The Virtuoso

by Sonia Orchard

  Schumann too, at a similar age, suffered a mysterious accident to his right hand, making piano-playing excruciating. The story my father told me was that Schumann had injured two tendons by attempting to stretch his hand in a homemade sling. Another version of the story was that in an effort to cure the syphilis he had contracted during his student days, Schumann had absorbed mercury (a treatment often prescribed at the time), damaging his nervous system. Schumann was, naturally, devastated and tried numerous suggested remedies, including immersing his hand in cattle secretions, despite being terrified that the cattle’s characteristics might infiltrate his own. In the same year, his brother and sister-in-law both died, and near the end of the year, Schumann attempted suicide for the first time.

  Even though Schumann’s injury forced him to abandon playing the piano and put all of his energies into composing, I had far less estimation of myself as a composer than as a performer, so managed to find little in the story of Schumann with which to console myself.

  Without resorting to the voodooism Schumann eventually turned to, I did try everything I could think of to fix my condition, going back through all the piano techniques and exercises I’d been taught over the years—circling my wrist in loose exaggerated loops as I played, or practising entire pieces in staccato. I visited numerous doctors and other specialists, but nothing—except a nip or two of gin before I sat down to practise—seemed to help me in the slightest.

  At one time I had a brief liaison with a singing teacher called Leonard, an affair that probably wouldn’t have extended beyond one night had he not informed me he was training to be an Alexander Technique practitioner. Leonard instructed me that it was impossible to separate mental and physical processes in the body; that our will to do something arose from deep within the brain, in our subconscious and unconscious mind; and that I had learnt this crippling behaviour—he could see it in my body: my tense shoulders, my stilted walk, my constant fidgeting—and I now had to re-learn, to stop these unconscious processes from taking their pre-set path. He said that the only hope for me was to inhibit my old way of thinking and acting (starting with total abstinence), and as he told me this he’d draw to his chest his dainty hands—I could never get over how impuissant those fragile instruments looked—and motion in the air as if doing invisible needlework. But he only needed to gauge an inkling of interest from me and he’d jump from his chair—I’d sense those little silky-skinned hands with their bristling fingers clambering towards me and I’d run to pull my new Brahms recording from its sleeve and make another pot of tea.

  I did, however, ponder all Leonard told me and was impressed by his many stories of recovery—from famous violinists who’d indefinitely postponed world tours, to ballerinas who’d been told they’d never dance again—to which he resorted when assailed with too many questions. I was momentarily intrigued and found myself quietly delighting in the idea that I had resigned myself to being a pitiful invalid of my own innocent and clumsy making. But like the rest, Leonard, with his pinstriped pants and colourful bow ties, passed in and out of my life so fleetingly, before I would let him anywhere near my ailing limb, or could digest the kernel of his words. Sitting at my small sunlit table only minutes after Leonard’s final exit (‘You’re making a big mistake, young man—I could really help you!’), it was far easier to pour myself another drink and cradle my rotten arm than to deliberate over any remnants of Leonard, including his inspired teachings, having so cleanly eliminated him from my life.

  I ended up deferring my studies several times, convincing myself that I’d been overworking my arm and that a period of inactivity would be of the most benefit in the long term. Anton wasn’t much help at all, once even becoming irate and calling me a drunk; he’d just shake his head with growing dismay each time I left the Academy halls to work at Boosey & Hawkes, the Albert Hall or the Steinway showroom. My position at these places never rose above that of sales or tea boy, and, quite frankly, I preferred making pots of Earl Grey to approaching customers who might correct me on the year of the Leipzig pressing of some ancient and unremarkable manuscript. But after a period of several months in each job (and usually on the verge of being sacked due to my slovenly appearance and crankiness with other staff) I would turn on the wireless at work and hear, ‘And that was Chopin’s F minor concerto performed by the pianist Noël Mewton-Wood.’ Suddenly everything about me would seem to tremble, my job would appear a sham, and I would run all the way home and find myself lifting the stained oak lid of my piano and staring devoutly at the keys.

  Each time it was Anton who lured me back to the Academy, and no time more successfully than the last. The knock of Ma O’Grady came on the door one evening as I sat alone in my room listening to an old Schnabel recording. I followed her large dumpling hips down the stairs and, as I leaned against the mottled wall of her apartment, holding the telephone receiver in my hand and preparing myself to weave my way through another of Anton’s brusque check-ups, he said to me the words that every aspiring pianist dreams of hearing one day. He told me that if I returned to the Academy and learnt to curb my erratic behaviour, I could solo with Clarence Raybould and the senior Academy orchestra. It would be my turn, at last, to perform a concerto.

  Ever since seeing Noël’s 1940 Queen’s Hall performance, I’d tried to visualise my own public debut—the venue, the audience, my entrance on stage, my bow and, most importantly, my programme. I’d decided that solo recitals, though empowering for the performer, can sometimes seem a little thin. A solo pianist becomes his own orchestra, he creates his own world; he is everybody and everything. But in a concerto the soloist is elevated above the tutti— the everybody— of the orchestra. The soloist is seated separate to, and on top of, the world.

  In a certain mood I did enjoy listening to the baroque concertos: symphonic pieces with solo parts written for a particular instrumentalist the composer had in mind. I found them fortifying, perfect for a sunny autumn morning after a vigorous walk through the commons. But for performance, one really couldn’t go past the virtuoso concerto, where the soloist has true isolation and supremacy within the orchestra. They are the ultimate form for showcasing a soloist’s virtuosity, a flamboyant display that culminates in that signature cadenza just before the end of each movement—an extraordinary flourishing passage from which the audience can judge the musician’s ability. Always the most thrilling moment in a concerto, I find: holding your breath while the soloist embarks upon this daring display, the conductor and orchestra lowering their baton and instruments, seated in reverent silence.

  Although Mozart was the father of the virtuoso concerto, establishing its form and writing close to fifty, it was not Mozart, with his ordered phrasing, his innate politeness, whom I wanted to play. No, the man I would perform had carried the Classical into the Romantic era, combining Mozart’s attention to form, design and beauty with the desire to express ideas, emotion and passion. Ludwig van Beethoven was the composer who completed the final transformation of the concerto from a baroque concerto grosso, with its tapestry of alternating groups of strings, into the musical hero myth: the soundtrack to the struggle and triumph of the individual within the world.

  Over the first few weeks Anton and I listened to all of Beethoven’s concertos, contemplating each in terms of its musical and technical demands. Anton was a boffin of the Napoleonic wars, and for that reason alone it seemed for a while that we might choose the Emperor, Beethoven’s fifth and final concerto, written in Vienna the year of Napoleon’s second onslaught and occupation of the city. We listened to it over and over. Each time that regal fanfare began I’d imagine the truculent Beethoven sheltering in his brother’s cellar, listening to the gun and cannon fire of the encroaching French army; and in the second movement, during the slow, dignified march of the orchestra, the piano singing out pleadingly, I’d see the composer stepping out from his refuge the following morning to find his city freezing, on fire and in ruins.

  Anton eventually dashed the idea of my taking
on the Emperor; he didn’t believe I could yet muster the exhilarated defiance and quiet restraint that were required. Incensed by his judgment as I was, the only thing that stopped me telling him he clearly didn’t know me at all was his following comment that he thought I had the perfect temperament for pulling off the Third—the C minor concerto—brilliantly.

  I worked on my part with Anton for several months. It was a momentous project and one for which I attempted, at first, to remain relatively sober. Sometimes we’d work on just the first-movement cadenza for the entire hour, him standing and conducting next to me through three tempo changes, singing in his deep baritone, his arms paddling in front of his chest as if he were spooling wool, tapping in the air with his invisible baton, or closing his eyes and whispering the bom ba-bom ba-bom of the timpani entry at the close of the cadenza.

  These lessons were the most trying, my right hand spidering up and down the keys, Anton shouting out commands—‘Back to the Presto-faster-slower-more crescendo-more decrescendo-more resolution-more anticipation-again, again, it must be perfect!’—and the pain in my arm so great that blood would drain from my face and I’d be willing the clock on the wall to move at the pace I was being forced to play.

  Four weeks before the performance, the orchestral rehearsals began in the Duke’s Hall every Thursday and Friday afternoon. Although each rehearsal went for three hours, while I was at the piano, carried along by the exultant sound of the orchestra, I rarely thought about my arm. Strangely it was the more technically challenging orchestral sections, those that ought to have stressed my arm and mind the most, that I preferred to play. During the cadenzas and the languorous second movement, I would often be oblivious to the orchestra, and become more frighteningly aware of myself: I would remember the pain in my arm, and fret about what came next. But those spirited sections in the Allegro con brio— arpeggios tearing up the keyboard in lively discourse with the strings, the entire orchestra trumpeting out notes below me like footholds on which to climb higher, and Clarence Raybould heaving over the orchestra, shouting out, ‘Like a cavalry charge!’ or ‘Onward, onward, strings, to its doom…’—those were the times I forgot about my pain entirely.

  At the end of each rehearsal, as others stood about cleaning their instruments, chatting about the music, whistling phrases, stacking chairs and folding stands, the pain would arrive like a burst of flames shooting up my arm, and I’d pay all at once for the pleasure I’d just enjoyed. The music would vacate my body like a passing spirit and I’d think of nothing else but breathing through the agony. I’d decline offers to join the others for a beer at the Glue Pot, and wander home on my own, nursing my arm like a sick animal.

  Back in my room the most I could ever manage was to lie on my bed with a bottle of gin and listen to recordings of the concerto—Schnabel, Rubinstein, Curzon—imagining how wonderful to be pain-free and able to comfortably perform this great work. I was fascinated by the differences in each pianist’s interpretation, and thought about Noël and the way he had played it at the Queen’s Hall, combining volcanic power with such trembling beauty, notes that barely whispered above the heads of a thousand listeners.

  People always remarked upon his musical intelligence, his ability to understand a piece of music. I would understand this piece too, intimately, as if it were a person—know every twist and turn in its character.

  I listened to the recordings for hours on end, following the score with my finger, sometimes as the viola, other times as the oboe, wanting more than anything to own this piece, to make this concerto mine. So that Noël would hear me play it as he’d never heard it played before.

  I started to practise technical work and pieces entirely in the key of C minor, wanting to feel Beethoven’s obsession, bordering on mania, with this Sturm und Drang key. When Beethoven wrote the C minor concerto he was nearing the end of his first C minor period, and this tono tragico coloured much of the music he wrote. In the years leading up to and during this time, Beethoven had witnessed the final stages of his mother’s battle with consumption, and the death of his drunken, tyrannical father. Then, in the autumn of 1802 when Beethoven was thirty-two and in the middle of his work on the concerto, it was confirmed that he was going deaf. From Heiligenstadt, a village outside Vienna, he wrote a will-like document to his two brothers describing his despair: Little more and I would have put an end to my life—only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce, and so I endured this wretched existence—truly wretched…

  Just as blue is said to evoke sadness, and red, passion or rage, I’ve found there is an equally inexplicable effect drawn from the twenty-four major and minor musical keys. C major suggests majestic splendour; D major, joyful exuberance; E flat major, elegance and grace; E minor has been likened to a maiden dressed in white with a pink bow on her bosom; and Beethoven himself referred to B minor as ‘the black key’. C minor, the key Beethoven turned to more than any other, is the key of melancholy and lament. A desperate plea for deliverance from suffering.

  I listened to the concerto, all thirty-five minutes, several times each evening. On the bed or alone at the table with a gin in my hand, eyes closed, moaning along to the music. I no longer thought of it in terms of notes, but as one long, exhaustive thought, a series of yearning demands and weeping sighs. I knew the music so well—I felt the lift of the bow preceding every string entry, every inhale and exhale of the flutes, and when the timpani entered at the end of the cadenza it was more like a heartbeat than a drum. I began to feel as if I’d composed the concerto myself. With the performance inching closer I started mentally rehearsing for the night I’d walk on stage, with an uneasy mixture of exhilaration and bone-chilling dread. I saw myself standing up there, lights aimed down at me from the roof, staring into the crowd, every seat in the Duke’s Hall filled. I knew that Noël regularly visited his old alma mater for the end-of-year concerts, and in my mind I had him seated in the middle, second row from the front.

  I began to think of the virtuoso’s role as being less about simply entertaining and more about fulfilling an extraordinary obligation—to provide the audience with an escape from their lives. I thought about all the great virtuosos of the past and the crowds they had enraptured, yet rather than feeling excitement with being at the threshold of such a league of performers, these thoughts only increased the grip of terror upon me.

  I wondered if Liszt—one of the greatest virtuoso musicians ever known—had ever felt this same sense of fear, whether he was racked with self-doubt before walking on stage in Paris, Vienna, Budapest or Rome. Never before had so much been expected of a musician as was of Liszt during the height of his career, the man they called the God of the piano. Off-stage he might have locked himself away in a room, practising fourteen hours a day, fighting off depression and melancholia, but the moment he walked out from the wings, there was nothing this man could not play. What’s more, his dashing good looks and Byronic manner—something I certainly didn’t possess—brought a touch of drama to the performance. With the exception of Beethoven, pianists had always held their hands closely to the keys; Liszt, however, would lift his hands a foot in the air and bring them crashing down on the notes, his long blond hair falling in front of his eyes. The women in the audience would go wild: they flung their jewellery on stage, fainted in the stalls and fought over the green gloves he intentionally left on the stage. I might add that this reaction is completely understandable to anyone who has seen a picture of the man (I only have to glance upon the drawing Ingres sketched of the young Liszt to break out in goose bumps and feel my heart thumping away madly). Indeed, anyone who has witnessed any great virtuoso up on stage can testify to this experience—one which can only be described as complete and utter salvation.

  So now it was my turn to sit in the spotlight, coat-tails swept behind my stool, sweat moistening my collar, five hundred pairs of eyes upon me, imploring, Lift us to the gods.

&nb
sp; The more I thought about this night, the more I thought about my aunt’s blunt words and how true they now seemed.

  If I was going to be a brilliant pianist, we’d surely all have known about it by now.

  Outside of rehearsals the pain in my arm was intensifying; some mornings I’d wake and barely be able to lift it, and only a swig from the bottle kept next to my bed enabled me to rise and face the day. I had to button my shirt with one hand; I couldn’t even hold a saucer to pour a cup of tea. I thought about all the losses I’d endured throughout my life, but how, amongst all these departures, this ailment had never left me. I couldn’t rid my mind of the image of myself as a child sitting at the kitchen table, writing out the alphabet under the hawklike eye of my aunt, my right hand gripped around my pen, tearing at the page as I wrote, and behind my back, my left hand, clenched in a fist—this bad hand that had such an overwhelming desire to grab the pen and glide all over the page, leaving a trail of whooping circles. As I sat at the piano, trying to coax my arm to relax, the C minor concerto in front of me, I had half a mind to ring my aunt and scream at her for all the damage she’d wrought.

  I decided that the most sensible way to manage this anxiety was to balance the intensity of my work with the more frivolous rewards of sexual and alcoholic indulgence. And so it began, one sunny afternoon.

  I was walking down a quiet avenue in Piccadilly when I noticed an older gentleman, parked at the kerb in a maroon and grey Daimler, staring in my direction. So I held his gaze and walked straight towards his car. When I was only yards away he opened the passenger door and I stepped in and sat beside him, noticing his suit pants wide open, his royal staff displayed in his wrinkly old hand for all the world to see. My presence was only required for a matter of minutes in order to help the struggling brute along his way. And as soon as I had him slumped back, eyes closed, in his shiny maroon leather seat next to me, wearing a crooked grin of something akin to both relief and pain, I plucked his hanky from his top pocket, wiped my hand, laid the cloth delicately over his lap, then stepped back out onto the street.