Ten years ago international concert pianist Jonathan Biss broke a bone in his left arm and had to pull out of a number of upcoming performances. “There was no single person in my life suggesting that I should lie about why I was cancelling concerts,” he says.
But, in 2019, when his anxiety had become so overwhelming that he had to cry off engagements, “not one person suggested I tell the truth”. Instead, they recommended he pretend he had the flu.
For him, that sums up the big difference in societal attitudes to physical and mental ailments. After writing about his previously hidden mental turmoil for a 2020 audio book, Unquiet: My Life with Beethoven (unfortunately not available to download this side of the Atlantic), he was “flabbergasted” by the number of people, some friends for decades, others total strangers, who contacted him to say, “me too”.
“There is really no question to me that my feeling I had to suffer in silence wasn’t just me. It is the message people are getting from the world around us.”
New homes: comprehensive guide to what’s for sale in Dublin, Wicklow, Kildare, Meath, Cork and around the State
‘They’re supposed to represent us, not sue us’: Crafts council threatens members after critical feedback
If Robert De Niro no longer feels he is able to speak out, one wonders who in the US does
He wants to help break down that stigma. That is why, after playing Brahms first piano concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra in the National Concert Hall in Dublin next month, he will sit down for a post-concert conversation about his experiences of anxiety with psychologist and writer Dr Tony Bates.
It is 8am in Biss’s Philadelphia home on a February Friday, a time that suits him best to take a call from The Irish Times. He only arrived home the previous night from a week’s concert tour to London and France, but assures me he is “fully functional”, having returned via New York, where he had non-performing obligations. Fulfilling this media request at the start of the day allows him to embark on a few hours’ practice from 9am.
“I’ve sort of moved in recent years away from quantity and towards, I hope, quality of practice.”
While he used to think the longer he practised, the better, albeit with life’s distractions at the other end of a mobile phone not far away, now he does a few, shorter instalments, with the phone turned off and “as close to total focus as I can muster”.
Not an early riser by nature, he has become one, he says, for overlapping reasons. Firstly, “multiple alarms” go off in his house between 7am and 8am, heralding the departure of his husband to a 9-5 job; then, after being routinely awoken at that time, Biss found he was doing his best practising in the morning.
None of us exist without some level of anxiety, but it is not hard to imagine how it must peak for a piano soloist at the start of a recital, their hands poised over the keyboard, amid the expectant hush of a packed concert hall. Yet, emotional highs are an essential part of a professional musician’s life, which he describes “as one part dizzying to one part deadening” – concert halls v airport terminals.
The son of two musicians and growing up in Indiana, Biss, now aged 44, started playing the piano when he was six. He believes the life path he chose had little to do with parental expectations – it was simply, “I have never loved anything remotely as much as I loved music”.
[ Generation panic: why is there so much anxiety among millennials?Opens in new window ]
However, paradoxically, “the thing that mattered most to me in the world and that made me feel most fulfilled and most at home and most myself, was also the thing that was tearing me to pieces”.
Classical musicians are obviously performers, but, unlike actors, he suggests, “I don’t think that the insatiable need to be on stage is necessarily the driving force for all of us”.
Initially, the motivation is the love of music, while the idea of going on stage to play for 3,000 people “is something that I think a lot of us have to learn to love”. Although, “it is a thrill, like I can’t tell you”, he stresses.
There was no music he loved more than that of Beethoven, a composer he had started to become obsessed with as a teenager. But it was to be the catalyst for losing his sense of self as anxieties deepened and his mental health crumbled.
In 2011, Biss embarked on the task of recording all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. After giving himself nearly a decade to do that, he was then to play them all within a year in concerts all over the world.
“The intensity and profundity and difficulty and sheer volume of music involved was overwhelming,” he writes in Unquiet. “I imagined it would be the most confronting and most fulfilling experience of my life. I joked in interviews that when it was over, I would retire, or die.”
However, the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 brought that high-speed touring treadmill to an abrupt halt in 2020 and “knocked me flat on my ass”. Although, in reality, “over the preceding months and even years, I had been quietly falling apart”.
His anxiety had been causing full-blown panic attacks and he felt “disembodied” from his public persona.
The enforced downtime sent him on an introspective journey. Having always strived, both personally and professional, to abide by the principle of “tell no lies”, he began to realise that he was living one. Mounting anxiety and self-recrimination for feeling that way, “had made me forget not only the truth of the music I wanted so badly to convey; they had made me forget who I was”.
Initially ashamed of admitting his vulnerabilities, even to himself, why did he then go on to share them with the wider world?
I don’t feel threatened by things not going exactly how I imagined them to, because that’s a form of being closed off
“I came to realise that having anxiety was not debilitating for me. Feeling that having anxiety was unacceptable, that was a debilitating thing.”
Any ambivalence Biss felt about the advisability of going public came from concerns about the impact it might have on those listening to him play. “Part of the magic of live music is the ability to transport you to a place where really nothing else exists,” he says. “I didn’t – and don’t – want my life story to be an obstacle in the way of a listener’s ability to get to that place.”
While he still worries about that, “I think that honesty as a performer is so critical. For me, I hit a point where I didn’t feel that I could be honest if I continued down the path of trying to conceal that.”
Biss says it has taken years of work to learn to cope with anxiety, but, asked to sum up what has made the big difference, “broadly speaking, it’s been mindfulness”, he replies. “It’s been learning to sit with whatever thoughts and emotions arise. Even when they’re very, very confronting ones, to be curious about them, because I find emotions that you allow yourself to experience, you can then begin the process of trying to understand where they come from and addressing how rational they are. Whereas an emotion that you feel that you immediately try to push away, [because] it scares you, that’s when it can eat you alive.”
[ A neuropsychologist’s view on how to thrive in an angry, unpredictable worldOpens in new window ]
It is an approach from which Dr Bates, veteran clinical psychologist and founder of Jigsaw, the national centre for youth mental health, believes we all have something to learn. As a lifelong lover of classical music, he is looking forward “with utter joy” to the post-concert In Conversation event with Biss. “I think he brings fresh thinking to a very old, very familiar subject. It is our major mental health issue at the moment, in young people particularly.”
The way Biss has come to terms with his vulnerability can, Bates believes, bring a new depth to the debate on whether young people’s anxiety can be “fixed” by addressing symptoms, or should we instead be reflecting on what truth these children are finding very hard to face.
Biss has not extinguished his anxiety, rather he has learned to live with it. “He’s gone through a real breakdown and he’s come right back,” says Bates. “He’s back in the saddle and doing better than ever and is a much deeper human being.”
Bates admires how Biss now reminds himself backstage, before striding towards that place of inescapable vulnerability, a piano stool, that “he cannot give a great performance by trying to avoid giving a bad one”. He also picks up on how Biss always felt some anxiety about performing, but it was only when he began to worry about never showing it, that he became convinced that as long as he hid it, he was in control. “And that became the rock he perished on.”
Biss now embraces the unpredictability that comes with performing live. “I actually find that there is a kind of a beauty in not having full control,” he says.
“One of the real jobs of performing in a concert is that you have to find the truth of that moment. And that truth will be different from the last concert you played, or what was true when you were practising quietly in the dressing room. I think that’s one of the big changes, that I don’t feel threatened by things not going exactly how I imagined them to, because that’s a form of being closed off in a way that I don’t want to be closed off any more.”
Great music, he points out, is infinitely interesting. “The Brahms concerto I’m playing in Dublin is a perfect example. You can come back to it every day for the rest of your life and find it to be something that you didn’t realise it was.”
Biss has proved himself to be a witty and illuminating communicator through both the written and spoken word but he still believes in the higher power of music to do the talking. “I think that, ultimately, you don’t become a musician unless you feel on a complete level that music accesses things that are not accessible with words. I love writing and I love being engaged with language, but when compared with music, language feels very poor.”
- Jonathan Biss will play Brahms Piano Concerto No 1 with the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Lio Kuokman, at the National Concert Hall on Friday, March 28th, at 7.30pm. The programme also includes Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. The In Conversation event will take place in the main auditorium 15 minutes after the end of the concert and is free to those with tickets to the performance. Tickets, from €15 to €39, available from nch.ie
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Join The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
- Listen to our Inside Politics podcast for the best political chat and analysis
