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Published: Monday, 04 November 2024 at 12:21 PM
Impostor syndrome: why even the greatest performers share our feelings of inadequacy
Read on to discover why even the most seemingly confident musicians and performers are plagued by the doubts of impostor syndrome…
Look at them up there, on the podium, on the concert platform, on record covers: the musicians that fill the pages of BBC Music Magazine, Radio 3’s schedules and concert halls all over the world. They are musical superhumans who perform feats that we mortals cannot, for whom things that would make the rest of us quake in our boots are simply part of their jobs.
Imagine having to go out there and play Busoni’s Piano Concerto or Beethoven’s ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata with all the right notes in all the right places, night after night! They are musicians who come equipped not only with the technique to dash off these summits of the repertoire, but the confidence to know that they can do it – and do it better than they did the night before – for the duration of their careers.
Impostor syndrome… why ‘supreme confidence’ is a courageous act
And yet when you meet your musical superheroes, you find out that the supreme confidence that’s projected by all that slick marketing, or the serene state of command that stares out at you from the covers of Bach or Ysayë solo violin sonata CDs, isn’t the whole story.
In fact, it’s not the case that these brilliant musicians are wholly unlike the rest of us: it’s that they have the courage to put themselves in positions of emotional vulnerability through the power of the music they’re playing, to transcend those experiences and communicate them to the rest of us.
Impostor syndrome… how feelings of doubt and inadequacy creep in
The openness of musicians like the conductor Antonio Pappano and the violinist Vilde Frang – two of today’s musical stars whose conversations with me for Radio 3 proved their generosity and honesty in everything they said, as well as how they make music – is initially shocking. Pappano spoke of his ‘impostor syndrome’; Frang, about feeling intimidated by someone saying how brilliantly she played one night, because then she thought, ‘Maybe I won’t play as well next time, and they’ll find out I’m not as good as people say.’
Those kinds of patterns of thinking are the deeply human undercurrent to all of the music making that we might take for granted as listeners and record buyers. They’re also internal monologues to which we can all relate, even if the rest of us aren’t internationally successful conductors or violinists.
Vulnerability and compassion… the real power of great musicians
Yet these revelations from Frang and Pappano show me that their true superpowers – and the Marvel-beating brilliance of all of the musicians who populate BBC Music‘s pages each month – aren’t only their virtuosities of technique and musicality: theirs is a virtuosity of compassion.
Their ability to explore the regions of our humanity where we all sometimes fear to tread, to open themselves up to places of doubt and jeopardy, and to face those fears with such integrity – that’s what makes their performances so powerfully empathetic and expressive. Impostor syndrome? Super-musician syndrome, more like.