Say a pianist is halfway through Ravel’s Jeux D’eau or a Rachmaninoff Etude-Tableaux and - aw, crap - brain goes white-out and forgets big time, big time. What do they do in that situation?
I’ve seen things like this. The typical problem is that they’ll go off in the wrong direction at a transitional point in the music. Usually they’ll start the piece over from the beginning, or pick it up at some other convenient point before their memory lapse. I have seen musicians simply freeze up, but that’s more common with students or amateur musicians. A professional can usually recover and get back on track pretty quickly.
One such incident I witnessed was Dudley Moore playing his score from Bedazzled, accompanied by an orchestra. He laughed it off and said, “That happens sometimes! We’ll start over!” This was a few years before he went public about the degenerative brain illness that eventually killed him.
The basis of a famous jokey piece:
And there was the occasion when Maria Joao Pires turned up for a concert expecting to play one Mozart concerto, and realised the orchestra was playing a different one - but delivered a faultless performance:
Not a pianist, but I have always been awestruck by this story from The Art of Possibility by Benjamin Zander, founder and conductor of the Boston Philharmonic:
In the middle of the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet op. 95, just before his big solo, Lehner suddenly had an inexplicable memory lapse, in a place where his memory had never failed him before. He literally blacked out. But the audience heard Opus 95 as it was meant to be played, the viola solo sounding in all its richness. Even the first violinist, Rudolph Kolisch, and cellist, Bennar Heifetz, both with their eyes closed and deeply absorbed in the music, were unaware that Lehner had dropped out. The second violinist, Felix Khuner, was playing Lehner’s melody, coming in without missing a beat at the viola’s designated entrance, the notes perfectly in tune and voiced like a viola on an instrument tuned a fifth higher. Lehner was stunned, and offstage after the performance asked Khuner how he could have possibly known to play. Khuner answered with a shrug: “I could see that your third finger was poised over the wrong string, so I knew you must have forgotten what came next.”
Whoa…reading that gave me goosebumps all over my whole body… THAT’S what I call a professional who knows their stuff (and everyone else’s stuff, too, apparently). Awestruck is exactly the right word.
Wow! Aye; that is a musician!
This happened to me, in a student violin recital. My teacher was accompanying me, and I started ok. When I got to a particular spot, I just froze, totally forgetting what came next. So my teacher started all over, and the same thing happened. So he began the next section and I finally caught up and finished the piece.
My father was FURIOUS.
I was watching Paul Simon and Friends this week (it was recorded in 2007), and, at the end Paul brought out Stevie Wonder and the Dixie Hummingbirds, and they all did a version of Loves Me Like A Rock which went well until it was Stevie’s turn to take the lead. He forgot his place, stopped, smiled at the audience and said, “Well, it happens.” They started over and he was fine the next time through.
I remember Paul McCartney forgot the exact words to “We Can Work It Out’” when filming MTV’s UNplugged (they just started over):
