The Byron Janis Story

[music playing] After a century of importing virtuosos from Europe, America suddenly produced its first generation of brilliant young pianists.

They emerged in the late 1940s and early '50s.

The proteges of illustrious emigres who brought with them the culture of classical music.

At home and abroad, these gifted young men thrilled audiences with their sensational talent and their promise for the future.

But over the next two decades, almost all of them began to seem cursed, as one after another, their stories turned tragic.

William Kapell was killed at age 31 in a plane crash.

Gary Graffman and Leon Fleisher were stricken by focal dystonia, a neurological disorder that deprived them of the use of their right hands.

Van Cliburn withdrew from public life, the apparent victim of his own fame.

Byron Janis continued on the course of his career.

Although, as it turned out, he, too, met with enormous obstacles, fighting a valiant battle against pain and disability that went on for over 20 years in secret.

Frankly, I don't know how he did it.

I think that is somewhat of a miracle that Byron has played at such a high level for so many years.

How he played in those circumstances is really a mystery, I suppose, to all of us.

Just a lot of grit.

And a lot of character.

And a very brave human, indeed.

I've worked on quite a few musicians.

Not all with the genius that Byron has, but nothing will keep this man from the piano.

Somehow, it was meant to be for me.

I was challenged all the time to keep going.

And I took the challenge.

I knew I had to do it.

Byron Janis was born in 1928.

His Russian mother, Hattie Horelick, and Polish father, Samuel Yanks, had met in America and soon settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Byron's father owned over a dozen Army Navy stores in the area and made a good living until the Depression, when he lost all but one of them.

Byron attended kindergarten at the Colfax School.

Can't believe it.

And I think this was 75 years ago, 76 years ago.

And I tell you, this is a very important room in my life, a very important place in my life, the Colfax School.

Because when I was four, we were asked to bring our favorite toys to school.

I had a xylophone which was given to me.

And I said, I want to bring my xylophone.

Now this is yours truly, aged four.

I stayed on the floor and played my xylophone.

I played just what she was playing on the piano.

And then she said, can you do that on the piano?

I did exactly the same thing that she was doing.

Well, that's how it started.

[gottchalk - "the banjo"] When Byron's teacher recognized his unusual musical ability, she contacted his parents.

And I remember very well, she pinned a note on my little jumper suit.

And I thought, uh-oh.

Because when they pinned a note, that usually meant trouble.

A week later, both of my kindergarten teachers were in my house.

And I thought, well, wow, this is serious.

Of course they didn't allow me into the room, and they were talking to my parents.

His teachers told his parents that Byron had an exceptional ear for music.

That he should begin to study an instrument.

We had a little piano.

Because my sister was three years my senior.

Was studying piano as everybody did in those days.

And that is how I started to play the piano.

Recognizing that they had a prodigy on their hands, Byron's parents made arrangements for lessons with a respected local teacher by the name of Abraham Litow.

I saw this man approach.

Very elegant and with something on his shoes, which I was told later were spats.

I said to my friend, boy, I hope that's not the fella.

And of course it was the man, Mr. Litow.

Litow got in touch with Josef Lhevinne, a fellow Russian, renowned as a great pianist and a great teacher.

And he called just because I spoke Russian.

He said, I want you to hear this young boy.

Janis was nine when he played his first recital at the Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh, causing a sensation.

This little boy would come out of that door onto the stage.

My mother was thrilled, and I was pretty happy.

Soon after, Janis left Pittsburgh for New York to begin his studies with Josef Lhevinne and his wife Rosina.

His mother and sister moved there with him.

His father stayed behind to run his business.

So your family broke up because of your talent?

Yes.

Did you feel very guilty?

I did, because my father would write these very sad letters to my mother.

And she would tell me about them.

And I would say to my mother, don't worry.

Don't worry.

I will succeed.

Don't worry.

In New York, Byron was enrolled at the Columbia Grammar School on West 93rd Street.

One day I stayed here to play softball.

I was excited.

I knew there was going to be a softball game.

I was chosen last by a team that was forced to take me.

And I hit a double.

Two bases.

For me, that was a tremendous accomplishment.

And I was in.

I was one of them after that.

And I like that feeling so much.

That they realized that I wasn't only a pianist.

Like most boys his age, Janis was rambunctious and occasionally reckless.

An injury that would have been traumatic for any child nearly put an end to his hopes as a pianist.

In retrospect, it was the forerunner of the long litany of medical problems he would face later in his career and the first of many occasions when he would find the will to overcome enormous adversity.

When I was 11, I was chasing my sister in I guess what was a fight.

And I ran ahead of her into a small dining room, which had a French glass door.

So I put my hand through that door.

And that would have been all right.

But I removed it very quickly.

And in that removing of it, I did a good job of cutting a tendon.

This joint, as you can see, isn't-- this last joint does not mend at all.

And until today, this finger is totally numb.

Byron, how could you play the piano?

Ah, indeed.

But how could you?

I had to learn a way of using my eye instead of my finger.

So that you knew-- So I knew where I was going.

And everybody around said, oh, very great talent.

But that's it.

He's finished.

He's finished.

I had a teacher, and she believed in me.

I'm very grateful for that.

But I also believed in myself.

Because the Lhevinnes' travels often took them away from New York, they suggested that Byron study with an associate, Adele Marcus.

Miss Marcus was such a great support for me.

Believed so much in me, and it really helped me so much in getting over this terrible, terrible accident.

I made out to myself that I did not have anything wrong with me.

Janis worked hard to regain his technique and made surprising progress, resuming his career in a matter of months.

Fully recovered, he played a concert with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra with a conductor by the name of Lorin Maazel, age 14.

We gave a concert together in the '40s.

We were both in our teens.

And Byron's a remarkable pianist already at that age.

I don't know whether I was like any other kid, but he certainly was.

Most charming and very modest and in no way arrogant.

And just loving the music that he made.

We got along musically famously.

When you have a natural gift such as Byron's kind of music, you make it very focused and very clear, very transparent.

At 29 West 85th Street, Janis found a second home with Samuel Chotzinoff, the musical director of NBC.

Janis lived with the Chotzinoffs for two years, an arrangement that allowed him to participate in the everyday life of a family.

And he was my musical-- not only musical, he was my surrogate father, I would say, since the age of 10.

It was Chotzinoff who had brought Toscanini to America.

At 15, when Janis made his debut with the NBC Symphony, Toscanini heard him play.

As it happened, Vladimir Horowitz attended Janis's concert with Maazel in Pittsburgh.

When he told Toscanini about the gifted young pianist he had heard there, Toscanini said, that's the boy I was telling you about.

Horowitz took on Janis as his student, giving him lessons at the house he shared with his wife Wanda on East 94th Street.

All my three years of my studying with him, can you imagine how exciting it was?

I was the very first person he worked with.

And he said something very interesting to me.

You play a bit in watercolors, but you could play more in oils.

So really what he was saying was you could be a bigger romantic virtuoso pianist.

[RACHMANINOFF, "RHAPSODY ON A THEME BY PAGININI"] Studying with him was actually fantastic and a double edged sword in a way because of that strong personality, which I absorbed.

He always kept saying, you don't want to be a second Horowitz.

You want to be a first Janis.

In 1948, Janis made his debut at Carnegie Hall in New York.

He was living on 57th Street at the time, half a block away.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person who's ever walked to his Carnegie Hall debut.

I did feel somewhat nervous.

Not only was my own reputation on the line, but it was Horowitz's reputation as well.

With so much riding on his performance, Janis managed to impress the audience and the critics.

In his review for the New York Times, Olin Downes said, "not for a long time had this writer heard such a talent allied with the musicianship, the feeling, the intelligence, and artistic balance shown by the 20-year-old pianist Byron Janis."

[PROKOFIEV, "TOCCATA IN C, OP.

11"] [applause] Janis was instantly established as a musician of the first rank and was soon in demand all over the world.

With devoted fans everywhere he performed, Janis found himself living the life of a matinee idol.

In London for his Festival Hall debut in 1952, he fell in love with June Dickson Wright and married her a year later.

In 1955, their son Stefan was born.

It was while living in London that Janis received an invitation to go to the Soviet Union.

I was the first American to go on a cultural exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States.

It was 1960.

Llewellyn Thompson was our ambassador.

And he said to me, thank god you've come because the Russians are saying America can only produce cars.

The total propaganda was that we were simply uncultured.

When I walked on the stage, what did I hear?

U-2, U-2.

A few months earlier, an American spy plane, a U-2, had been shot down over the Soviet Union.

I can't remember how I could play after that, because it was really hostile.

But somehow, I just said to myself, quiet, quiet.

And I played.

And it was so beautiful to see how music overcame this hostility.

By the end of the concert, it was extraordinary, because these people were coming to the edge of the stage and really sobbing.

And I said to myself that this is not just music.

They know I'm not their enemy.

I'm just a human being like them.

In Leningrad with Benny Goodman, Janis played the first performance in the Soviet Union of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," even though the Russians were initially opposed to it.

How can an artist like Janis play such inferior music, inferior music?

I didn't take much of that.

I told him, I'll fly a kite.

I'm playing "Rhapsody in Blue."

The official box was empty throughout Janis's tour.

But two years later in 1962, he was invited to return, this time with his own recording crew.

The first thing that seems so improbable was to see a recording truck marked Mercury Recordings with a US license plate parked in Red Square.

If you don't think that attracted a little attention-- Don't ask me how they ever got wind of the fact that Janis was recording at 3:00 in the morning?

But there was this group of 30 or 40 people stayed there through the whole recording.

They kept on clapping and clapping and clapping.

And Kondrashin said to me, they will not leave the Hall.

You've got to play an encore.

After three concertos?

I said-- he said no, I've got to play it.

What tempo do you want in the last moment of the Tchaikovsky concerto?

I wonder if anybody's ever done that.

But I tell you, after that, I was really exhausted.

The excitement about wanting to hear Byron was so great when we would play in the conservatories, the young people students would crowd up to the windows of the car trying to hold his hand.

The success in Russia catapulted Janis into the spotlight.

In America, he was hailed as a cultural hero.

Here performing Prokofiev's "Toccata," from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, American pianist, sensation, Byron Janis.

[applause] At home and abroad, Janis's renown continued to grow as he pursued a full calendar of international engagements.

[PROKOFIEV, "PIANO CONCERTO #3 IN C"] I had only heard him play one piece of music.

And that was the Prokofiev third piano concerto.

I was so captivated by the music, I started playing it 24/7.

And at the same time I was doing some etchings with very vigorous wrist movement to the point where I actually frayed the tendon.

And I had to have a major hand surgery.

Just as his first marriage was ending, Janis met Maria Cooper, the daughter of Hollywood film star Gary Cooper.

I arrived in the South of France.

The night that I arrived, our hostess gave a welcoming party.

And in comes concert pianist Byron Janis.

And I'm wearing a cast from my middle of my hand up to the elbow, which he caused, inadvertently.

And that night was the total turning around and changing of my life.

I looked at Maria.

She looked at me.

I knew immediately she was going to be the woman in my life.

When we were traveling, of course, it's all the usual packing, unpacking.

Three or four cities in a week.

I would be responsible for saying that the basics were taken care of like his tails were ready and the shirts had been washed cleaned, pressed, that I didn't leave the cufflinks in Salt Lake City and there we were in Detroit.

I used to tour with my father.

I was like a military brat, except for the fact that my father was a performing pianist.

When I got on the airplanes, the stewardesses would put little pins in my lapels and say, here you go.

We'll take care of you.

It was a great adventure for me.

But I always felt very much part of his life, I think, much more so than children do who have 9:00 to 5:00 working fathers.

And unlike typical 9: 00 to 5:00 working fathers, Janis moved in high circles, mingling with the likes of Princess Grace of Monaco, Maria Callas, and Pablo Picasso.

In 1967, after a performance in Paris, Janis and his wife received an invitation from Count Paul de La Panouse to lunch at the Chateau de Thoiry, his family's ancestral home.

After lunch, the Count offered to show them the archive room.

He'd pick something up and he'd say, "Oh, look, this is a letter from the Crusades."

It was a beautiful trunk.

It was marked old clothes.

And there were absolutely layers of beautiful costumes, clothes.

I suddenly noticed something.

It was buried underneath them.

And it looked like a music manuscript to me.

I saw some notes.

And so I gently pull this out.

And there were two manuscripts tied together with a light blue ribbon.

And I was trembling.

And I said to Paul, you know what this is?

He said, yes, yes.

He said my grandmother loved to write funny music.

I said, no, Paul, this isn't your grandma.

These are two waltzes of Chopin.

[CHOPIN - WALTZ BRILLANTE IN E FLAT, OP.

18"] Although the waltzes were already known, the manuscripts turned out to be lost versions of them.

Six years later, Janis was teaching a master class at Yale University in a room that housed hundreds of musical scores.

I pointed up to one of the top shelves.

I said, what's that?

One of the professors climbed up a ladder.

He got this down.

He said, ah, it seems to be Chopin.

Well, I sat down.

I opened this folder.

And I practically fell off the chair.

There were the same two waltzes in different versions, again.

Was all, quote, "accidental."

But somehow I learned that I don't believe in coincidences somehow.

The discoveries provided new insight into Chopin's creative process.

For Janis, they were the culmination of a lifelong affinity with the composer.

Paradoxically, there are pianists with short fat fingers that play Chopin wonderfully.

But I always think of Chopin's hand as being very much like Byron Janis's hand.

Those long, thin, knowing fingers that can get very small and can also open to this incredible reach, which I think Chopin definitely had.

And I always thought of Byron Janis as certainly a continuation of that line.

Chopin, Liszt, maybe Rachmaninoff, Horowitz, Janis.

I seem to feel this man somehow.

When I was very young, something about him interested me in a way that was beyond his music.

At 21, Chopin came down with tuberculosis.

He never fully recovered.

Though he continued to compose and perform, he was often ill.

He was 39 when he died.

I felt his pain.

Something about not giving in, always coming back.

I suppose I identified somewhere with that.

As it turned out, Janis's life would bring him many occasions to appreciate Chopin's suffering and determination.

Having overcome one disastrous injury in his childhood, he found himself in the early 1960s faced with severe bursitis in his right shoulder.

And I held my arm very close to me, because I remembered if I went out too far, it would hurt.

I had an operation.

And they took the calcium deposit out, and then I got a frozen shoulder as a result because the surgeon nicked a nerve or something.

For two years, he relied on Butazolidin, a strong pain reliever to control the pain whenever he played.

I believe I know why I got the bursitis.

And I believe the problem was that little finger of mine, which I injured when I was 11, that was a very big thing to overcome.

But in doing that, I'm sure I use my right hand much more strongly than I would have normally.

And I was told that bursitis was a precursor to arthritis.

So then the arthritis came.

[PROKOFIEV, "TOCCATA IN C, OP.

11"] There was inflammation and damage to the cartilage and bone in these joints, as well as some of the joints of the fingers themselves.

The arthritis was constant.

But as long as he could maintain his high standards, Janis refused to give in to it or curtail his performing to accommodate it.

What's remarkable and is remarkable about Byron is that he has pain every day.

It's just a matter of whether the pain is a little better or worse that day.

And pain like this from arthritis actually gets more intense when you put mechanical pressure.

So for example, playing the piano and using your hands will cause even more pain.

And in his playing, one can imagine that each of these joints was a potential source of pain.

You can play through pain, as many athletes will tell you.

When a person has chronic pain, the medicines will reduce them to a point.

But at some point, one has to live with a certain amount of pain.

And then the individual's willpower, his drive, his ability to overcome, will have to take the place of medications.

And what we saw in Byron is that the medicines didn't cure the disease.

But the pain was always there.

But his will and his drive to be outstanding and creative led him to perform through the pain.

Janis would eventually undergo five operations on his hands, any one of which could have ended a pianist's career.

This was the second cast.

First was a fiberglass.

I couldn't really move.

This one, as a matter of fact, I designed myself.

I can't get this out.

Oh, I see.

Another one for holding the hand in place.

These things are pretty far apart.

And that gives you an extension.

Same thing kind of on the right hand.

And the last one I had was this, which I wore really until a few days ago.

So this is a smattering of the things I have had to use three years.

I simply stated what Byron had was a tendon transferred from here, the index finger to the small finger.

There was a time even as recently as last year where a pin had to be placed into his thumb in order to stabilize the joint and allow a tendon transfer to be made.

Arthritis dictated the rhythm of Janis's life, with his daily routine designed around managing the pain just enough for him to continue.

I had one big suitcase full of medical kind of stuff.

Hot packs, cold packs.

Fluorine methane spray.

ACE bandages and mineral ice and something called DMSO.

A powerful liniment that had proven effective for alleviating pain in horses' legs.

DMSO was eventually prescribed for humans, and Janis was one of the first to use it.

And he would carry it in the pocket of his tails.

And in between movements or if he had a chance, he would reach in and very quickly dab it on his fingers.

And the pain immediately is numbed.

He was able to do that in the middle of a concert even, and nobody noticed.

Sometimes before a concert, he would have the Band-Aids on his fingers.

I knew that that-- my way of thinking anyway, I was a little bit awkward.

And he'd taken obviously-- Now I realize he'd taken cortisone shots.

I didn't know what it was at the time.

He said to me I think once that he was covering up his nails and he was protecting his nails.

And so I think that's how he tried to evade telling me the truth.

As they got inflamed they would inject that one.

And as they got more inflamed, I would use that finger less at the piano.

What did you do about your fingering?

Change it all the time.

I would change it depending upon which finger was inflamed of the day.

Or of the night.

Wasn't easy.

But let me share one little place that occurs in a Mozart concerto.

It's written like this.

[music playing] And I have trouble reaching from there to there.

Very hard for me.

So what I did was-- You used your right hand thumb.

Or second finger.

I mean, this is so difficult when you have to take whole pieces and redo them.

Yeah, you do.

And when you come into the difficult spot, you say, OK, how am I going to overcome that little spot.

It was an adventure.

But I did it.

And that's how I kept playing, really.

I learned therapeutic massage, which became very helpful.

Because when you tighten up one muscle, then it's like a domino effect.

Everything begins to cramp up.

It was hard because you're supposed to ice something right away if you've strained a muscle.

And that would be hard, because usually Byron would have to change quickly, and we were supposed to be at a reception in 20 minutes.

So if he wasn't able to do that, we'd have to wait till he got to the hotel, and sometimes then it was too late.

[music playing] Preparation for a concert would really take him more than just getting dressed and going down and warming up backstage.

He had to calculate very carefully how much he could warm up.

Because as the arthritis got worse, he had to figure, well, just how much have I got left in my hands?

And of course, orchestral concerts were always more anxiety producing those last years, because he'd have to play full out at the rehearsal at least once.

And then try to figure out how to save himself, how to not injure something.

The difficulty is not only physical.

It's also mental.

It must be.

I mean, the idea of getting up every morning and worrying about the thing that connects you to what you deeply, deeply love, what you've done all your life, and you get up every day and you don't know if it's going to feel like you can do something or you can't.

I think that must be an unbelievably debilitating, psychologically debilitating thing.

Most of that time I knew him was when he was, if you will, in the closet.

And only a few people knew that he had arthritis.

He had very high standards, and he couldn't let anybody know that whatever problems he was having were due not to just loss of competence, but by disability.

I thought people would look at me as some sort of a freak.

It was a horrible feeling.

I know that, I mean, God, I can't tell anybody this.

Keeping it a secret was to me as though I simply didn't have it.

Nobody knew I had arthritis, except my doctor, Maria, and a couple of friends.

They hid his problems very successfully and played spectacularly well.

If a performing artist is known as having a physical problem or any other problem.

It, of course, makes it very difficult for him or her to follow a career.

Word gets out that the artist in question is damaged and in some way.

And folks, they want to be able to count on the artists.

They want to feel that they're up to the challenge of performance, which is always a difficult one to meet.

And one day, I said, Maria, how can you stand this?

Why don't you tell me to stop?

The medication that I was saying, it was getting to me.

It was horrible.

And she said, Byron, I cannot tell you that.

You are the only one who can make that decision.

And I want you to know, I despised her for saying that.

I said, wow, can she be so cold and [inaudible] seemed like suffering .

But then I realized, of course, she was absolutely right.

Had she told me to stop, I would never have listened anyway.

Problems arise and health issues arose, and none of which-- one had expected or planned for, but you handle each situation as it comes up.

And I figured, if I flake out, what good is that going to be for you.

I used to take things to the very brink.

I went as far as I could, until I realized that I could not do anymore.

[PROKOFIEV, "PIANO CONCERT 3 IN C"] In 1985, no longer able to tolerate the side effects of his medications, Janis decided to go public with the battle he'd been fighting The Arthritis Foundation approached me.

And they are the ones who said, well, let's do this in a big way.

Let's do it at the White House.

[CHOPIN, "NOCTURNE 2 IN D FLAT.OP.27"] I was relieved when Byron decided to go public.

I think Byron was, too.

It was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.

But I eventually came to terms with it.

Thank you.

It was beautiful.

Really beautiful.

And I think that you all would be interested in knowing that that beautiful music came from a man who has suffered terribly from arthritis for 12 years.

An awful experience for anybody.

But for a pianist, it's particularly shattering.

The disease is still with me.

The joints don't bend.

The severe limitation of motion.

I have it, but it does not have me.

[applause] About three weeks later, Byron got very depressed, and for about a week or so, he was really in a funk.

We talked about it.

And the reason for his being depressed was the fact that the secret was out.

My father's one of most courageous men I've ever known in my life, really.

Not just because he played with pain, but imagine allowing yourself to be looked at by critics and judged by normal standards not knowing what you're going to read the next day.

I mean, the anxiety must have been just atrocious.

[CHOPIN, "WALTZ #2 IN A MINOR, OP.

34"] The arthritis continued to run its course.

Until finally, the pain became unbearable.

I mean, if I just did that, just did that, just a touch of a shoot of pain would be excruciating.

So there's nothing to do except fuse the joint.

Byron had such disease of his thumb that they had to basically remove the joint itself and fuse the bone.

This is the normal joint.

And this is where the thumb was fused, and it shortened the thumb.

And I came back, I remember, after five or six months with the bandage.

And I said to the surgeon, I said, doesn't this thumb seem shorter to you than the other one?

He said, no, no, no, it's just because it's too soon after the operation.

Well, it wasn't that at all.

The thumb was made shorter.

Like a surgeon who shall remain nameless.

I thought that was it.

How can I play with a shortened thumb?

It's almost impossible.

Suddenly, Janis was forced to confront a future without the piano.

So I went into a severe depression for over a year.

I really didn't go out of my room.

My life was over.

Music was my life.

And I managed to always come back every other time when I had a problem.

But this time, I thought, I'll never do it.

Despair proved more debilitating than his physical problems had ever been.

It was his wife Maria, finally, who had an idea.

A documentary about her father Gary Cooper was in the works.

And she suggested that Janis write the movie's theme music.

[music playing] I said, Maria, I don't know, how can I-- I can't even move.

She said, no, no, no, you can do it, you can do it.

I was working on this thing for about two days.

And I came up with something, which I had no idea how good or not good it was.

And I said to Maria, look, this is what I wrote.

So I sat there, and Byron started to play this theme.

I started crying, because it was exactly as if my father had walked into the room.

The experience gave Janis a sense of new possibilities, and he began writing songs.

(SINGING) What a happy season this is.

Every smile's like a kiss.

And the icy days of life just waltz away.

So I was obsessed, because I suppose I thought, hey, if I can do something here, it'll be another way for me to go.

(SINGING) In the lovely warmth of Christmas.

Byron's composing was now becoming more of an important possibility as the arthritis was moving along.

Frank Military, vice president of Warner Chappell, the largest music publishing house, heard some of the songs that Janis had written and asked him if he'd like to do something big.

A musical version of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

It was a story that spoke to Janis directly, with its account of a life shaped around a disability.

I didn't know what I was doing.

But for six weeks, I was obsessed with writing this music.

Working day and night, he wrote 22 songs.

When he finally played them for Frank Military, Military told him that he'd written a great score.

I said, what?

You've got to be joking.

He said, no, no, no, I don't joke about music.

[music playing] I said to myself, at last, a good music.

Because there's been a lot of musical play, a lot of plays.

But the music, though, was not always very good.

I must say, it was maybe very commercial in a way.

Not for children with show kind.

But here, there's a mixture of great ideas, great story.

(SINGING) The world might be blind for a day that they wouldn't laugh because they couldn't see that something like love comes from something like me.

I was writing from my heart.

I was writing what I felt, and I was writing melodically.

[BYRON JANIS, "ESMERALDA'S LOVE SONG"] As songwriting gave Janis a way to move forward, he and his son began a collaboration that would bring them closer.

In some ways, not only for him but for me as well.

And I think that he's very, very aware of how much I love him.

Because I'm very aware of how much he loves me.

There's some part of us that appreciates how special our relationship is.

(SINGING) Yes, forevermore.

For eternity.

Oh, Israel.

(SINGING) Look, see.

The Star of David shines over thee.

Although composing had turned out to be a new means of musical expression for Janis, he eventually found himself drawn back to the piano.

And I said to myself, OK, now I'm going to have a little chat with you.

And I'm going to make you somehow be able to play.

And I began to use my right hand some for my left.

I did all kinds of tricky things.

And I began to play again.

[music playing] [applause] Janis returned to the concert stage.

I didn't know if this was a person who was so disabled that it would only be a shadow of himself.

And what I heard was this poet of the keyboard.

Janis played a program that included Chopin's Waltz Brillante, one of the waltzes he had discovered.

The audience welcomed him back with a long ovation.

When I went backstage and said hello, rather quickly, I mentioned the idea of a recording.

And he looked rather startled.

In 1996, Janis went back into the studio and recorded 15 works by Chopin.

It had been 32 years since his last recording.

That historic middle of the night session in Russia.

"Time has done nothing to diminish his piano prowess or artistry," one critic wrote.

Another called his performance a resurrection.

[music playing] When you listen to the recording you do not think, oh, this is a very good pianist.

I wonder what he sounded like when his hands were OK?

There's absolutely none of that in this recording.

And I didn't have to splice things together.

And then the reviews came out, which were overwhelmingly positive.

And this led to the fact that EMI decided to make a second recording, which was equally successful.

And I could tell the critical reaction wasn't, oh, let's say something nice about this person who's suffered in adversity.

No, it wasn't that at all.

It was that this is another side that we have not known as much about about this particular artist.

But I have to say, someone like Byron Janis, I find it almost unimaginable that he's not physically at the keyboard.

He defines the piano, and vice versa.

[music playing] Then there would be concerts that would be even better than what I felt I had done before.

It is true.

I believe this.

All this suffering, it brings something out of me.

It was somehow more meaningful than my lyrical playing before.

I had less technique.

But I felt I had more ability to make people feel.

(SINGING) Happy birthday, dear Byron.

Happy birthday to you.

[applause] I think he's a great example for any artist, for every artist, by staying involved and being so totally committed to his art.

Human beings, some of them are extraordinary and don't accept failure of any kind.

Failure in health, failure in opportunities.

And it seems to me, Byron made himself a hero.

Not only as a musician, but as a man.

Always have a difficult goal, because then if by chance you achieve it, you've changed the world.

Like somebody possessed.

Nothing stops him.

You don't make excuses, you just do.

Byron's had determination, patience, and courage to fight this battle with his hands.

He's had more operations on his hands than Joe Namath had on his knees.

And yet, he transcends when he plays.

And he played like this for 30 or 40 years or more with this arthritis.

And it truly was an inspiration to many people.

Like it or not, I do think that suffering does something to our soul.

It gives you another quality.

Actually, I'm grateful.

I would not change places with anybody today.

I would not ask for another pair of hands if I could have them at 20, or now.

Because whatever I have learned has made me what I am.

[music playing] [music playing] I'm the ripe old age of 85.

But we have to keep the child that's in us because it's always looking for something new, something exciting.

Never become jaded.

Byron Janis to me represents both the struggles and the triumphs of being an artist.

It's just an inspirational story, achieving the greatest heights despite the fact that we're human and we have all of these frailties that are all a part of who we are.

[music playing] You've got to be naked up there on the stage.

I was a shy young man, but not with a piano.

With a piano, I just became.

Let everything happen.

He belongs in that great romantic tradition of bringing fire and love and emotion to the works he's playing.

I think he goes a step further with the different moods that he creates in any given piece that he plays and has such amazing color, from the grays to the intense colors that he's able to express.

Color is just so important.

And piano playing particularly, because it's a percussive instrument.

Hammers against the string.

You have to make it sound like a voice.

He's passionate about love, he's passionate about his wife.

His life experiences have just molded and shaped his artistry in a very, very profound way.

Talent, passion, and perseverance are all three very important.

And what you do with them is up to you.

The clarity of his playing is phenomenal.

And he's just blessed from heaven.

As far as I'm concerned, Byron Janis is absolutely on the top of the greatest pianists who ever lived.

[music playing] [applause] [music playing]