The Improbable Encore Fifteen years ago, the CSO’s Alex Klein was one of the world’s best oboists. Now he may be classical music’s greatest comeback story.

Almost every night before bed, Alex Klein, one of the world’s most famous oboe players and a principal in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, goes through the same routine. He begins by leaning his left side against a living room wall in his Riverside condo, his left arm stretched out behind him. He stays like this for 30 seconds before turning around and repeating the same movement with his right arm. When finished, he reaches both arms in front of him. With his right hand, he pulls down on his left fingers as a group, then works them one at a time, tugging hard, as though he were trying to yank them from their joints. After that, Klein moves to the kitchen for phase two. He gathers ice cubes from the freezer and neatly folds a small pile into a washcloth. Sitting at a table cluttered with papers and mail, he drapes the washcloth over his left wrist and keeps it there for about five minutes. On particularly grueling days, Klein also performs a kind of do-it-yourself electrotherapy. He spreads a gel on his left arm, then attaches two square white pads. These pads connect to a small black box, about the size of a tinderbox, ominously called a transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation device. It shoots electrical pulses to arouse the nerves and activate the muscles. Klein generally sets the machine for 30 minutes, during which he relaxes—often to the point of sleeping—as his fingers twitch relentlessly from the pulses. This is Klein’s reality now, the reality of living with a rare neurological and movement disorder known as focal dystonia. The condition limits his control over his left hand, leaving two of his fingers misshapen, a particularly cruel twist for someone who makes his living with those fingers. It also leaves him in chronic, intense pain—a side effect of torturing his body to get it to perform the way he needs it to. The goal of his nightly routine isn’t to eliminate the pain—pain is a permanent part of his life now. He’s learned to accept that. His goal is just to moderate it enough to get through rehearsal the next day. There was a time, a little more than 15 years ago, when Klein would wake up each morning eager to get to work. As an oboist, he was special. His stunning technical prowess pushed past what others had ever done with the instrument. His tone was so unique and beautiful that musicians from around the globe would flock to Symphony Center to hear him play. An oboe would sell at a premium simply because he had played it. He wasn’t just the CSO’s principal oboist. He was Alex Klein. But that was before the focal dystonia. Before he was forced to leave the orchestra for 12 years, under the assumption his career was finished. Before he gave up the oboe almost entirely. Before he spiraled into a depression so deep he contemplated suicide. And before, in the most surprising development of all, he clawed his way back to the CSO just last summer. He’s a different person than he was the first time around—no longer a confident young virtuoso, but rather a twice-married 52-year-old scarred by his fall from classical music’s greatest heights and summoning the strength to stage a second act. Alex Klein Jeff Sciortino To understand what having the oboe taken from him meant to Alex Klein, you have to understand his childhood in Curitiba, Brazil. Growing up in the 1970s, Klein struggled in school. He was bright—he could read books by age 4—but suffered from severe attention deficit disorder. He was so disruptive in class that in third grade the principal threatened to expel him. Klein’s father, a civil engineer, had a different idea: He enrolled his son in music classes, figuring they might help center him. The boy already knew the instrument he wanted to learn. His father had once taken him to an orchestra concert, and he was mesmerized by the oboe players—the way they could work such a loud, crisp sound from such a small instrument. Advertisement Finding an oboe, however, wasn’t easy. Brazil was under a military dictatorship at the time, which made it difficult to import items from Europe. But Klein’s father saved three months of his salary and gave it to a music teacher he knew who often traveled back to his native Germany. It was on one of those trips that the teacher hid an oboe for the 9-year-old in a package he mailed to the Goethe-Institut’s Brazil outpost. The boy’s talent was immediately obvious. By 11, he was selected for a professional chamber orchestra in Curitiba. At 13, he began touring Brazil as a soloist with internationally renowned conductors, including Olivier Toni and Eleazar de Carvalho. Even his performance in school improved. “Oboe was my savior,” Klein says. “Everything started working better in life.” Klein left Brazil for the United States in 1984 to attend Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. As a senior, he took first prize in an international oboe competition in New York, beating out some of the world’s most famous oboists. Over the next decade, he traveled around the globe playing competitions (he won three more), landed teaching gigs at Oberlin and the University of Washington, and released his first album, a recording of Vivaldi’s oboe concertos. Then, at 30, in a star-making turn, Klein was hired as principal oboist of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—one of the most prestigious orchestral jobs in the world. By 2001, six years into his tenure there, his career was peaking. He had recorded a Strauss concerto with the CSO that would later win a Grammy, and his performances were being heralded for their Dionysian beauty. “He had an energy and eagerness and a certain joie de vivre,” recalls Bill Buchman, the CSO’s assistant principal bassoonist and a longtime friend of Klein. “He was at the absolute top of his artistry.” That March, Klein traveled to Brazil to perform Mozart’s oboe concerto, a buoyant, gleeful piece, with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra. But a few days before the concert, as he began rehearsing, he found it difficult to move the fingers on his left hand. It took all his concentration and energy to play the right notes. “I just felt incapable. It was like I didn’t understand who I was anymore.” When Klein returned to Chicago, he mentioned this to the CSO’s doctor, who was concerned. Klein underwent tests at Rush University Medical Center to see if a brain tumor was to blame. That ruled out, he saw a physician who specialized in working with performance artists: Alice Brandfonbrener at Northwestern. She diagnosed the focal dystonia. At first, Klein was relieved: “When she didn’t mention tendinitis, I thought, Whatever it is, I can deal with it. At least I don’t have to stop playing.” But Brandfonbrener painted a sobering picture for Klein: She told him that the condition was irreversible—that, in fact, tension in his body would only build—and predicted that within three years he would quit the orchestra out of frustration. In the medical field, dystonia is something of a mystery. For more than half a century, it was considered a psychological disorder rather than a neurological and physical one. Neurologists now know that dystonia involves the basal ganglia, a tiny area inside the brain that controls movement. Misfiring neurons there send the body conflicting messages, resulting in a variety of problems, including tremors, contorted muscles, and the inability to control certain muscles. In the case of focal dystonia, the mouth and fingers are mostly affected, which for a musician can make performing a familiar task, such as playing the oboe, incredibly arduous and painful. There are a few hypotheses for what causes dystonia. One is that it is genetic. Another is that simple overuse is to blame, which would help explain why dystonia afflicts musicians in disproportionately high numbers. “They train and train and abuse their muscles and their brain,” says Jan Teller, chief scientific officer at the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation in Chicago. Klein estimates that he was practicing and performing as much as 50 hours a week. Paradoxically, though, professionals in certain other fields that require repetitive movement—such as barbers or tennis players—rarely develop dystonia. Which is what makes the condition so perplexing. Unlike Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases and other movement disorders, dystonia is not degenerative, so early intervention can allow patients to fully recover their mobility. “It’s more like a radio receiver out of tune,” explains Teller. “You just have to readjust, and sometimes you don’t know what button to press. Maybe you move a little to the left and walk by the window and extend the antenna.” The problem for musicians is, they often don’t recognize dystonia when it first hits. Looking back, Klein recalls a moment in 1998 when he felt a searing pain in his sternum, a sensation he now believes was the result of his muscles beginning to tighten. But that possible warning sign, more than two years before his diagnosis, went unrecognized.

When Klein talks about the past, he doesn’t shy away from darkness, but he is not morose. He swings wildly from quiet, somber reflections to stories told with such great urgency and excitement that every sentence seems to end with an exclamation point. As he talks, his arms are in perpetual motion. It’s only when he takes a breath and lets them drop to his sides that his physical deformity becomes clear. With his hands relaxed, his right fingers hang normally, like branches of a willow tree. His left hand, though, curves into the shape you might use for a bull in a shadow play—his ring and middle fingers curl inward, nearly touching his palm. These are their new resting positions. The difference is maybe an inch, but enough to reverberate across Klein’s life. The changes in his playing started out small. He’d hold a note just a fraction too long or muddy a technical passage a bit. But the small changes grew more noticeable, becoming a full-blown crisis. Every time he played, he would have to force his fingers into place. As a result, the left side of his body would tense up. Eventually, the tendons in his left wrist and arm got so swollen that Klein developed tendinitis, which caused him agonizing pain and quickly eroded his playing. Advertisement He began taking regular breaks from the orchestra to ease the strain on his body. “I would come back for a week or two at a time and then disappear for a few months,” he recalls. Even when he was scheduled for a concert, Klein would wind up canceling more than half the time because he didn’t feel he could perform. The dystonia didn’t hinder his mobility in any other part of his life. He had no trouble tying his shoes, typing an email, or even playing the English horn. It only affected his ability with the oboe. “I just felt incapable,” he says. “It was like I didn’t understand who I was anymore.” Consumed with finding a cure, Klein visited more than 30 doctors, trying different therapies. He went to a chiropractor. Then an acupuncturist. He took lessons in the Alexander technique—a method meant to alleviate pain and discomfort by realigning posture—and tried a few rounds of hand massage. “The masseuse would dig into every finger, every little muscle and knuckle, and then I’d play oboe in his office while they dug into different parts,” recalls Klein. Nothing seemed to help. This went on for more than six months, and Klein’s search became increasingly manic. “Every two to three weeks, I would see a doctor with all my best hopes,” he says. “When nothing changed, the doctor would either refer me to someone else or tell me that the condition was incurable. I would go home depressed for a few days, feeling sorry for myself until a new idea came out and I would start searching again. I was willing to try anything.” Klein, shown here at a 2002 performance with the CSO, was diagnosed with focal dystonia in 2001. Photo: Peter Thompson/Chicago Tribune Klein had a new oboe made, one built from violetwood, much lighter than the traditional ebony, thinking the change would make playing less strenuous. It didn’t. He tried Botox injections in his fingers. Novocain too. He took a few doses of levodopa, a drug prescribed to Parkinson’s patients. He tried finger weights. One doctor said his condition might be the result of mercury in Klein’s fillings. (A dentist quickly dispelled that notion.) A nutritionist suggested he change his diet, so Klein cut carbs. He tried walking with better posture and not carrying his wallet in his back pocket anymore.He even underwent energy healing. “I would sit in a room and the doctor would be 10 feet away from me, moving his hand around and asking me if I could feel a blockage,” says Klein. “I think he was just trying to convince me that I felt something.” His bouts with tendinitis got worse, and by November 2001, Klein couldn’t play a note. He decided to take a three-month medical leave from the CSO to recuperate. By then, his personal life was also in turmoil. Three days after his leave began, his wife filed for divorce. Klein subsequently lost custody of his two young children and began sliding into an even deeper depression. In the morning of July 3, 2003, Klein sat down at his computer to write a suicide note. Killing himself, he felt, was the only way out of his despair. “I was having trouble understanding what I was here to do. Where would I go? I was dangling in a very unstable circumstance.” Just as he was finishing the note, Klein got a phone call from a friend in the orchestra. She had noticed that he seemed out of sorts in rehearsal the day before, and when she asked Klein about it, he began screaming and crying. His colleague knew someone who had worked in a crisis center and had that person call Klein immediately. They spent the next two hours together on the phone until Klein finally backed off from his suicide plan. “I felt astounded for about a week,” he says. “It was as if a part of me died.” He continued to try to perform with the CSO for another year. But ultimately, it proved too difficult. In the summer of 2004, almost three years after he was diagnosed with dystonia, Klein resigned. Without an income—the CSO’s insurance company had denied his claim for disability benefits because he could still play to a degree—Klein felt he had nowhere to go but back to Brazil. He moved in with his parents in Curitiba, marking the beginning of what Klein calls his “exile years.” Advertisement It wasn’t an easy adjustment. The first few months in Brazil, Klein would often jolt awake at 4 or 5 in the morning and jump out of bed to look for his oboe, thinking he was late for rehearsal. In reality, he had all but given up the instrument. “Every now and then, I would practice a little, and it felt good. Then I’d do a bit more. By the weekend I had tendinitis, and I’d close the case again.” No longer performing, he toured the country judging music competitions and even tried conducting. He also spent a lot of time reading, particularly about Beethoven. “It was curious to me how he could have been depressed, disabled, rejected, and still maintained a sense of humor,” says Klein. “Even at the end of his life, Beethoven comes up with something like the Ninth Symphony, which talks about love in the world. So I asked myself, What do I have that’s still good? What are other dreams I’ve had that do not depend on these two fingers?” That’s when Klein decided to create music festivals. In 2004, he formed a double reed festival to be held annually in Panama City. At the inaugural event, Klein met Catalina Guevara, a bassoonist from Costa Rica. “I remember when I first heard him play, it was like magic,” says Guevara. “You cannot imagine that this person is sick.” They were married two years later and eventually had two children. In 2006, Klein started the annual Festival de Música de Santa Catarina, or FEMUSC, a free two-week gathering of South American music students. The students perform together and are coached by talent from around the globe, including several of Klein’s former colleagues from the CSO. The undertaking helped him start to heal emotionally: “I felt I was doing something worthwhile.”

Klein performs in Kansas in 2014