On a bullet train out of Shanghai, a nuclear family catches my eye. The father, weather-beaten and wearing an ill-fitting suit, is clearly a working man. His wife, younger and city sleek, is dressed to impress. Their son, an only child, is four or five years old.
Curious, I get talking and discover they are from a northern city, near the Russian border. What were they doing in Shanghai? Entering the boy in a piano competition.
The number of children learning to play the piano in China varies from 40 to 60 million, depending on who you ask. Walk through a tower-block residential area in Shanghai at five in the afternoon and you can hear the clangour of many hands playing scales.
The piano boom is widely ascribed in the West to the global success of two Chinese soloists, Lang Lang and Yundi Li. Lang Lang, darling of a dozen luxury brands, is probably the highest-earning classical musician on earth, even during the year he has taken off to recover from painful tendonitis. Yundi, winner of the 2000 Warsaw Chopin Competition, focuses more on his domestic base, cultivating a teen army of followers across the vast country with uncompromising recitals of pure Beethoven. There is real enmity between the two stars, ever since Lang Lang got Yundi bumped from his record label. In China, Lang Lang is seen as an establishment figure, Yundi as a dreamy poet.
Neither, though, was the trigger for China’s piano mania, an epidemic so compulsive that four out of five of the world’s pianos are now made in China. The man who first got China’s fingers moving was the silky French entertainer Richard Clayderman, a Liberace-style merchant of melancholy kitsch who burst upon the Chinese in the mid-1980s with his signature tunes ‘Ballade pour Adeline’ and ‘Les feuilles mortes’.
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