The End of My Addiction

saying, “Telephone me at Kléber-4183, I fly tonight for a concert in Rome.” After all, who could resist my mother, even in epistolary form?
    I went to see him on a beautiful morning in September, at his mansion at 22 Square de l’Avenue Foch. I arrived punctually at 10:30 a.m., almost overcome with nervousness. A butler ushered me to a room filled with Impressionist paintings and a magnificent Steinway. Half an hour later Rubinstein arrived in a black robe with red piping—I half expected him to be in concert attire—and said, “Let’s talk.”
    I had no voice. I was paralyzed with shyness. He said kindly, “Go to the piano.” I sat down at the Steinway, my fingers trembling.
    “What do you want to play?” the maestro asked.
    My dream was to play Chopin for him, but I thought if I played Chopin he would think it was because my technique was not good enough to play Liszt. So I began a Liszt rhapsody, reluctantly, because I wasn’t good at it, no. 11 in A Minor. Rubinstein stopped me after a few bars. “Look, first, you should play it a little differently. But I cannot judge somebody on Liszt. Could you play Chopin?”
    That was all I needed to hear. I played Nocturne no. 16 in B-flat Major. My fingers were doing whatever they did. I could not control anything. The music was going along, but I felt horrible. At the end of the piece, he said, “You are a very brave man.”
    I thought, “Oh, my God, what did I do now?” I wanted to disappear.
    He said, “This piece is so musically difficult that I haven’t played it in thirty years. Horowitz played it. Ignatz Friedman played it. And since Friedman played it so well, I decided never to play it.”
    I thought that meant, “Here is the door.” But he said, “You played that with such passion. You remind me of me playing for Paderewski when I was fifteen. Can you play another nocturne?”
    I played the Nocturne no. 15 in F Minor. And then he came and sat beside me and made up chords. That captured my mind, his fingers and mine on the same keys. That and the fact that he was like me, or rather I was like him. I could see that he was making things up, but very well. And he saw that I was making things up, too; he was no fool.
    He told me, “You are doing what I did when I was young. Nowadays audiences want every note. What I fooled the Europeans with didn’t work in the United States. I had to practice very hard to be recognized there.”
    He asked me to play some more, and I played a few of my own compositions. He said, “I love what you composed. Your influences seem to be Wagner and Rachmaninoff.” I adored Rachmaninoff and took that as the greatest praise I could ever have received. Of Wagner I had only heard the prelude to Tristan and Isolde , but I didn’t dare tell him that.
    I said that I was starting medical school, and that I wondered if I could study both medicine and piano.
    He said, “No, that used to be possible at the time of pianists like Moriz Rosenthal”—a pupil of Liszt’s who studied philosophy at the University of Vienna in the 1880s—“but nowadays you have to practice like a maniac.”
    He continued, “You are a fantastic pianist; you are one of the best. You remind me not only of me, but of Samson François. He played for me on that same piano.”
    The comparison took my breath away. Samson François was my favorite among the younger generation of pianists.
    Rubinstein went on, “You must perfect your technique. You need to practice Czerny, Scarlatti, Bach, and Mozart. You should abandon medicine and start right now.”
    Hearing “You must perfect your technique” crushed me. The praise went in one ear and out the other, while the criticism echoed over and over in my mind. I told myself later, “If that’s how it is, I’m not going to become a performer, because it’s too much work.” I didn’t want to do scales. And I had difficulty reading scores: that would be a terrible hindrance and embarrassment in a conservatory program or in trying to work with professional musicians.
    The die was cast. I would become a doctor.

    A few weeks later, in October 1969, I began medical studies at one of the University of Paris’s teaching hospitals, Hôpital Cochin, a fifteen-minute walk from home. I was only sixteen years old, two or three years younger than everyone else in the class. I was painfully conscious of not fitting in. But then chemistry captured my imagination, thanks in large part to a brilliant teacher