THE DAVID HELFGOTT PHENOMENON.
Pianist Helfgott embarks on new tour
In about three weeks time, something very strange will take place in two of Britain’s concert halls. They will be packed for a concert by a now elderly pianist who always plays the same handful of pieces. He’ll be dressed in an eye-catching outfit, probably a brightly coloured silk shirt, and he’ll behave in a deeply eccentric way; accompanying himself with a running commentary, and mugging at the audience. As for the musicmaking, at some moments it will be respectable, overall, but probably not outstanding, and occasionally quite odd. Then, at the end, will come the oddest thing of all; the audience will go wild.
This is the David Helfgott phenomenon, which will soon be seen in the U.K. as part of Helfgott’s 70thbirthday tour. For strangeness, one can only compare it to Florence Foster Jenkins, the famously bad soprano idolized by millions. What brought Helfgott fame was not his music-making but his extraordinary story, made known to millions around the world through the feature film Shine, a biopic of his life which won Geoffrey Rush Best Actor at the 1997 Oscars and was nominated for six further awards.
This portrayed the sad story of a gifted child, born into an immigrant family of Polish Jews in Australia. David’s talents were soon recognized, and he was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he won all the keyboard prizes. But his mental health was disintegrating, and in the film we see the disturbing results, when Helfgott’s performance of Rachmaninov’s 3rd Piano Concerto wins him an award, but leads to a temporary breakdown.
Back in Australia, he had a short- lived marriage, and, after a modest musical career at an opera company, his mental health gave way completely. He was institutionalized for years, and after discharge continued to be on medication. His present wife, Gillian, an astrologer, met him when he was working as a pianist at a wine bar, and nursed him back to health. His playing was restored, to a degree, but his eccentricities remained — the urge to hug everyone in sight, talk at a manic pace without waiting for a reply, and follow whims without a thought for the consequences.
A life of reasonably stable, happy obscurity should have followed. But when Shine appeared in 1996 Helfgott was propelled to stardom. There were recordings on a major label, and sold- out world tours. Audiences loved him, critics were dubious. And accusations started to fly, that the story told in Shine was not the whole truth.
In the firing line was Gillian Helfgott, played in the film by Lynn Redgrave and portrayed as a saintly woman who sacrificed her own career to rebuild her husband’s. Not everyone saw it that way. “There was this idea that I was exploiting David,” she tells me. “I don’t know where this came from. His sister Margaret wrote a terrible book called Out of Tune where she says David never wanted to get back onto the concert platform. But as David says himself, music never hurt anybody. He plays because it is his passion. So how was it manipulative to encourage him to play in public?”
Gillian is still smarting from the hostile press she received at the time, and remains circumspect when it comes to the Helfgott family. David has four siblings, two of whom, sister Margaret and brother Les, were fiercely critical of the way the film portrayed their father as manipulative and tyrannical, and partly to blame for his son’s breakdown. “Well, children have different views of their parents. I think David believes now that the film gave a very fair portrayal of his father. His father ran away from home when he was 13, during the First World War, and the fact that he survived in Europe during the war is quite extraordinary. He was a very traumatized man, and he wanted to live through his children. That’s why he was so keen for them all to learn music, and when they didn’t play along, he had problems with that.”
As for David, Gillian says his energy is amazing. “When we’re at home he swims for hours every day. His other great passion is listening to music. He listens for hours and hours — he must be Australian Broadcasting Company’s most loyal listener.” How does he respond to the stress of being on tour? “Amazingly well, as long as there are breaks between each concert. I would say we have more of the essential David shining through. There’s a very wonderful innocence about him. In a way he’s like a child savant, not quite of this world.”
Could this be the secret of his appeal, I ask? “Yes, I think people respond to his total lack of guile. He just played a concert at a primary school in front of 400 children, and the response was fantastic. The really extraordinary thing was how the autistic children responded. They don’t like being touched in any way, but when David went into the audience and put his hand on a boy’s head, the boy just hung on to it.”
This story shows what lies at the heart of the Helgott phenomenon, and why critics who point out deficiencies in the playing are missing the point. For his adoring audiences Helfgott is genius first, saint and martyr second, and pianist very much third.