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The themes of creativity, adversity, and capturing life stories ran through this academic year's Duke Magazine Forum, held in November. Featured in the forum were renowned pianist, conductor, and teacher Leon Fleisher, who, in the course of a short-term residency on campus, also performed and led a master class; and Nathaniel Kahn, who, as a documentary filmmaker, found a compelling subject in Fleisher. The moderator was Anthony Kelley '87, A.M. '90, an assistant professor of music, who is also a composer.
The program began with a showing of Kahn's short documentary Two Hands. The documentary describes what happened after Fleisher—once called "the pianistic find of the century"—lost the use of his right hand to a neurological disorder. It covers his effort to reinvent himself as a teacher and conductor, his relentless search for a cure, and his triumphant return to the concert stage. "His comeback," wrote The New York Times, "has catapulted him up next to Lance Armstrong as a symbol of the indomitable human spirit and an inspiration to a broader public." In December, he was recognized as a Kennedy Center honoree for a lifetime of contributions to American culture through the performing arts.
Filmmaker Kahn is also well known for My Architect (2004). That work chronicles his five-year odyssey to explore the legacy—personal and professional—of his father, Louis Kahn, the acclaimed modernist architect. Both documentaries were nominated for Academy Awards. As a Yale student, Kahn took a literature course with Richard H. Brodhead, now Duke's president.
Along with the magazine, the forum was sponsored by Duke Performances and the President's Office. President Brodhead opened the conversation, which appears here in an edited version.
Richard H. Brodhead: I just said to the two people I'm about to bring onstage that it's as if I had been asked to appear at a production of Hamlet—after which I got to introduce Shakespeare and Hamlet to the audience for a conversation. It is, of course, a great pleasure for this university to host Leon Fleisher. Your story is the story of the mystery of talent itself—of someone being given an extraordinary gift, a gift that made you a prodigy, a gift that had you debut with the New York Philharmonic when you were sixteen years old. And then, a gift that was mysteriously, or at least partially, withdrawn as mysteriously as it was given. The fact that you then, out of your sheer love of your art, went on to a career as a conductor and teacher, is just an extraordinary saga.
I know a little bit, personally, about the other person who's about to come on stage, Nathaniel Kahn. I don't know about your musical talents; I know you used to have theatrical talents. But now, you have become one of the most gifted documentary filmmakers. Many of us will know your other wonderful work, My Architect. In this case, "my architect" carries an intimate reference, because it's your father, a person who was loved by many people, who fathered children by a number of people, and who would intermittently appear and disappear. The temptation in telling that story would be to indulge in self-pity, or sentiment, or anger. Instead, the guiding emotion in that film is curiosity: "I wonder what my father was like, since I didn't really know him?" There is curiosity, too, about the rest of your family—and empathy. But in addition, the documentary shows respect for the strange conditions that sometimes underlie creativity.
Anthony Kelley: I want to ask about the idea of your media having something in common. Do you both see an interplay between truth and artifice, for example?
Nathaniel Kahn: I've rarely been able to work with someone who gave so much truth in such a short period. We really only had two or three days together. It was unlike my previous film, My Architect, in which the energy of lots of people was coming at me in a very forceful way. I found a totally different energy from you, Leon. And it was fascinating to me. At first I worried, you know, he's so good at this; he's like a great actor who's done this performance, or told his story, a number of times. But I found in looking at the footage that there was so much more there than I could even feel in the room. I realized this is what great actors work all their lives to achieve, which is an enormous reality in the smallest of gestures. I found in your eyes and your hands and in all the things that are most expressive so much truth, so much beauty, and so much pathos as well, that it really knocked me out—not with its artifice, but with its truth.
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