Yo-Yo Ma: ‘Huge ego is very often matched by huge insecurity’

By Laura Battle

One hour and 20 minutes into his marathon recital of Bach’s suites for un accompanied cello at Leipzig’s historic Nikolai kirche, as applause erupts after the Fourth Suite, Yo-Yo Ma does something at once strange and typical. Cello in one hand, he hops off the podium and starts jumping up and down, waving his arms and beaming as he encourages the audience to join him in an impromptu aerobics class. Then, quick as a flash, silence is restored, focus regained, and he launches into the sombre Fifth Suite.
“People know when they come they’re signing up for two hours and 15 minutes of uninterrupted music, but it’s nice to sort of say, ‘I see you and I know the pews may be hard’,” Ma explains with a laugh when we meet at Kaffeehaus Riquet, just around the corner from the church, for brunch the next morning. “Music gives you a ton of information subliminally; it’s not just an aural performance, it’s visual, it’s the body language you’re receiving from the audience and relaying back,” he adds. “There was an elderly gentleman last night who was smiling and just really into the music, and I would look at him once in a while and . . . ” — he mimes a smile and nod of recognition. “I like to pick out certain people and just occasionally play for them.”
Heir to a legacy left by Pablo Casals and Mstislav Rostropovich, the greatest cellists of the 20th century, Ma is now pre-eminent — but he is loved not just for his musicianship but for the openheartedness he brings to his art.
Now 62, he has performed for eight US presidents — notably at Obama’s inauguration — and has sold 10m albums globally across a career that has stretched six decades. A child star, he has always handled his success with humility, and displayed an innate desire to connect with other people and different cultures. Today, as the world appears more divided than ever, he is building bridges, bringing audiences from all walks of life into his charismatic orbit — but, I wonder, does he draw the line at Donald Trump
Ma’s repertoire stretches from Frédéric Chopin to Philip Glass, Luigi Boccherini to Astor Piazzolla, but it is Bach’s cello suites for which he is rightly renowned; the Prelude of the First Suite from his 1997 recording is the most-streamed classical track ever in the US.
“Bach’s music has been a great companion, a great friend through thick and thin,” he says, and he describes the role it played in his father’s life when, as a student in Paris during the blackout of the second world war, he would learn the violin sonatas and partitas during the day so that he could play them by heart at night. “And when I started performing the suites in my twenties I would get letters from people, who were maybe studying or taking exams, going through a horrible time, saying Bach got me through it,” he says. “So, this has always been very special music.”
The cello suites, thought to have been composed just before Bach moved to Leipzig to begin his cantorship at the Thomaskirche in 1723, were little known until 1890, when a 13-year-old Casals discovered the Grützmacher edition of the works in a junk shop in Barcelona and brought them to wider attention. Today, they are considered among Bach’s supreme achievements, and treasured for their profound examination of the human condition. They are also admired for the ferocious technical and emotional demands they place on the cellist — a challenge that is all the greater if they are performed, as is Ma’s way, entirely from memory. I suggest Bach would have been astonished by last night’s performance. “Oh, I don’t know, I think he would have nodded and had a beer,” he says with a laugh. It’s a classic Ma response; throughout our conversation his thoughtful, sometimes elliptical sentences — delivered in a soft legato-staccato lilt — are frequently undercut with a self-deprecating gag.
We scout around for a waitress. On paper Kaffeehaus Riquet looked perfect: a proper Mitteleuropean coffee house — established in 1745, in fact, five years before Bach’s death. I anticipated oodles of atmosphere and strudel. The present building is a faded art nouveau confection, with gold mosaics and two large elephant heads either side of the entrance; might the cantor himself have swung by the original café for a kaffee?
?