, even a genius. It could even be said that this is the fact most easily overlooked by contemporary artists after they have been busy innovating, moving away from the essence and attaching themselves to their craft. Experiencing a spiritual journey, Elena says with characteristic wildness and confidence, "I give birth to **** the same flesh as the piano, and together we, the piano and I, become divine beasts, some kind of brand new centaur, some kind of auspicious eternal scorpion." To experience music, one should become the continuation of its life. That was the answer she was looking for.
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Book Review #2: Whisking Sound
"It's been too long since I've tasted a pretty exodus."
I think everyone has had moments of soul-dusting disorientation. With obscure sadness, we long to squeeze through the bubble of time, break free from routine, and pounce on a gorgeous adventure.
The Pianist's Journey of the Heart is a spiritual journal of escape and return.
This is the book of the famous French pianist Hélène Grimaud. Hélène Grimaud's second autobiography, published after Wild Variations. In this short biography, letterhead, diary and other traditional elements have disappeared, Hélène with a pure text account of her mysterious encounters with a few strangers, casual conversation decorated with exquisite allegory, light but not lack of philosophical flavor. The meaning of traveling gradually unfolds in the enigmatic exchanges, and as the author says, "I believe that my journeys and encounters inevitably hold answers."
Music and coyotes have always been Elena's most important life symbols.
Elena began playing the piano at the age of six as an outlet for her excess energy, but showed an amazing talent. She studied under the tutelage of Jacqueline Kurtan, Pierre Bertrand and Jean-Pierre Bertrand. Kurtan, Pierre? She studied with Jacqueline Coultan, Pierre Barbizet and other pianists, became the youngest student at the Paris Conservatory at age 13, and won the first prize at the Jacques Rouvier Classical Music Competition at age 16. At the age of 16, she won the first prize in the Jacques Rouvier Classical Music Competition, and at the age of 18, her first piano recital made her famous, and since then she has become world famous, and her performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Sonata No. 2 was awarded the Grand Prize of the Record Society.
In addition to her impressive musical resume, Elena's life trajectory has also been branded with the legendary label of "Dancing with Wolves***". A chance encounter with a she-wolf, Arawa, led to her trust and closeness. "I wanted to give back to the wolves the essence of their nature, to return them to their nature - freedom." In 1999, she and photographer Henri? Together with photographer Henry Fell, they founded the Wolf Conservation Center, which protects and educates the public about red wolves, Mexican wolves and other wild wolf species. "I miss the old days, when animals were sacred and could talk, when man hadn't forgotten that he was never more than a creature, and that to do better, you had to try to understand." This is Elena's simple but sincere reverence for the primal wild.
The raging reputation came with a programmed rhythm, "my schedule was in the hands of agents, record labels, and press commissioners," and the maverick Elena couldn't stand it. "The soul was never in tune with the body: sometimes it was behind, hanging on to the train of memories; sometimes it was in front, busy with memories. ; sometimes it rushes ahead, busy with plans, with terrible visions of the future, suffocated by heavy calculations." To breathe, she flees to travel, waiting to be turned on. "The Europe that unfolded before me looked like the squares drawn on the ground by children playing the game of building a house. Chance had thrown his round cake and I jumped on one foot on the Franz? Liszt left his footprints and landed with both feet on Schumann's imprint."
One by one, the strange professor who hitchhiked, the anguished young man in the café, Beatrice of Assisi Abbey ...... they entered Elena's world, and the wise exchanges gradually lifted the fog of the mind.
My favorite part of this repartee:
"Have you found the keys to heaven?"
"We all have it: it arises in the moment when two people meet, in the same, generous impulse as each other."
The moment of encounter radiates love in Elena's writing, "I wish to recover the innocence of a child, an innocence that does not know death and prefers the moment and its completeness - the music of time, that is to say, silence." Each encounter is a weighty moment, a passionate release of love's energy, but also a quiet beauty that makes you think, "What matters is that we have met before, that it creates moments, that it creates the precious moments we have just mentioned."
Moments accumulate and love settles in, as the book says - "Love is the forgetfulness of constant recollection; forgetfulness is a memory that is supposed to be eternal, which leaves a trail of imprints - sweet and fleeting memories that from time to time travels through our hearts and immerses us in feelings of completeness and joy."
At the end of the journey, Elena meets Hans, a blind musician, "I realized that I had been blind long before the car accident, and that I was so desperate for self-satisfaction that I could not see anything but work, praise, and the quest for absolute perfection, which bordered on self-absorption. I was always in the sport of acceleration, a sport that didn't lead me one step forward but took everything away, including my ego."
Hans's candid statement hardened Elena and unveiled the nature of art and life: "The truth of music - even the truth of life - is not to simulate happiness, but to heuristically bring life's tragedy in layers. Joy and happiness are only the result of a compromise with life and pain, a discordant note played by death."
Everything in the world has cracks in it so that light can penetrate.
This final conversation takes place in the darkness and opens the way for the female pianist to return to her heart, "Only silence is enough to pay homage to the deeper meaning of the story. Like in music, the silence that follows the last few notes of a sonata."
This is a chord of light played by a blind man, brushing the dust from each of our hearts. Late at night, the title page of Wistan? Hugh? Auden's words shine again and again - "If love cannot be shared, may I be the one with the deepest feelings."