Music, at Least, Doesn’t Lie

Mr. Biss is a concert pianist.

The truth is under attack. Our federal government lies with impunity even when those lies are exposed by easily accessible evidence. A.I. erases the distinction between what is real and what merely looks real. We swim in an ocean of social media rife with falsehoods, promoted by algorithms that serve only profitability. The phrase “alternative facts,” so jarring when uttered by a senior White House official nine years ago, is by now banal.

The performing arts, with their warm embrace of subjectivity, might not seem the most likely corrective amid this crisis. But they have much to teach us about the notion of truth. There is no great performance — not even a theatrical one whose surface is, by design, artifice — that doesn’t have truthfulness at its core. The search for truth is an artist’s life’s work.

That work corresponds directly to the audience’s need. People have varied and mysterious reasons for attending live performances. They may want to be uplifted, distracted, amused, discomfited or all of those things at once. But one impulse accompanies all of these contradictory desires: to be in the presence of something ineffably right. The difficulty of explaining this rightness in words makes it more, not less, powerful.

That need grows ever stronger as the unholy trinity of social media, A.I. and aspiring authoritarian leadership bombards us with the distortion of reality every day. When great art hits us in the solar plexus, our sense of what is true is momentarily restored.

This raises a difficult question: What is truthful performance? The answer comes in two parts.

The first part is that a truthful performance must be sincere. This is easily understood but difficult to achieve. Sincerity requires openness and vulnerability, which are compromised by the very human desire to be admired — a desire that performers tend to possess in spades. It takes vanity to seek the stage, but to tell the truth on that stage you must leave your vanity in the green room.

Sincerity is essential, but by itself it is insufficient. For a performance to be truthful, it must reveal not just the performer’s truth but the truth of the material being played. An actor channeling the death of a beloved parent can surely be sincere. But if the parent recalled in a sincere performance is an abusive monster, that sincerity alone does not present the truth. There are many ways to give a truthful performance of Hamlet, but doing so requires a deep engagement with, and understanding of, his psychology. Truth comes only when the inner life of the performer meets the inner life of the art.

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