Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch - Declassified : A Low-Key Guide to the High-Strung World of Classical Music

Theres a story my parents like to tellabout how I became a violinist. It starts off with me, when I was two and a half, losing my voice because I wouldnt stop singing the Queen of the Nights bombshell second aria in Mozarts The Magic Flute.

Who could have guessed that the notoriously strenuous numberwhich vaults and arpeggiates and somersaults around and above the standard limits of the soprano range in a breathtaking display of power, technique, and virtuositywould prove unhealthy for the vocal cords of a two-year-old?

My parents took me to the doctor, who diagnosed me with nodules. He also said, famously, Youve got to find a way to shut that kid up. So my parents brought me home, sat me down, and asked if I wanted to play the piano. They knew I loved musicand they had two pianos already, for my dad.

But I said no. I wanted to play the violin.

The rest of the story is just a sigh, which somehow manages to say she was always such a pain in the ass while also encapsulating and claiming credit for the whole of my training and career: my two degrees from Juilliard, my competition wins and concert tours, my album, the time I mangled the concertmaster solo in John Adamss The Death of Klinghoffer while Adams himself was conducting. All of it, according to this sigh, was foretold the minute my parents trusted their collective gut and caved to the demands of their imperious toddler.

All of it, that is, until I quit the violin and walked away from music just a few years into my professional career. No one saw that coming. Except possibly Carol, my high school counselor.

Anyway, its a tidy little ball of yarn, isnt it? It has all the things you look for in a story: adversity, kismet, stubborn toddlers, throat nodules.

But its also bullshit.

First off, it makes some pretty questionable leaps. For instance, it takes great liberties with the definition of the word singing. And it hinges on the flawed premise that, when I said I wanted to play the violin, I actually knew what I was talking about. Plus, the whole point of the storythe thing that lends it significanceis that this was when I decided to become a violinist.

It wasnt, though. It was when I started taking lessons. But I took ballet lessons, tooand ski lessons, and tennis lessons, and golf lessons. And if youd asked me, at the age of two, what I actually wanted to be when I grew up, I would have said the next Picabo Street on Tuesday, and the prima ballerina of American Ballet Theatre on Wednesday, and James Bond all the other days of the week.

So when did I pledge my heart, my soul, and all of my waking hours to classical music? I was seven. And it was because of a boy. But well get to that later.

When I was a kid, there was no classical music. There was just musicBach, Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven. And it was everywhere in our house, at all times of the day and often at night because my mom never wanted our dogs to feel lonely.

My dad was a concert pianist who eventually began teaching at Phillips Academy, a boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts. When he wasnt giving piano lessons, teaching music theory courses, practicing on his Steinway (or his Bechstein), or, later, coaching me and my sister, a cellist, through our practice sessions, he could be found in front of his old Quad electrostatic speakers, buried in a score.

My parents acquired a rescue dog toward the end of my high school career: Hogan was his name. He was quite literally starving when he came to usand his fear of going hungry never left him. The way Hogan was about eatingthe way hed devour three bowls of chicken and oatmeal and dog food and then snatch a whole wheel of brie from the kitchen counterand then scavenge through the laundry bin and scarf up nine socksnever any pairswas the way my dad used to be about music. (He still loves it, by the way. Its just that he plays a lot of golf these days, too.)

My mom, an English teacher, was our familys token nonmusician. She did play the French horn in school, thoughand shes always loved Bach and Brahms and the other Austro-German greats. For years she also threatened to haunt the rest of us unless we agreed to perform Tchaikovskys Piano Trio at her funeral. (Now she just wants us to smuggle her ashes onto this one South Pacific military reserve so that we can scatter her, at sunset, into her favorite bit of ocean.)

She and my dad used to teach a course called Words and Music at Andover. Together they would analyze operas and teach musical texts like Joyces The Dead. Theyd explicate compositions inspired by works of literaturelike Mendelssohns