If the retirement age is raised, it will cause untold misery for huge numbers of classical musicians, says Susan Tomes

Friday July 1, 2005
The Guardian

Marathon woman: Susan Tomes. Photograph: Sarah Lee.
  
I came out of a long, tough rehearsal at a classical music festival recently and stood chatting with my colleagues, many of them principal players in orchestras around Europe, most in their 40s. There was a longish pause. Then someone asked: “Can you imagine doing this for another 30 years, if retirement ages go up?” There was a heartfelt chorus: “No!”
Everyone started talking at once about the challenges of performing: “Just imagine a 70-year-old footballer! Nobody expects sportsmen to go on and on. But that’s what we have to do night after night, to international standards, having our work picked over in the press, while we struggle against tendonitis. We’re athletes, too, but there’s no way our careers can be cut short unless we get injured.”

As it is, classical musicians already have an exceptionally long working life because their training starts so early. The international pool of young musicians is fearsomely accomplished, and, in order to compete when you leave college, you must have years of dedicated practice behind you. Most performers have been at it for several hours a day through their teenage years, and often since their early childhood. Ask a really good violinist when they started training and they’ll often tell you they were five or six years old (not something that is necessary to become a stockbroker or a lawyer).
By middle age, many performers suffer gradual loss of high-frequency hearing because of the battering their eardrums receive from loud instruments. We know about the volume produced by the brass section of an orchestra, but a grand piano or a string quartet in a small rehearsal room can also generate damagingly high decibel levels. Playing a concerto with a Swedish orchestra last year, I was amazed to see a box of earplugs by the door leading to the stage. It’s unfortunately telling that orchestras should need to wear earplugs to protect them from the sound they’re making – the very sound the audience has come to hear.

Classical music is a particularly demanding field because most pieces have been notated with great care and love by their composers, and are closely followed by listeners who know exactly how the music should go. There’s very little room for manoeuvre; you can’t change notes because your arm is aching or because you can’t remember what comes next. The physical demands of performing can be just as intense in other forms of music, of course, but in improvised music there is a built-in flexibility. Players have the freedom to tailor their performance to their capabilities, and indeed one of the joys of jazz is watching seasoned players do exactly that. A few well-chosen notes from a grizzled lion of jazz can express the soul of the music perfectly, but no classical player can reduce a piece of music to just the notes he or she feels like playing on the night.

Convention also demands that soloists play without the music in front of them. A pianist will routinely play two hours of music from memory, a task requiring months of preparation for each programme. This skill doesn’t generally improve as time goes by, and any lapse of memory will aggravate the perennial problem of stage nerves. Fans of Sviatoslav Richter will remember that in his later years, he took to putting the music on the piano and reading it by the light of an anglepoise lamp. Of course, a great artist who is loved by the public can afford to show the vulnerability of old age. But most musicians live in fear of the least sign of degeneration. A doctor attached to a symphony orchestra told me that almost all the players who consult him about physical problems beg him not to let their secret get out, because they know that there are plenty of other musicians waiting to take their place.

If we do all end up having to work for longer, as the government threatens, we shall need to develop some kind of handicap system that acknowledges the fact that not all jobs are equally demanding. Of course, there are many which are very arduous in all kinds of ways – from heavy manual jobs to caring for the elderly – but classical musicians are in an unusual position. We’re expected to combine the precision of the proverbial brain surgeon with the stamina of the marathon runner. It’s difficult enough to maintain this up to normal retirement age, and most musicians I know couldn’t afford to retire early. Add to that the strain of working in an image-conscious profession where youth gets most of the publicity, and the prospect of ploughing on into old age seems cruel indeed.

· Susan Tomes performs the complete Beethoven Piano Trios with the Florestan Trio at the Cheltenham International Festival, Thursday to Saturday