Exit Strategy is a series about people confronting the challenges of retirement, told in their own words.
Lily Friedman has had a rollicking career as a pianist, a performer and a teacher.
But after more than seven decades of working, in the quiet moments a thought now nags at her.
All these famous guys say they stop while they’re “on top,” and I don’t know how you know when you’re on the top. Because I don’t feel I’m on top yet.
Has she already reached the top, and begun to decline? She doesn’t want to go out with her students dissatisfied, or her performance faltering.
Then again, she doesn’t want to stop at all.
Knowing when, how and whether to retire has long vexed people reaching the ends of their careers. By 2030, 74 million Americans will be over 65, and in that season of life when retirement usually begins, compared with 49 million a decade ago.
With the country becoming older as the baby boomer generation ages, the number of Americans on that precipice — as they reckon with their professional desires, new limitations and financial needs — will soon grow larger than it ever has been.
While some welcome these years and have planned ahead for them, Ms. Friedman is guided solely by her passion to keep playing.
You’re really laying your soul bare, is what you’re trying to do, and hoping that they get the same message, that they feel something.
As the story goes, Ms. Friedman asked her parents for piano lessons at the age of 5, and she has been playing since. After she graduated from Juilliard in 1952, postcards started appearing in her mailbox with teaching opportunities, and her student roster grew. At one point, Ms. Friedman played concerts regularly and juggled as many as 50 students. Now she has fewer than a dozen.
I had students and they just kept coming, and now it’s down. It’s dwindled and dwindled. The kids have grown and gone to college, gone away, and the adults are getting older.
The lessons are tiring. If I play for an hour, an hour and a half, I am tired. And I can lie down when I think it’ll be 20 minutes. Two and a half hours later, I wake up. I am very pissed about that.
When I can’t see the notes, I wonder if I should stop teaching. I say I need a telescope and I joke about it, but I wonder if I should.
But this is also the teacher whose enthusiasm for playing inspired her surgeon, after he operated on her gallbladder, to become her student. And there’s Yujin Kim, a 38-year-old veterinary professor, who commutes two hours each way, weekly, to study with Ms. Friedman in her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
During their first session last year, Ms. Kim recalled, Ms. Friedman told her to slightly change the angle of her pinkie. “That totally changes the sound quality, and she just knew,” Ms. Kim said. “That is why I feel I’m listened to by her.”
For Ms. Friedman, the losses have come incrementally.
First it was stepping down about 12 years ago as the artistic director of Summer Trios, a chamber music organization that she had co-founded. Ms. Friedman was taking care of her partner at the end of his life and found herself unable to do both.
Then it was parting with her red Mini Cooper. She gave it to her grandson after her sons forbade her from taking the wheel; she was 92.
And then it was her annual New Year’s Day fund-raiser for Summer Trios at her apartment, a daylong music celebration, complete with her homemade stuffed cabbage. Last year, she no longer had the stamina to organize it.
Perhaps the biggest transition of recent years unfolded after a surgery in 2022, when she started needing both a cane (she chose a red one with red rhinestones) and a round-the-clock caregiver, covered by her insurance.
Now her vision and hearing are waning.
Thirty five years ago when Ms. Friedman established Summer Trios, which offers workshops for amateur chamber musicians, things were different. It was an era when Ms. Friedman survived on ice cream, Hershey bars and little sleep as she kept Summer Trios running.
It is still going strong. In June, nearly 100 participants attended during the two-week program, at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. Many still remember that first summer there, and Ms. Friedman is still the draw.
This year, she mentored a few groups and played Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor (Op. 60) for her faculty performance.
Oh, it was an ordeal. It was awful as far as I was concerned. I mean, it might have sounded OK to the others, but I literally couldn’t see. And I was so focused I don’t even remember who I’m playing with, who the cellist was.
Everybody thought it was fabulous, but it was not good.
For her second performance, she was more prepared and rested, and armed with enlarged sheet music. Even so, it was not easy.
They recorded every faculty concert, and I looked at mine and I’m stiff because I couldn’t see, even on the large copy. It was very tense and I can’t always hear the high violin notes.
I don’t know if any of that can be fixed.
She would later learn that some mentees had complained about her hearing, and, for the second year in a row, there was a cake celebrating Ms. Friedman at the reception after the performance, which felt a bit like a retirement party.
And then there was the composition she played. It had been the first piece of chamber music Ms. Friedman and Chris Lee, her collaborator of close to 50 years, had performed together. He had suggested that they play it again this year.
The complaints, the composition, the retirement party of sorts; it all seemed to be subtly hinting at something. Should this be her last summer?
Nobody said anything like that. But the implication was sort of there.
I don’t know if I’ll go next year. We’ll have to see what happens.
Ms. Friedman still has many pieces she wants to learn, and others that she has nearly mastered. One in particular.
Wow. I worked on it. I played it every day.
I was so upset about Ukraine, because my father was from Ukraine, that I dug up this piece by Beethoven. It’s famous in the repertoire as being very, very difficult. It’s a 45-minute piece.
And then I don’t play it for a month and come back to it and there’s still some more there. There’s something I didn’t get the first time.
It’s Opus 111. It starts very angry, and then the second movement, it is so, so calming and so beautiful. I’m almost crying.
Nobody ever plays Opus 111, rarely.
After playing Opus 111, she feels like she’s broken up with someone, she said, because she can’t believe it’s over.
Ms. Friedman wants others to hear it.
So, she has set her sights on one more solo concert. Maybe then she will feel like she is going out on top.
I want a real venue, you know?
Last week, Ms. Friedman turned 95. She celebrated with a big family dinner and a canoe trip down the Housatonic River. And she has begun calling around, looking for a recital hall where she can perform again.
