In 1934, in “You’re the Top,” Cole Porter composed a tune in praise of the sublime. Alongside the Colosseum and the Louvre Museum he included, to rhyme with Camembert, “the nimble tread of the feet of Fred Astaire.” Anyone who’s ever seen him in motion couldn’t doubt for a minute that he was a master.
Mastery is everywhere and almost always immediately apparent. If Cole were alive at this hour he might have celebrated “the lightning chop of the knife of Jacques Pepin.” Such performers seem to possess not just talent or skill but a kind of elegance, grace and economy to their art that sets them apart. Often they perform with an almost lazy-seeming insouciance, the art of making the difficult look easy.
I was young during the era of Jim Brown who was my hometown’s hero. All the men were gaga for him, but at that date I was more focused on Davy Crockett on the black and white TV than on large men running down a field in a snowstorm pursued by others. But one day, perhaps at Thanksgiving time, I found myself in a crowd of grown-ups watching football with no escape, so for once paid attention.
Lo and behold, even to my untutored eyes it was clear that Brown was something special. He seemed to glide down the field effortlessly while his foes, exerting themselves strenuously, were powerless to impede his progress. It was the first time I had seen the truth of the phrase “poetry in motion” and realized there could be an aesthetic dimension to any endeavor.
Later I was to discover this kind of calm, perhaps even trance-like, concentration was typical of unusual mastery. Andres Segovia could appear to be nodding off, barely moving his hands while performing pieces that could have contorted less accomplished classical guitarists into pretzels.
Musicians as far apart as cellist Pablo Casals and the matchless jazz vibraphonist Milt Jackson of The Modern Jazz Quartet shared this trait of performing passages of such intricacy as to flummox lesser instrumentalists while appearing themselves to be completely relaxed and almost somnolent.
In a particularly amusing instance of the distance between proficiency and mastery, I have never forgotten a televised master class of Casals. He and a rising, young cellist would sit on two chairs almost knee to knee, each holding their cello. The tutee would name the piece he or she had chosen to perform and have at it, generally with a remarkably energetic attack. By and by, Casals would interrupt, offer a few mild words of suggestion, and then demonstrate what he was after. And he would play the passage that had appeared to tax the tyro to the limit twice as fast and with far greater fluidity and depth of feeling while appearing to be barely moving. Magic.
It is easy to spot this kind of ethereal superiority in physical performers, whether dancers, musicians, actors, singers or athletes. Often one look or listen is all it takes to reveal that someone has “got that thing,” to quote Cole Porter again, that extra spark of life, or depth of skill, or of presence – Nureyev, Michael Jordan, Cary Grant.
Of course, we don’t see the endless hours of barre work, of rehearsals, the outtakes, the repetitions that lie behind the seemingly effortless performance. The same is undoubtedly true of masters in other disciplines. How many wastebaskets did Einstein fill with equations before E=MC2 arrived? How many drafts did it take before the jewel-like perfection of certain works appeared in print? “The Sun Rising,” “To His Coy Mistress,” “To Autumn,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” “Tears, Idle Tears,” “Dover Beach,” “During Wind and Rain,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “Directive,” “Counting the Beats,” “An Arundel Tomb.”
Apparently Mozart could compose complex scores in his head, and then copy them out without a blot, while carrying on a conversation. By contrast, Beethoven appears to have begun with a trivial idea and then tinkered and revised and labored through many drafts and erasures before creating a work that seemed inevitable and unimprovable.
Always the finished product of mastery seems timeless, flawless, unspooling with magical ease and causing delicious, infectious joy. It is this combination of an enameled surface, deep reservoirs of feeling beneath, and finally an indelible individuality that mark a master. No one else moved like Fred, phrased like Frank, added soul like Ray, depicted fire and rain like Turner. No one else could have given us both Lear and the Fool, Falstaff and Shylock, Portia and Lady Macbeth. Few have had the moral imagination to refine life into The Fire Sermon, the Tao, the Enchiridion of Epictetus, the Beatitudes.
It’s for people like these that we build Pantheons and Halls of Fame. Most of us will never play in this kind of league, no matter how many reps we do a day, but we get to live in the world with such masters and enjoy the fruits of their labors. Merry Christmas. Celebrate with a masterpiece. What a piece of work is a man.