Most classical musicians “don’t do God”, in Alistair Campbell’s notorious phrase. Kyung Wha Chung is different. ‘‘I have a deep faith,” she says. “I walk out on stage, and God is with me all the time”.
The Korean violinist has returned to the world’s concert halls after recovering from a hand injury which almost ended a career spanning more than half a century. She talked to me in Verbier on one of those Alpine summer afternoons when sunshine, cloud and rain vie for supremacy in an elemental struggle.
Two hours earlier Chung had walked off the platform to a standing ovation from the latest leg of a comeback tour. In Prokofiev’s 1st Violin Sonata, the famously tigerish ferocity of her lower register had lost none of its teeth. Two years ago she played at the Royal Festival Hall in London for the first time in a decade, and provoked less comment for her playing than her tetchy onstage response to the parents of a coughing child in a noisy audience.
She has also returned to the recording studio. For Decca Records and then EMI (now part of Warner Classics) she made a string of collectable recordings until 2001, covering the peaks of the classical repertoire for violin: concertos by Beethoven, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, chamber music by Debussy and Mendelssohn, and inevitably The Four Seasons of Vivaldi.
Now Chung has gone back to Bach. Just as the Cello Suites and Well-Tempered Clavier are the Old Testament of technique and expression on their respective instruments, so the six sonatas and partitas have an almost biblical authority for violinists. Like all serious string players – almost all musicians – Chung has played Bach since childhood.
“I started to play unaccompanied Bach when I was 13,” she says. “I had gone to study with Ivan Galamian at the Juilliard School in New York, and the first thing he gave me was the preludio from the E major Partita. Then the G minor Sonata – and I didn’t know what I was doing. The fugue was beyond me. But by the time I was 17 I could play all six.”
Chung recorded half the collection, for Decca, in 1974, but only now has she played all six works together. In the lonely nights of recovery after she put down her violin in 2005, Bach was her companion. “My pastime was to lie there at night and put on the fugue of the G minor Sonata. It came to the point when I could go through the fugue continuously in my head. This experience liberated me from the instrument. All violinists are attached to their instrument. Pianists less so. It gave me a freedom, and those five years were an eye-opener.
“By that time my relationship with God was steady. I had a strong faith. Whatever came to me in life, it came because God meant it. So when I injured my hand, people around me were very concerned. Me, not so much, because I thought, whatever happens, this is my calling, to play the violin.”
Chung’s faith was decisively strengthened by a personal crisis in 1989. “I was married with two children, living in Kent. But I was struggling every day. I cut down my concerts to 60 a year, then to 40. But I still couldn’t cope. And I went to church – the Korean church in Wimbledon – and received speaking of tongues. I was in a euphoric state for six months that summer.”
Then a car accident put her out of action for some time. “I became a crazy gardener,” she recalls. “While I was in England until 1992, I was questioning my commitment, but trusting God 100 per cent without having this resentment of why this had happened to me. But the struggle is a blessing. God only gives you what he knows you can manage.”
Musicologists and theologians have wrestled tenaciously over how Bach’s faith may be heard at work in his music. Whether in service to court or church, Bach knew his place in a long family lineage of musicians, and towards the end of his life he became increasingly aware of his place in history. But he was unafflicted by the Romantic crisis of self-consciousness. Artist, craftsman, composer, performer: all were one to him.
However, life and art did merge for once in the sonatas and partitas. They reach a climax with the concluding chaconne of the D minor Partita. Woven into the fabric of eight-bar variations are silent references to Lutheran chorales on the subject of mortality and consolation. Although he had likely worked on the cycle for some years, Bach wrote out a neat manuscript copy late in 1720, with the six works carefully ordered by key signature. That summer he had been travelling with his employer. He returned home to the news that his wife, Maria Barbara, had died and been buried a week earlier. The chaconne, it seems, is more than likely both a tribute to her memory and an early outworking of grief.
Kyung Wha Chung hears suffering in all the sonatas and partitas, not only the chaconne. She notes how the opening chapter of the cycle begins “with the tonic chord on the lowest string of the violin. This first G minor Sonata is totally related to Genesis in the Bible and the creation of the world. In it we can hear a tremendous love for creation.”
In Chung is a refreshing balance of study and intuition. Having mastered the notes for so long, she is now willing and able to go where the music leads her. In the case of the A minor Partita, it is to join Christ on the Cross. “The opening grave is completely human. There is no other movement like it. The G minor lifts you up, but the A minor is a piece of humble sacrifice. ‘Dear Lord, why am I here? Why is there such suffering and pain?’ That’s the hardest fugue to perform. Then follows the andante, and that’s the movement it took longest for me to have the courage to play in public. It is the beating of the heart, and it’s physically scary to play.
“I am an instinctive person. I was never analytical,” Chung remarks of her teenage years at Juilliard, where she is now a teacher. “I hated theory class. But I had no choice. When you grow up you have to know something about what you are playing.”
Through time and training she came to value her voice – not her speaking voice, which is now wry and as whispery as dry leaves on a forest floor, but her voice as a violinist, of bow against string. “In my head I hear a voice of how a piece should sound. And you have to find a relationship between your voice and the composer’s voice.”
On the sofa next to Chung lie the back of spruce and chest of maple which enclose the body of every fine old violin, including her own, made in 1734 by Giuseppe Guarneri “del Gesù”. “My present instrument is warmer and deeper, like my own voice has changed.”
It is no coincidence that string-instrument players and makers talk of voices, backs and bodies and personalities. They spend more time with their instrument than with any human, often from childhood onwards. They notice every minute change in their instrument’s tone of voice as we do with our parents, children and closest friends.
Chung observes in young musicians extraordinary technical accomplishment, but challenges them to dig deeper. “They want to play the best, very brilliant, very beautiful. But before anything you have to know who you are. What is your voice?”
In the encouragement and nurture of her students, motherhood has its part to play. “I don’t control my children the way my mother controlled us,” she says of her own family, which includes several other distinguished musicians. “The most important thing I have given them is love. I wanted them to be independent and think for themselves. My boys and my faith: these are my most precious gifts. Without them, I could hardly take a breath.”
Bach: Sonatas and Partitas by Kyung Wha Chung is now available on Warner Classics. She performs at the Barbican Centre, London, on May 10, 2017, and will play a recital of Prokofiev and Franck at Carnegie Hall, New York, on May 18, 2017
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