我也认为音乐家的使命和生命是在台下。台下是土壤和根，台上是花朵。没有土壤和根，哪来花朵？花开之后是凋谢，要再开花还得靠土壤和根。一个完整的音乐家应该有土壤和根为先，花是不愁开的。一直很喜欢王笑晗这样的音乐家，不用音乐去为生活发愁，不为生活让音乐妥协。不开音乐会则吧，开了就对得起音乐、对得起自己。今天和大家分享一篇登载在China Daily（作者：陈婕）上的好文章（对青年钢琴演奏家，作曲家和钢琴教育家王笑晗的报道），请同事翻译后和大家分享。

——苏立华

请先欣赏钢琴家王笑晗演奏的录音：

《e小调第27钢琴奏鸣曲》（作品90号）第二乐章 作曲：贝多芬

《ａ小调钢琴练习曲》（作品10之2） 作曲：肖邦

《降E大调钢琴与中提琴奏鸣曲》（作品120之2） 作曲：勃拉姆斯

中提琴：李腾 钢琴：王笑晗

钢琴家的使命完成于舞台下

文（英文）：陈婕

中文翻译：　李娜

中国有数百万少年儿童学习钢琴。他们中，一部分纯粹是为了学习音乐，而另一部分则是为了在高考申请大学时候能把它作为“特长”拿到加分。

大部分真正喜欢钢琴而又有天赋的中国人要么去赢得国际比赛，要么师从一些有名的大师，然后成为职业钢琴家，但是很少有人会选择从事全职钢琴教育。

34岁的青年钢琴家王笑晗，就是这样一位以钢琴教育为职业的钢琴演奏家。

他任教于中央音乐学院附中，除教学外，他每年举办20来场音乐会，业余时间还学习绘画和作曲。2014年12月13日，他在北京中山公园音乐堂举办了一场音乐会，曲目有舒曼、贝多芬、斯克里亚宾和他自己创作的钢琴作品。

20世纪80年代早期，在中国的大城市，家长们开始让孩子学习乐器。王笑晗说他的外交官父亲花了1,700元（合274美元），相当于他好多个月的薪水，买了一架钢琴，通过报纸广告找了一位钢琴老师。

当时5岁的王笑晗跟他这位住在一条小胡同里的老师学习了6个月，然后到中央音乐学院开始跟金爱平和李其芳教授学习。

10岁时，他赢得了星海杯钢琴比赛，这是中国最高级别的儿童钢琴比赛。他给评委留下了深刻的印象，其中包括著名的钢琴家鲍蕙荞和周广仁，他们见到王笑函的父亲时说王笑晗应该成为一位钢琴家。

王笑晗说：“我当时也不知道是应该以钢琴为生还是仅仅是为了兴趣。我很听话。我父亲和老师们都觉得我应该花更多时间在钢琴上，所以我上了中央音乐学院附中。

1997年，王笑晗赢得了在慕尼黑举办的ARD音乐比赛并遇到了著名的以色列钢琴家阿里·瓦迪，他第二年在德国汉诺威音乐学院将王笑函收为自己的学生。

阿里·瓦迪的中国学生中还有李云迪和陈萨，虽然他们在中国比王笑晗要出名，阿里·瓦迪还是在此前与《中国日报》做过的专访中对王笑晗大加赞扬。

2001年举办的范·克莱本国际钢琴比赛成为王笑晗的突破。他不仅是该比赛进入决赛最年轻的而且是第一位在此比赛上演奏自己作品的选手。但是在2005年的比赛却让他遭遇了滑铁卢。

这年的一位评委问王笑晗为什么要重返范·克莱本国际钢琴比赛。王笑晗说那位评委是这么讲的：“你是要来赢比赛而不是来练习的，但是你看起来状态可不佳。”

王笑晗承认他自己对参加比赛也没把握。“重返这个舞台我感到很大的压力。我是最后一刻才决定要报名的，没有认真选曲。”

他没能进入决赛。这场比赛之后，他有六个月没有上台。六个月后，他在12月举办的德国波恩贝多芬钢琴大赛中拿到第四名。

他说：“我哭着打电话给阿里·瓦迪说‘我做到了’。”

在范·克莱本的起伏让王笑晗想通了很多事情。他全心投入到跟阿里·瓦迪的学习中、刻苦练习而且一直没有停止创作。教书之余，他开始创作一些钢琴小品。

王笑晗1998年去汉诺威之前，他的父亲经常带他去北京一家叫荣宝斋的古董店学习中国画和书法。那些书画后来成为他脑海中的音符和乐谱。

“有一次在看黄永玉的画作‘风中莲花’时，我的脑海里回荡起了拉赫玛尼诺夫《第三钢琴协奏曲》的音乐。这两个作品真的感觉太相似了。”

王笑晗后来将他对画作和音乐之间的关联理解他自己原创的钢琴作品中表现了出来。他还选择了其中一首在2007年德国波恩贝多芬钢琴大赛上弹奏。同年，他的钢琴作品《遗失的日记》在中国作品比赛上获奖。次年，他的无伴奏小提琴独奏曲《村趣》也在这个比赛上获奖。

他在2010年拿到了汉诺威音乐学院的博士学位，并与很多著名的交响乐团一起在世界各地演出。然而，两年后，他放弃了这种空中飞人的生活，找到了他的使命—在他曾经读书的中央音乐学院附中成为一名教师。

他说：“我非常清楚做全职钢琴演奏家，那并不是我想要的生活。时间排得满满的，生活在机场、酒店和剧院的穿梭中，重复演奏同样的音乐…这不是我想要的。”

他说他曾经在纽约的茱莉亚音乐学院做过助教，这段经历对他的意义很重大。他目前在北京中央音乐学院附中担任钢琴主课老师，给10个学校安排的钢琴专业学生上课，每周上课15小时。

以下是发表在China Daily上的英文原文：

Millions of children and young adults in China learn the piano. Some do so for purely musical reasons, but others may find it easier to score points while applying for higher education, if they have an "activity" alongside to show.

Most talented Chinese with genuine interest in the piano either win international competitions or learn from renowned masters and become career pianists, but few decide to take up full-time teaching.

Wang Xiaohan, 34, is one of them.

He teaches piano at the middle school attached to the China Central Conservatory of Music. Every year, he presents about 20 onstage recitals and paints and composes in his spare time. On Dec 13, he played at the Forbidden City Concert Hall, where he presented a mixed recital of compositions by Schumann, Beethoven, Scriabin and his own Piano Paintings.

In the early 1980s, Chinese parents in big cities started to send their children to learn musical instruments. Wang says his diplomat father spent about 1,700 yuan ($274), manyfold his salary, and bought a piano and found a teacher through advertisements in the newspaper.

Wang, then 5, learned from his teacher, who lived in a small lane, for nearly six months before turning to professors Jin Aiping and Li Qifang at the China Central Conservatory of Music.

At 10, he won the Xinghai Cup Piano Competition, the highest national contest for children. He impressed the judges, including famous pianists Bao Huiqiao and Zhou Guangren, and both met Wang's father to tell him that Wang should become a pianist.

"I had no idea whether to play the piano for a living or just for fun. But I'm obedient. My father and teachers believed I should spend more time on the piano, thus I went to the middle school attached to the conservatory," Wang says.

In 1997, he won the ARD Music contest in Munich and met the renowned Israeli pianist Arie Vardi, who made Wang his student at the Hochschule fuer Musik in Hanover, Germany, the following year.

Vardi also taught Chinese pianists Li Yundi and Chen Sa, and while Li and Chen enjoy much more fame than Wang does in China, Vardi praised Wang highly in a previous interview with China Daily.

Wang's breakthrough came in 2001 at the quadrennial Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. He was not only the Texas contest's youngest finalist but also the first competitor who played his own composition. But the same Van Cliburn turned Wang's Waterloo in 2005.

One of the judges that year asked Wang why he had returned to Van Cliburn. "You come to win not to practice, but you don't seem to be in a good condition," Wang quotes the judge as telling him.

Wang admitted that he was not sure about the competition. "I felt great pressure to return to the same stage. I decided to apply at the last minute and could not carefully choose the repertoire."

He failed before the final round. Thereafter, he didn't return to the stage for six months until in December, when he won the fourth prize at the Telekom Beethoven Competition in Bonn, Germany.

"I cried and called Vardi to say, 'I did it'", he says.

The rise and fall at Van Cliburn helped Wang to think things through. He immersed himself in learning from Vardi, and practiced hard and continued to compose. When he played Mozart's Cadenza at the same middle school where he now teaches, he began composing short pieces.

Before he went to Hanover in 1998, his father often took him to learn Chinese painting and calligraphy at the antique shop Rongbaozhai in Beijing. Those paintings became notes and scores in his mind.

"Once while viewing Huang Yongyu's Lotus in the Wind painting, I heard Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No 3 playing inside my head. The two were just so close."

Wang later interpreted his understanding of the connection between the painting and the music in his Piano Paintings compositions. One of the pieces was chosen as the repertoire in the Telekom Beethoven Competition in Bonn in 2007. In the same year, he won China's National Composition Competition for his piano composition Lost Diary. He topped the same contest the following year with his violin score Villages.

He got a doctoral degree from Hochschule fuer Musik in 2010, and started to tour around the world, performing with many famous orchestras. Within two years, however, he gave up that jet-setting lifestyle to find his true calling－as a teacher in the middle school, where he once studied.

"I'm pretty sure being a full-time pianist is not the life I want," he says. "Tight schedules, living between airports, hotels and concert halls, repeating the music ... that's not what I want."

He says that he had once worked as an assistant teacher at the Juilliard School of Music in New York and that experience seemed meaningful to him. At the middle school in Beijing, he now has 10 students and teaches 15 hours every week.

(本文引自samsumusic）