Writing of an up-and-coming 21-year-old pianist in the Jan. 18, 1950, issue of the Tribune, Claudia Cassidy cited the young musician’s “big talent (and) remarkable technique,” “stamina” and “concentrated nervous energy,” concluding at the end of a grudgingly positive review that “wherever he is going, he has a terrific head start.”
Neither the cantankerous music critic nor the pianist himself could have foreseen the arduous odyssey his career would take since that early recital. Nearly 48 years to the week after that appearance, Byron Janis will sit down at the keyboard Friday at Barat College in Lake Forest to perform Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A major with the Lake Forest Symphony. It will not only mark the celebrated musician’s first Chicago-area appearance in more than two decades and just his second concerto performance anywhere in 24 years; even more significantly, it will provide eloquent testimony to Janis’ perseverance and courage in overcoming the painful psoriatic arthritis with which he was stricken a quarter-century ago.
“I know I’m playing well and I feel fine. I just choose when I want to play,” said the 69-year-old pianist, speaking from the Manhattan home he shares with his wife of 31 years, Maria (whose father is Gary Cooper). “I don’t want to tempt anything by hurting myself. There’s no point in that. . . . My goal is really not to tour and play a lot of concerts. My goal is to do just a certain number of concerts and special events.”
The domestic musical landscape has seen more than its share of tragedies among the promising generation of American pianists who came to prominence in the middle of the century, from Leon Fleisher’s crippling repetitive-stress syndrome to William Kapell’s early death in a plane crash at age 31. But for sheer, dogged long-term determination and focused tenacity, few could rival the intense keyboard prodigy from McKeesport, Pa., whose classic recordings possess a unique blend of fiery virtuosity and poetic insight and remain musical touchstones with few peers today.
What is less common knowledge than Janis’ arthritis, and in some ways even more remarkable, is that the musician’s prodigious career–much of it spent in large part on the treacherous Romantic repertoire–has essentially been played with only nine fingers, the result of a childhood accident.
“When I was 10 years old, I was fighting with my sister and I stuck my hand through a glass door, and in moving it slashed my little finger on my left hand very badly, down to the bone,” Janis recalls. “I was rushed to the hospital and they had to operate. I lost the use of a tendon, and the little joint on that finger did not bend. To this day that finger is numb. Totally numb.”
Even at that young age, Janis was bent on refuting those who said his musical career was over. “I was blessed with a very strong mind and a willpower, which is the only reason I’m still here today. I just went through all kinds of pain and stuff to try to work out a way of using this finger. And I did, but it created a lot of problems, obviously. I couldn’t work too long on that hand. It became a visual thing; I had to use my eye to get the note rather than (touch alone).”
At the height of his career Chicago became nearly a second home, Janis having made nine downtown appearances from 1954 to 1967 and logged 23 performances at Ravinia between 1952 and 1974. Though he hasn’t appeared downtown with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra since playing the Prokofiev First Piano Concerto under Irwin Hoffman in 1967, some of the musician’s fondest memories come from his CSO concerts, especially those in the 1950s under Fritz Reiner, “a true virtuoso in the best sense of the word.”
Adjusting to his affliction
It was in London in 1973 when, after noticing a small red patch on his left fourth finger, he went to a doctor who ultimately diagnosed his condition as psoriatic arthritis. “I asked what does that mean, and he said, `Well, it doesn’t get any better.’ That was not what I wanted to hear. . . . I came back to New York, and it spread over the next year and a half to both hands, to the wrists, and eventually to all my distal joints, the last joints on the fingers, which don’t bend. To this day, they don’t bend, none of them.”
Despite the pain, Janis forged ahead with a heavy performance schedule, even playing the complete Rachmaninoff piano concertos in Paris in 1977 at the height of his arthritis, using substitutions and finding ways around playing as each finger grew more debilitated. “I kept challenging myself to do more. And in that challenging, I extended my possibilities,” he said.
With a combination of medications and various treatments, including hypnosis, acupuncture and, even for a while, agonizingly painful cortisone shots in his fingers, Janis continued playing and garnering generally positive notices. “Somehow you play through pain. If I had felt at any point that my standards were not being kept, I would have stopped,” he said. “Occasionally, I was not up to my standard, but that happens anyway. But there were so many times when I really played so very well. It was like there was almost something that was a compensation . . . because of that something inside, like a spirituality grew. Whatever it was seemed to come out more. People would say, `Oh, I’ve never heard you play so beautifully.’ “
Janis went public with his arthritis in a big way in 1986 with a luncheon at the White House with Nancy Reagan and became ambassador for the arts for the Arthritis Foundation, a role he still enjoys today. Yet four years later, the musician reached the lowest point in his lifelong seesaw battle for advantage with the disease when an operation to reduce intense pain in his left thumb left it nearly half an inch shorter, a catastrophic result of which he was never warned. That crushing blow sent the pianist into a two-year depression, where he “didn’t care about living any longer.”
Ultimately, salvation came this time from the musician’s creative rather than interpretive talents, when a friend who had heard some of Janis’ songs suggested that he work on writing the score for a musical version of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Janis fell to the task “like an obsessed person,” completing 22 songs in about six months and as a result restoring his energy and rebuilding his confidence.
Yet one more time, Janis found a way of playing around his physical limitations. A benefit recital at New York’s Alice Tully Hall in 1995 made his latest recovery complete, and ultimately led to the recording of Janis’ “comeback” Chopin disc on EMI, which has rung up large sales and garnered great critical acclaim.
Music as an experience
With his pain kept under control with minimal medication that allows this week’s Lake Forest return to the concertante repertoire, Janis reflects that waging the battle with his disease has brought a deeper spiritual dimension to both his life and his performances.
“Music had to be and still has to be for me an experience — not just a performance of notes and not an interpretation. It has to go beyond that somehow. It has to transcend something. That for me is what it’s about.”
In addition to celebrating his 70th birthday in March and marking the 50th anniversary of his 1948 Carnegie Hall debut with a recital in New York in October, Janis continues to teach at the Manhattan School of Music and do charitable work for the Arthritis Foundation, as well as working on his memoirs. Besides looking forward to bringing the “Hunchback” to a New York stage later this year, Janis is taking a page from his illustrious predecessor Josef Hoffman by looking into the possibility of having a Steinway built with smaller keys that would accommodate his reduced range of movement.
He likens his return to the concert stage to track athletes who broke the four-minute mile after the great runner Roger Bannister became the first to achieve it.
It demonstrates the art of the possible.
“The center of life for me is passion,” Janis said. “If you have passion, real passion–foot on the accelerator all the way, not touching the brake–it’s amazing what one can do.”
