The Making of Me: Vanessa Mae
With a fortune in excess of thirty million pounds, Vanessa-Mae is one of Britain’s most successful young musicians.
‘This beautiful instrument has given me so much history and memory and beauty in my life. `It has basically dictated my life.’
From her early years as a musical prodigy to the glamour of money and celebrity, Vanessa’s entire life has been shaped by music.But for fifteen years someone else helped to forge her career: Pamela, Vanessa’s mother.
‘I was always made to appreciate that the love my mother had for me was conditional. She said to me, ‘You know I will always love you cos you're my daughter, but you're only special to me because you play the violin. And if you play the violin well then you're special to me.’
Now Vanessa wants to know whether her musical success was down to her or her mother.
‘I need to work out whether I was born to play the violin or if I was talked into playing the violin. Was it nature or nurture that played a bigger part?That's really my brain?’
To help Vanessa find the answer, science will test her body and her mind.
‘That's so funny!’
She'll be observed by psychologists.She seems quite aggressive at this point. I think she realises she's running out of time.
And be pushed to the limit.
Vanessa ends her journey by answering the question that started it: how much did Pamela contribute to her musical life?
‘The key thing for me on this was finding out that emotionally I may have become the person I became because of, you know, the parent in my life. I mean I was groomed to be a violinist. It wasn't a normal childhood and to be cut off from so many different things, means that I didn't get to know who I was or make any choices until I was pretty old.
‘At the start of my journey, I thought that what set me apart from say another violinist with the same amount of training was nature, so that's why I thought seventy-five percent nature, twenty-five percent nurture.
But now I think there's nothing to be ashamed of that it was my blood, my sweat and my tears that brought me here today, even though there was a huge part my mother played in that, it's still the experiences I went through.
So I’m gonna shift towards fifty percent nurture now, and fifty percent nature.’