Another sample of the same genre may be found in : The Soloist: A Lost Dream, An Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music; Author Steve Lopez; GP Putnam, 2008. Somehow the titles of biographies of persons living marginal existences but with exceptional abilities, are getting longer and staler: note the re-occurrence of similar stigmatizers: lost; curious (unlikely) ; soloist (genius).
The "friendship" is real enough, and the fundamental redemptive feature of the book. The 'redemptive power of music' is a bit harder to defend, given that it was the excessive concentration on a musical education that, along with other factors, led to a life of madness over 30 years on the streets of Los Angeles. In fact, in both of these books, it appears that the pressures specific to a career in classical music had a disequilibrating effect on sensitive, fragile human beings. Can one speculate that music itself, exclusively pursued, can disorient the capacity to focus on other things? What a thought!
Steve Lopez writes human interest columns for the LA Times. He discovered the 54-year old Nathaniel Ayers, a stringed instrument player (mostly double bass, but he plays all the orchestral string instruments) playing serious and difficult classical music on a violin with only 2 strings in an underpass tunnel in Los Angeles, filled with grease, fumes from heavy traffic, loud bracing noises, angry motorists and pedestrians anxious to get through as quickly as possible: all things normally considered unacceptably distracting by concert artists.
In 1972 Nathaniel Ayers was a scholarship student at the Julliard Conservatory in New York. He did well in all the studies that related directly to music: double bass, cello, violin, piano, theory, harmony. His descent into schizophrenia was sudden and intense. Lopez's account is multi-dimensional with a refreshing respect for the facts, totally unlike the depiction of a 'dramatic' onset of mental illness depicted in the outrageously phony film Shine. Unlike John Nash, Nathaniel Ayers has never recovered.
It's quite a story. The artist is a 20-year old Afro-American from Cleveland (the racial issue enters in an important way when his odd behavior at Julliard is interpreted as "black rage") . In the early 1970's the percentage of Afro-American instrumental students at Julliard was negligible.
When Lopez discovered him, Ayers was storing all his worldly possessions in a grocery shopping cart. This didn't seem to bother him; as Lopez points out, having nothing to steal meant that he had nothing to lose. After a long day of concertizing in his tunnel he would wheel the shopping cart down several blocks to a squalid alleyway in the Los Angeles Skid Row, there to hunker down with dozens of alcoholics, addicts, mental cases and homeless persons unable or unwilling to go to the shelters. His bed was a piece of cardboard flattened into a niche that was recognized as his turf.
Nathaniel's quixotic dignity has saved him, these past 35 years, from temptations that could have quickly put and end to him. He despises alcoholics and drug addicts, avoids having anything to do with the prostitutes, holds up his nose in disgust when someone smokes around him. He is almost sane in many ways, although his rambling discourse and writings bear the unmistakable imprint of a lifetime of schizophrenia.
Throughout the book Lopez reflects on how he is blown away at the sight of an 'elite musician' reduced to such a condition. He admits frankly that he knows nothing about classical music, which is certainly not to be held against him. There are real problems with his writing style. His sentences are filled with clichés in many hues and shapes, standardized opinions about concert artists; about concert music; the glamour of Julliard (he seems to think that only world class virtuosos go there); the virtues of psychiatry, as if it were obvious to everyone that it is a legitimate branch of medicine (we all know, don't we, that "all ills are cured by pills"?) ; about the 'negative effects' of the Civil Rights movement, which he seems to treat as a misfortune on the level of the Vietnamese war. His descriptions of the tough world of Skid Row draw heavily on the banal stereotypes of journalistic naturalism, all the hard-boiled metaphors of life on these mean streets: prostitutes servicing their clients in out-houses, women screaming in hysteria for no apparent reason, drug addicts lying in the streets in their own vomit. All these things exist, of course. It's the way he puts them together to produce 'atmosphere' that's embarrassing.
Over-riding these defects are certain strong cardinal virtues. Primary among these is Lopez's tenacity in digging down to the roots of his story. He travels wherever he needs to in order to interview persons who have had, or still have, some meaningful interaction with Nathaniel. In addition to Los Angeles, his quest takes him to Cleveland, New York and Las Vegas. He steps into Julliard and finds real people there!
There are also his willingness to abandon fixed ideas about the new world he's discovered quite by accident; his moving friendship, and endless patience, with Nathaniel (than whom one could not imagine anyone more difficult). Over a number of years he wins Ayers' trust; gets him to move out of the alleyway and into half-way houses; puts him on social security and medical programs; reunites him with his sister; takes him to concerts; channels instruments sent to him by well-wishers, (violins, cellos, trumpet, flute, even a double bass!). He interests a cellist from the LA Symphony, Peter Snyder into giving him lessons again. After Nathaniel has become settled, Lopez arranges for him to share a music studio, complete with piano. The book ends with a moving encounter with Yo-Yo Ma, whose period of study at Julliard overlapped with Nathaniel's.
Somehow the public image of a classical musician does not harmonize well with failure, insanity, alcoholism, or anything to indicate that in frailty and fallibility they are just like the rest of us. The sensationalism surrounding 'discoveries', like Nyiregyhazi, Ayers and Helfgott, shows that the general, and even the music-loving public, imagine the world of professional classical music as a kind of hermetically sealed chamber, a greenhouse for exotic and delicate plants. Once in awhile someone drops out. These marginal cases are insufficient to dissolve the barriers that separate the sacred realm of great concert art from the real world inhabited by the rest of us.
Likewise, if one looks closely at the 'excellence' and 'sacredness' of classical music, one discovers that Bach was a failed school teacher (only the most hidebound pedant would hold it against him) . At the worst of times, Beethoven's psychological problems were in the league of Nyiregyhaza and Ayers. Salieri died in a madhouse. Mozart's career was a financial disaster (I would not take seriously Milos Forman's claim that he was a notorious womanizer.) Schubert was a lowlife (alas, not an exaggeration), Brahms an even lower lowlife (ditto). Schumann made a suicide attempt, which put him in a mental asylum. (Apparently he preferred the asylum to his bourgeois home life and just stayed there). Wagner was a Nazi. According to a distinguished German biographer (Mann something?) Schoenberg made a pact with the devil, who gave him syphilis!!!
And the same goes for musicians, mad, drunk, depraved, abusive, helpless, hopeless ...Yet the curious story of the lost genius and the redemptive power of music will, time and again, set the world buzzing with shock and amazement that 'two totally different persons' can actually exist in the same human psyche.
However, there always will be a very important distinction which classical music bestows upon its congregations of the faithful. Steve Lopez, eager to discover where Nathaniel spends his nights, is accompanying him to his few square feet of alleyway, down a street filled with horrors of every kind, (described in Lopez' inimitable style). From a loudspeaker somewhere blares "the sonic blast of a rock band".
Steve Lopez asks Nathaniel Ayers:"You like that music?"
Mad, homeless Ayers turns to him with a superior air and a voice tinged with derision : "You call that music?"