The classroom at the Vietnam National Academy of Music could be almost any place in the world where piano is taught. The furniture and lighting are institutional. The walls have soundproofing. There is a long table for instructors and a decent grand. Down the hall, though, hangs a wacky photo of Ho Chi Minh in band-master whites conducting an orchestra.
Seated at the studio's table was a tiny woman, under 5 feet tall and 92 years old, the matriarch and grande dame of Vietnamese music and a founder of the academy. Next to her were her daughter, the former rector of the academy, and granddaughter Thu-Nga Dan, who lives in South Pasadena, California.
I asked Thai Thi Lien if she would play for me. She laughed and apologised that she was under the weather and had not practised for three weeks. She had just returned to Hanoi for an extended visit from Montreal, where she now lives with her son, Dang Thai Son, Vietnam's most celebrated classical musician. But she picked up her cane and marched to the piano and began to play Chopin. Her sound is huge, soul-stopping, the kind you expect from a key-crusher trained in Eastern Europe.
After she finished playing, Madame Lien, as she asks to be called, brushed off compliments and began to recount her remarkable story. With a little help from her friends, Ho being one, she played a role in creating a classical music tradition for her country and her persistence during North Vietnam's wars with the French and Americans helped maintain that tradition.
First brush with the piano
Thai Thi Lien was born in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) when it was an exotic French colony. "My father was the first engineer in Vietnam," she said. "He studied in France and he brought back many recordings of opera. He decided I should learn piano." She was 4 — and a few French piano teachers had made their way to Indochina. She spent her teens studying with a pupil of Chopin and grew into a fine virtuoso. But her family arranged a marriage. Husband No 1 wasn't in the picture for long.
Although fighting between the French and the Vietnamese had already broken out in 1946, Lien moved to Paris to study. There she met and married Tran Ngoc Danh, a Communist political operative.
He was part of Ho's delegation that hoped to negotiate independence from the French. Ho and Tran Ngoc Danh were not successful, so the newlyweds went to Czechoslovakia, where Lien enrolled in the Prague Conservatory. When she received her diploma in the early 1950s, she became the first Vietnamese woman to obtain an advanced degree in music. Much of her time in Prague was spent apart from her husband. Tran Ngoc Danh remained politically active, working mainly in Bangkok. When Lien finally joined him, he was in the countryside of North Vietnam with Ho and the Viet Minh forces.
She made the journey from south China to the Vietnam jungle on foot, carrying her 22-month-old daughter. She remained with the Viet Minh for two years until the French were routed in 1954. Her first son, Tran Thanh Binh, was born in that jungle and her husband died in it of tuberculosis. When Ho took charge of the new country, he asked Lien to record her arrangements of Vietnamese folk songs and lullabies.
Madame Lien is careful not to take full credit for founding Vietnam's first music school in Hanoi. Her responsibility was the piano department, she says. But her co-founders were all self-taught musicians and she was the one who, having learnt Czech in Prague, had also picked up Polish, Romanian and Russian to hire music professors from the Soviet bloc countries friendly to Vietnam. Madame Lien says that the music-loving Ho began a commitment to fully funding the school that the Communist government continues to this day. In 1965, when American aircraft began bombing North Vietnam, the government relocated the 500 students to a village 48 kilometres away. The school's 60 pianos and other instruments were carried on ox carts.
Lessons through war
In the village, Lien looked after her youngest son, Dang Thai Son, who was born in Hanoi in 1958, and taught him piano. Her teenage daughter Tran Thu Ha (a pianist) and son Tran Thanh Binh (then a cellist) were assigned quarters apart from their mother and with the older students.
Through it all, the school thrived and actually grew, thanks to the demand for musicians to entertain the troops. But Tran Thu Ha and her brother were also quick to leave as soon as they could. Although the school remained in the countryside until fighting stopped in 1973, Ha enrolled in the Kiev Conservatory in Ukraine in 1969. Tran Thanh Binh followed her but by then had given up the cello and studied architecture in Kiev. Ha later got a doctorate in piano at the celebrated Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow and, back in Hanoi, became an instructor in the piano department of her alma mater, which had grown into the Hanoi Conservatory of Music.
She worked her way up to rector in 1994, a post she held until stepping down two years ago. Under her, the school became a prominent institution, opening conservatories in Hue and Ho Chi Minh City. It is now the Vietnam National Academy of Music.
The main campus in Hanoi houses 1,800 students who learn either Western classical music or traditional Vietnamese music; there isn't much crossover. And as Vietnam emerges on the world scene economically, it is also becoming vibrant musically. In Hanoi, Madame Lien's architect son Tran Than Binh has designed his country's first modern major concert hall, now under construction at the National Academy. It is scheduled to open next autumn. It will be dedicated to Thai Thi Lien. Her other children no doubt will be soloists in the opening concert. By all rights, the hall should be named for her as well but that is for the government, which is covering the cost, to decide.
