Cellist Martha Baldwin talks about the restorative power of Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto after a difficult diagnosis.
Cellist Martha Baldwin talks about the restorative power of Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto after a difficult diagnosis.
Featured Music:
BEETHOVEN – Piano Concerto No. 2
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Welcome to The Cleveland Orchestra’s On a Personal Note, where every story has a soundtrack. In difficult situations or moments of sheer joy, music connects us with our humanity.
My name is Martha Baldwin. I’m a cellist in The Cleveland Orchestra, and I’ll be sharing the Beethoven Second Piano Concerto.
In 2015, I started getting occasional and then more frequently really bad headaches. I remember the first really bad one. We were on tour, we were in Germany, and I woke up in the middle of the night and it was just blinding pain and I was vomiting profusely and I couldn’t work the next morning. As things progressed, I started getting a lot of pain sort of in and around and behind my eyes, especially under bright lights. Being on stage, under stage lights, was challenging and following music with my eyes became more and more challenging. I would start to eventually kind of start to see double, which makes reading a lot of notes really fast a little bit tricky. It got to the point where it was, I really sort of dreaded going to work, not because I didn’t like working, but because I just knew it was going to be so physically demanding to get through a rehearsal or a concert.
And as 2016 progressed into spring, they started getting dramatically worse and more and more frequent to the point that they were really just completely affecting my life. I started going to a new primary care physician, Dr. Ewa Bak at University Hospitals, and I called her — I remember it was right around spring break — and I said, “Ewa, this just doesn’t feel right.” She said, “Well, come into the office tomorrow and let’s go through it again.” I went in, she said — I’m sure she was just trying to be very calm — and she said, “I’m just going to scan your head, we just need to rule everything out.” I went in, I had my MRI, and in the middle of the afternoon Ewa called me and she said, “Hey, you should go grab a beer.” And so I sat down and she said, “Look, it’s all going to be fine. Everything’s going to be just fine. But . . .”
And they, the MRI had come back and there was a large tumor near, right around my brainstem, and she said not to worry, I’ve already sent the scans to our really phenomenal neurosurgeon. I’ve already talked to him about it. I’m convinced and he’s convinced this could well be benign, but we’re going to need to take it out, so you have an appointment in a few days with him. I’ll come with you.
I was doing really well up until the night before — I think I was just mostly sort of denying it and compartmentalizing, but also I felt really relieved that we’d finally found the source of all this pain and that there was actually a solution. And I think anybody who’s ever had something wrong with them and not know what it was, you spend a lot of time thinking, Oh, I’m just overreacting. It’s just headaches. Everyone else gets headaches and I’m the only one who can’t deal with them. And I think finally, the night before, it was the night of my fortieth birthday and I remember we got milkshakes. And suddenly, after that, I thought, Oh, gosh — after tomorrow that might be the end of my working life.
In that moment you think, if I can’t work again, that’s fine. It’ll be okay as long as I’m here for my family. And I was lucky in a way that my daughter, at the time, she was three and she didn’t really understand. My colleagues are amazing. I got a huge amount of support. I remember even Franz [Welser-Möst] wrote me a note the week before the surgery to wish me luck and André [Gremillet], our CEO, sent me an e-mail to wish me luck and kept checking in. The best part was my whole cello section, the day before the surgery, the entire cello section got together and videotaped themselves playing Happy Birthday for me and then sent it to me. And so the day after my fortieth birthday, I went to University Hospitals in Cleveland and I had, I think it was something like a 10-hour brain surgery.
The two big risks with the surgery were, would be losing my hearing and losing some muscular control on the right side. That, and finding that it was a cancerous tumor were the three big concerns going into it. And then I remember the first thing after I woke up was I heard somebody sort of whisper or shout at me. I have no idea. I was pretty out of it. But I remember the first thing I heard was somebody saying, “We got it out and the tumor was benign.” And I remember the first thing I thought was, I can hear. I knew as soon as I woke up and I could hear and I could move and I didn’t have brain cancer, I was like, this is going to be fine. Finally, it all healed. And just in time for me to come back and get back into shape playing-wise and join the Orchestra again at the beginning of the next season.
One of the first concerts we played was our gala concert, which is always sort of a particularly festive event. Everyone’s dressed so beautifully and you look out into the audience and everyone’s fancy and joyful. And this year we had one of my favorite pianists play with us — Emanuel Ax. As it happened, he was playing the Beethoven Second Piano Concerto, which is for anybody who doesn’t know, it’s just extraordinarily beautiful. But the second movement is just, it’s heart-wrenching and it’s soulful and it really makes you take pause and then almost, without a break, it goes into this third movement, which is just an explosion of joy.
There’s just nothing like that feeling of, for me at least, of going from the second movement to the third movement where the piano comes in and you can’t not smile. And I just remember sitting on stage, just smiling ear to ear thinking, it’s all all right now. And then it was just wonderfully normal to be back and just doing what we’ve always done.
And there’s a simplicity about life when you’re on stage playing because everything else falls away. Sort of one of the last places now in our lives where you’re not allowed to bring a phone on stage for obvious reasons. Nobody can get ahold of you. You’re just, there’s nothing to do for that time except sit there and play music. And it was just nice to get back to the simplicity and normality of that.
[Leonard] Bernstein gave a series of lectures a long time ago about Beethoven and he called them the Inevitability of Beethoven. Where if you listen to Beethoven’s music, every note, if you were to stop the music, you know what the next note is going to be because it’s so inevitable. It’s so right. It’s the only thing that it could be there. And I think that’s what gives Beethoven’s music this sense of calmness and comfort, even amongst the incredible emotional turmoil and complexity of it.
For me, that really represents so much about a healthy philosophy to life — that regardless of the complexities of daily life and the turmoil and the emotional ups and downs we all have, that there’s this inevitability and rightness of the way things turn out.
I feel like I think about that now, in this time that we’re all in, such an overwhelmingly large number of people have all lost their jobs, including my husband and he’s lost his job. The Orchestra is not playing for who knows how long and you sort of look at the short-term future and think, Wow, we’re really kind of looking at a cliff here. But I’m just assuming that it’s all going to be fine because it will — because we always manage, right, to sort of somehow make it through.
I think everybody can relate to that in a way. You hear a song from your childhood or especially from your teenage years and if you hear the song now, it immediately will bring you back to that moment, right? You have the song you listened to on the first breakup or the first slow dance with the boy you had a crush on or the first moment you heard certain bad news. Music is so integral to all of our lives in that way and the way we use music to sort of work through our emotions. You don’t have to be a musicologist or a well-read classical musician who knows every detail of the form of every movement of a symphony to feel that. We all use music to work through our emotions and being able to do that, because you don’t always want to talk about everything that’s going on, but to have a way to sort of release those emotions through listening to music is — it’s really cathartic for, I think, most of us.
Martha Baldwin chose Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto featuring pianist Emanuel Ax, recorded live from Severance Hall in 2017. For Martha, Beethoven represents unbridled joy, optimism, and the inevitability of tomorrow. Good things to keep in mind in challenging times. We hope you find joy in this recording of the third movement coming up next. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to On a Personal Note. I promise you, you won’t want to miss a thing. You can also hear more at clevelandorchestra.com/podcast.