Fei-Ping Hsu

Fei-Ping Hsu, pianist: born Gulangyu, China 20 December 1949; married (one daughter); died Qiqihar, China 29 November 2001.

With Shine, The Piano and The Piano Lesson, and Polanski's The Pianist in the pipeline, films about pianists and piano-playing seem to have taken the public's fancy. The life of the Chinese-American pianist Fei-Ping Hsu – "a fully developed performer of particular ability", as The New York Times described him at his 1984 US début – almost comes ready-wrapped as a screenplay: from child prodigy via the cataclysmic upheavals of the Cultural Revolution to recognition and success in the United States, and now to an abrupt and tragic end.

The tale begins almost idyllically. The island of Gulangyu sits on the south-east Chinese coast, in the lee of Taiwan, just offshore from the city of Xiamen. One of its local nicknames is "Piano Island" because of the inordinate number of instruments there, a legacy of the Jesuit missions – in the early 1950s, when a piano was a rarity on the mainland, there were over 500 on Gulangyu; there is now a piano museum there, and even the main dock is piano-shaped. So it is hardly surprising that when Hsu Fei-Ping (his name is transcribed also as Xu Feiping) was born there, in 1951, it was into a musical family – his brother, Xu Feixing, likewise became a pianist (as since has Hsing-ay Hsu, his niece). From his pastor father he also acquired a Christian faith so strong that he refused treatment for, and survived, childhood cancer.

Hsu was playing the piano at five, precociously enough for his primary and secondary schooling to be undertaken at the Shanghai Conservatory. In normal circumstances that would have guaranteed him the foremost musical education available in Communist China: the staff had benefited from the influx and influence of Russian and German teachers fleeing the persecutions of earlier generations. But China's own 10-year wave of cultural Bolshevism came with the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, and the Conservatory was shut down.

Hsu, already a member of the China Symphony Orchestra, was expelled to the provinces, to work on a rice farm and in a factory, moving heavy equipment. That fate befell a number of China's most gifted young musicians: Eileen Huang, for example, another pianist, similarly had to put her career on hold for seven years while she planted rice and cooked for 200 "farmers" (other banished student musicians). A pianist colleague reckoned that the enforced labour removed a degree of fluency from Hsu's technique; what remained was remarkable all the same.

Hsu regained official favour when he was summoned to perform the Yellow River Concerto – a "revolutionary" work promoted by Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Tse-Tung, and written by a collective of composers who included Yin Chengzong, another native of Gulangyu. The concerto is based on the patriotic cantata Yellow River by Xian Xianghai (Hsien Hsing-hai), inspired by Chinese resistance of the Japanese invasions of the 1930s – a theme that suited the isolationist temperament of the Cultural Revolution.

So Hsu took to the road, quite literally, walking with his musician colleagues alongside an upright piano on a barrow – hardly a feather-bedded existence, but in that China it was a luxury even to be able to play: one of Hsu's teachers had died in his arms after torture at the hands of the Red Guards, and Hsu was the first pianist to be permitted to resume this decadent, bourgeois occupation. "It was required that all people listen to it, because they said it was a political model. So we went to the farms, the factories, the army," Hsu told The Washington Post in 1989. "I did this for two years and then I quit."

He moved to the United States in 1979, initially to attend the Eastman School of Music in up-state New York and then the Juilliard School, where his principal teacher was Sasha Grodnitsky. In 1983 he won third prize in the Arthur Rubinstein International Competition and, a year later, made his New York début – with Liszt, Beethoven and Chopin, the kind of Romantic composer with whom he felt in particular sympathy. He settled in New York, became a US citizen, and established an international reputation, making a handful of recordings, chiefly of Beethoven and Chopin.

His premature death came on a concert tour of China. He was travelling in a van outside the city of Qiqihar, when it ran into a tractor parked on a darkened highway.

Music was Fei-Ping Hsu's life, and he was a solicitous teacher, keen to pass on the message even to the youngest students: "Most people pay too much attention to other things today. If you study music, if you play the piano, life will touch you when you grow up."

Martin Anderson