The truth is under attack. Our federal government lies with impunity even when those lies are exposed by easily accessible evidence. A.I. erases the distinction between what is real and what merely looks real. We swim in an ocean of social media rife with falsehoods, promoted by algorithms that serve only profitability. The phrase “alternative facts,” so jarring when uttered by a senior White House official nine years ago, is by now banal.
The performing arts, with their warm embrace of subjectivity, might not seem the most likely corrective amid this crisis. But they have much to teach us about the notion of truth. There is no great performance — not even a theatrical one whose surface is, by design, artifice — that doesn’t have truthfulness at its core. The search for truth is an artist’s life’s work.
That work corresponds directly to the audience’s need. People have varied and mysterious reasons for attending live performances. They may want to be uplifted, distracted, amused, discomfited or all of those things at once. But one impulse accompanies all of these contradictory desires: to be in the presence of something ineffably right. The difficulty of explaining this rightness in words makes it more, not less, powerful.
That need grows ever stronger as the unholy trinity of social media, A.I. and aspiring authoritarian leadership bombards us with the distortion of reality every day. When great art hits us in the solar plexus, our sense of what is true is momentarily restored.
This raises a difficult question: What is truthful performance? The answer comes in two parts.
The first part is that a truthful performance must be sincere. This is easily understood but difficult to achieve. Sincerity requires openness and vulnerability, which are compromised by the very human desire to be admired — a desire that performers tend to possess in spades. It takes vanity to seek the stage, but to tell the truth on that stage you must leave your vanity in the green room.
Sincerity is essential, but by itself it is insufficient. For a performance to be truthful, it must reveal not just the performer’s truth but the truth of the material being played. An actor channeling the death of a beloved parent can surely be sincere. But if the parent recalled in a sincere performance is an abusive monster, that sincerity alone does not present the truth. There are many ways to give a truthful performance of Hamlet, but doing so requires a deep engagement with, and understanding of, his psychology. Truth comes only when the inner life of the performer meets the inner life of the art.
A work of art does indeed have an essence that is not up for interpretation. Even music — possibly the most subjective of all art forms — is not infinitely subjective. Tonal music derives its meaning and power from the ways that certain chords relate to one another. In the early classical period, pieces of music invariably started and ended on the tonic chord, which is built from the first note of the scale and feels like home, a stable, comforting place that provides resolution. The principal destination was always, without exception, the dominant chord, built on the fifth note of the scale. The dominant is a close relation of the tonic, but their relationship is oppositional. If the tonic represents home, the dominant represents being away from home, and the uncertainty and longing that come with it.
In the first movement of his Piano Concerto No. 5, the “Emperor,” after departing for the dominant, Beethoven takes a remarkable detour. The keys he explores are so distant, so contrary to expectation, that they represent an extreme dislocation. It is as if you left your house to go to the supermarket and found yourself in another solar system. This music is first sinister, then ethereal; when Beethoven, with a lightning-fast modulation, at last finds his way to that supermarket — that is, the dominant — we feel that order has been restored, that we have been returned to reality.
A performance of the concerto that does not grapple with this harmonic dislocation, that is more interested in attractive but inessential details or a preening virtuosity, like a politician interested only in power, is not telling the truth. This grappling can be purely intuitive, and it can lead in countless directions, but it is the only way one can find Beethoven’s essence and convey it to an audience. If you tell this truth, the “Emperor” becomes timeless and gripping; without it, the piece is pleasant but nothing more.
Schumann, working a generation after Beethoven, took a more radical step in his Fantasie in C, circling but never reaching the tonic until 11 minutes into the work. This is what makes the music so impossibly yearning: We are rudderless, homeless. The relief we feel when the long-withheld C major key arrives is immense. A truthful performance makes you feel this yearning and relief in the deepest part of yourself; a performance that ignores these harmonic facts and their psychological implications feels like a slog.
Most modern music exists outside the tonal system, and yet when I play music by the contemporary composers Kaija Saariaho or Tyshawn Sorey, the task is the same as it is with Beethoven or Schumann: to find the truth — or, if you prefer, the internal logic — in their strange, captivating soundscapes.
A certain modesty is necessary here: The answers to the question of what is true in a work of art are slippery. As a colleague often tells me, perception is hallucination, a pithy reminder that one cannot look at life or art other than through a distorting lens. This is why a diversity of viewpoints, whether among artists, academics or public figures, is crucial.
Every profound question is ultimately unanswerable. That does not mean that the search for truth isn’t central to making art or building a just society. It does not mean that the truth is but a construct. B major is very far away from E flat major; a gun in a man’s holster on a Minneapolis street is not being brandished.
Art cannot save us from the cynical dishonesty of our leaders; that is not what it is for. But when we focus on its attractive surfaces rather than its deeper meaning, our critical acumen, our integrity and maybe even our souls are degraded. Art has the power to show us what the truth looks like. It is complex and elusive. The search for it is where true beauty and moral strength lie.
Jonathan Biss is a concert pianist.
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