Girls at the Piano

by Virginia Lloyd

My reunion sent me reeling. If I’d been as good a pianist as my peers remembered, why hadn’t I become a professional? Why had I let my musicianship lapse after all those years of intensive study and practice? What had been the point of learning to play? And what would my life look like now if I’d pursued sounds instead of sentences? These are the questions that a woman of privilege may ask herself, lying in her parents’ spare bedroom on the night before her return flight to New York, because she had an education and a choice in the matter. Regret and self-doubt are the currency of decisions. Twenty years after making mine, I—like anyone who chooses one path over another—was living with the consequences.

  Millions of girls have learned to play the piano over the course of its history, and only relatively recently have gifted women pianists had much say about what to do with their talent. The example of Maria Anna Mozart illustrates the ivory ceiling that many talented women pianists have run into.

  In 1763, the eleven-year-old piano prodigy began a lucrative three-year grand tour of Europe with her younger brother, performing duets for stunned audiences of aristocrats from Salzburg to London. Nannerl, as Maria Anna was known, sang and played harpsichord or piano; Wolfgang Amadeus played violin as well as the keyboard instruments. Nannerl’s ambitious father Leopold had taught her piano from the age of three, as he began teaching her little brother five years later. When Nannerl was twelve, Leopold declared her to be one of the finest pianists in Europe.1

  Few female pianists made public performances in the eighteenth century. When they did, it was often because they could be admired as freaks or anomalies, as was blind keyboardist Maria Theresia Paradis when she toured Paris and London.2 Other performers attracted audiences with the novelty value of being foreign or a child.

  But in 1769, despite Nannerl’s undeniable gifts, Leopold Mozart decided that his daughter would no longer tour or play for a paying audience. She had reached the marriageable age of eighteen, when the virtue of a musical girl began to hold greater cultural power than her virtuosity. Leopold felt that while it was one thing for his talented child to show off in front of an audience, something was shameful about a grown woman performing in public, irrespective of his pride in her ability. In December 1769, when her father and brother boarded a carriage en route to perform in Italy, Nannerl broke down weeping. She was staying at home, where she would perform the domestic roles that her father had chosen for her, rather than the one she would have chosen herself. She locked herself in her room and did not emerge until the next day.3

  In what became a common progression for virtuosic women pianists, Nannerl reinvented herself as a highly regarded teacher, following her father’s pedagogical path without travelling anywhere. Almost ten years after Mozart’s solo career took off, Nannerl was still her father’s housekeeper in Salzburg and unmarried, because he had forced her to reject the proposal of the man she loved. Oblivious—or perhaps tone-deaf—to the ways in which his decisions had constrained her personal and professional opportunities, Leopold boasted of his daughter’s musicianship in a letter to his brother. ‘She can improvise like you wouldn’t believe,’ he wrote in February 1778, referring to Nannerl’s ability to create music spontaneously as she played.4 By their nature, improvisations are not intended to be written down, so we have no record of Nannerl’s. At the age of thirty-two she married a much-older man, a twice-widowed magistrate who brought five children to their union. In a salutary lesson for multi-taskers, Nannerl managed to teach while raising them plus the three that the couple composed together.

  In October 1777, Nannerl’s brother had travelled to the Bavarian city of Augsburg to meet Johann Stein, whose hand-crafted pianos had impressed the composer. During Mozart’s visit, Stein’s eight-year-old daughter, Nanette, performed for him. As a precocious virtuosa, she was accustomed to public performance, but not to criticism of the sort that Mozart offered her father—which he recorded in a letter to his own father:

  Mr Stein is completely silly about his daughter. She is eight years old and learns everything only from memory. She might amount to something, she has genius; but…she will get nowhere, she will never get much speed, because she makes a special effort to make her hand heavy. She will never get what is the most needful and the hardest, and the principal thing in music, Tempo, because from infancy on she has made it a point not to play in time.5

  Tempo, the speed at which a piece of music should be played, is one of the key paradoxes of musicianship: the more time the young pianist devotes to playing in tempo, which is to say at a consistent speed—even if that speed is as slow as a wet week—the faster she will be able to play, as her dexterity catches up with her impatience. In Mozart’s identification of Nanette Stein’s tendency to rush, predilection for memorising the notes and heavy wrist, he could have been writing about any number of the thousands of young girls learning to play the piano in the late eighteenth century, or in the late nineteenth, or even the late twentieth—myself included.

  In 1792, when Johann Stein died, 23-year-old Nanette took over her father’s business. Who knows if she heeded any of Mozart’s advice about technique, but by then she knew more than anyone about the mechanics of building pianos. She was clearly entrepreneurial too, because she shifted the family business to Vienna—where there was a burgeoning demand for instruments—and in 1794 established herself as the managing director of a new business under her married name, referencing her father: Nanette Streicher, née Stein. Hers was effectively one of the first piano factories. Stein’s handcrafted output had been approximately seventeen pianos per year, but Nanette’s operation produced forty-nine to fifty-three in the same time.6

  Because of Nanette Streicher’s expertise and business acumen, the piano was on its way into the homes of aristocrats and the wealthiest merchants in Europe as a coveted piece of domestic furniture. And as with any high-end product, emerging technology soon liberated the piano from exclusivity. Before long, thanks to factories such as Nanette’s popping up across Europe and the United States, production increased to meet the demand of the burgeoning Victorian middle classes. By 1847, according to Arthur Loesser’s comprehensive Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History, 60,000 instruments were manufactured each year in Paris alone, and 20,000 in England. Within a few decades of its invention, the piano had become ‘the social anchor of the middle-class home’.7 As it had for Nannerl Mozart, the piano shaped Nanette’s life, but possibly in a different way from what she had imagined as a child. She was significant in the history of talented women pianists because she turned her musicianship into a thriving business that ushered in generations of girls at the piano from all social classes.

  As the product equally of art and commerce, the piano walked hand in hand with the Industrial Revolution. In its large-scale production, the instrument was one of the first consumer items to face competition from rival nations. Annual production worldwide increased almost tenfold in the second half of the nineteenth century; by 1910 it was 500,000. But despite the piano’s cutting-edge relationship to technology and manufacturing, playing the instrument was seen as a recreation for girls rather than boys. The 1881 Girls Own Annual included an advice column on how to purchase and look after your piano.8 In his bizarre bestseller, the 1871 spiritual-musical manifesto Music and Morals, the Reverend H.R. Haweis spuriously maintains that ‘the piano makes a girl sit upright and pay attention to details’, whereas Latin grammar strengthens a boy’s memory.9 I’m not sure if the good reverend ever tried learning a Mozart sonata by heart. Posture aside, I well remember that effort as an intensive and repetitive combination of attention to detail and memorisation.

  Not everyone perceived the ubiquity of pianos in domestic life as an altogether happy event. ‘All—except perhaps teachers of music—will agree that at the present day the piano is too much with us,’ declared the British Medical Journal in April 1899. Protesting the ‘scandalous waste of time, money and labour’ of music lessons for most piano students, the Journal insisted that ‘an ordinary inte
lligent girl will learn half the languages of Europe in the time given to her abortive struggles with an art she really does not care for and cannot understand’.10

  Whether or not this judgement was true, the piano lost its central place in domestic life after World War I. Presented with the gramophone, the pianola and expanding economic opportunities for women, many ordinary intelligent girls found other things to do. By 1977, the year I began learning the instrument, French philosopher Roland Barthes was asking: ‘Who plays the piano today?’11 In ‘Musica Practica’, the essay that poses the question, Barthes describes the decline in amateur musicianship as only an amateur musician can: with nostalgia and indignation. ‘Initially the province of the idle (aristocratic) class, it lapsed into an insipid social rite with the coming of the democracy of the bourgeoisie (the piano, the young lady, the drawing room, the nocturne), and then faded out altogether,’ he writes. His potted history has a large hole in it the size of millions of working-class families, who embraced the piano as a ticket to respectability in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  While thousands of upper middle-class girls may have been playing nocturnes in drawing rooms for prospective husbands, working-class families caused the explosion in demand when upright pianos became available mid-century. The upright is easier to fit into a room than a grand piano, and much cheaper. And to accommodate families aspiring to acquire one, piano makers invented the payment system of hire-purchase, meaning that the instrument was the first product to be sold by this method. Those without the means to pay in full at the time of ordering could take delivery for a deposit and then make a series of monthly repayments until they owned their piano outright. The system proved so successful that by 1892 hire-purchase comprised 70 per cent of all piano sales.12 In Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence gets close to the truth, which is to say the symbolism, of piano ownership, when he writes of the ‘amazing heights of upright grandeur’ provided by a piano in the home of a coalminer: ‘It makes him so much higher in his neighbouring collier’s eyes. He sees himself reflected in the neighbouring opinion…several feet taller on the strength of the pianoforte, and he is satisfied.’

  The pleasure of playing the piano knows boundaries of neither class nor technique. In ‘Musica Practica’, the bourgeois Barthes distinguishes the music we listen to from the ‘practical music’ that we play at home as amateurs who ‘inscribe’ it on our bodies while we transmit sound and meaning from page to instrument. In Barthes’ case he inscribed mostly Schumann, which he played every morning for his mother—with whom he lived for sixty years. We may physically inscribe our music through touch and sight and hearing as we play, as Barthes says, but we also inscribe it on our bodies when we’re not playing, in the memories and associations—positive and negative—we form with music and take through life.

  At the most literal level, amateur pianists tend to play as adults the music they learned as children, not straying far in terms of repertoire from those individual works that loom disproportionately large in their imagination. Jane Austen, who was born in 1775, was a diligent piano student. She practised every morning before nine, when she prepared a breakfast of tea and toast for her father and the rest of the family.13 The last quarter of the eighteenth century was a time when Beethoven was composing and Mozart famous, but they don’t make it into her novels. Jane’s heroines perform works by Haydn, Hoffmeister, Pleyel and Sterkel—composers whose music she learned as a teenager.14 As a piano student, my holy trinity was Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. In the same way that we are what we eat, we become whom we play. The principle holds true for the professional as well as the amateur musician.

  Amateur. It’s a French word that comes from the Italian amatore, which itself descends from the Latin amator, or lover. In the coy phrasing of the OED, an amateur is someone who is ‘fond of something’ or who ‘has a taste for something’. But fondness seems a rather pastel version of love to me. When I hear the word lover it’s painted in bold primary colours, conjuring messy bedsheets, open mouths, a reward worth vigorous effort. It’s passion, not fondness, that drives the amateur football teams, the needlepoint obsessives, the mobile-phone photographers, the community theatre junkies and the garage bands. The amateur is the person who chooses to spend time practising the thing they love—and more often than not, they’re doing it without hope or expectation of monetary reward, an attitude that today is increasingly regarded with suspicion if not downright hostility. The person who pursues a passion without a plan to ‘monetise’ the skill or knowledge is considered foolish rather than wise. In its adjectival form, amateur is defined by contrast with professional, which is all about getting paid. As a result, the amateur is associated with a lack of skill.

  What the women at my high school reunion did not know was that, having experienced a spectacular failure, I had concluded that I would not—more definitively, could not—become a professional musician. After an adolescence characterised by intensive practice and regular public performance, I had all but renounced my love of the piano. Ever since, I had felt ashamed of being an amateur and could not enjoy playing for its own sake. I had given up all performance opportunities and come to loathe anyone listening to me play; I heard only the gulf between how I used to be able to play, when I practised for hours every day, and how I played now.

  After the reunion, I was tormented by the suspicion that I had made a profound mistake. Though I had lived with a keyboard or an upright piano nearby for most of my adult life, my playing mostly felt half-hearted. When I moved to New York in 2006, there was no longer even a wobbly keyboard in my apartment. Widowhood had made me feel as isolated as I had as an adolescent, hiding in plain sight at the piano in an auditorium full of my peers. Two decades later, the reunion made me suspect that my early dedication to the piano had shaped my life in ways I had not fully understood, and that by cutting myself off from the instrument, I had lost something. After years of self-enforced hibernation, the reunion forced me to recognise that I yearned to connect again—with other people, and with the piano.

  In 1840, the composer and piano teacher Carl Czerny published Letters to a Young Lady, on the Art of Playing the Pianoforte, from the earliest rudiments to the highest state of cultivation. The ideal piano student of the nineteenth century was a marriageable young woman from a respectable family, and at the time of the book’s publication, thousands of them were actively—if not all enthusiastically—learning to play.

  Famous as one of Beethoven’s star pupils, Czerny was a natural self-promoter. The previous year he had published the four-volume Great Pianoforte School, modestly describing it as ‘beyond all comparison the most extensive and complete method for that instrument ever published’. My mother often told me that self-praise is no recommendation, but Czerny’s chutzpah only fanned the flames of his reputation as a teacher. In Letters to a Young Lady he identified an untapped market—young girls who are studying the piano; or, to be more precise, their paying parents—and his fame spread.

  Czerny addresses his ten-part correspondence to an imaginary beginner named Cecilia whom he fantasises to be a ‘talented and well-educated girl of about twelve years old, residing at a distance in the country’. Cecilia’s upper-class parents—who supported her acquisition of keyboard skills as a tactical advantage in the years-long battle to snare an eligible bachelor—agreed with Czerny that ‘pianoforte playing, though suitable to every one, is yet more particularly one of the most charming and honourable accomplishments for young ladies’.15 By the time Czerny capitalised on it, this shtick had been around for nearly a century. In his Encyclopédie, a series of volumes published between 1751 and 1777, the philosopher and critic Denis Diderot listed piano-playing as ‘one of the primary ornaments in the education of women’. The belief was so prevalent that in the 1830s, mass-market reproductions of female music-makers were as widely available as prints of Robert Doisneau’s photograph The Kiss today. For the Cecilias of the world, their amateur musicianship was as ornamental as the pianos t
hemselves, expensive luxury items of domestic furniture that signified wealth and social status.

  In 1774, Goethe’s lovesick hero in The Sorrows of Young Werther was so carried away by his passion for pianist Charlotte that he decided suicide was the only way out of his torment. But a century on, the Victorians made an art out of portraying the piano as an outlet for emotional girls. Edmond de Goncourt described the piano as ‘the lady’s hashish’, while the Reverend Haweis’ bestseller Music and Morals went through sixteen printings, purchased by parents and pastors horrified at the release of pent-up feelings that had no other channel for their expression. In its critical diagnosis, the British Medical Journal attributed to piano practice the ‘chloroses and neuroses from which so many young girls suffer’, turning the human primal responsiveness to music into gendered pathology.

  The girl sitting at a piano was such a potent cultural theme that it was often caricatured. In 1880, the French illustrator and cartoonist Draner drew a woman playing the piano with her right hand, while stirring a pot on the stove with her left.16 The truth of this visual joke was that most girl pianists in the late nineteenth century were not budding minor aristocrats like Cecilia, but daughters of the working class like my grandmother Alice, who was born in Glasgow in 1895—girls who grew up knowing how to play the wooden spoons as well as the piano.

  3

  WHEN SHE SMILED, MY GRANDMOTHER REVEALED a perfect set of false teeth the colour of old piano keys. But she deployed her smile unexpectedly, as an assassin might a concealed weapon. She lived at a place known as One Tree Point, on what in the late 1970s constituted the south-western fringe of Sydney. I dreaded having to visit her. Our epic journeys from Hunters Hill took place on the occasional Sundays when my father made us pancakes for breakfast, as if the sugar sprinkles would sweeten the lemon juice of that long car trip, and longer visit, still ahead.