Girls at the Piano

by Virginia Lloyd

  As a pianist, I had reached an uncommon level of proficiency, and yet I had dismissed my achievement as being without value. There was value in providing accompaniment to the dancers—and the proof of it was that Mrs Dalton paid me for the service. There was value in playing with others, too, but aside from this ballet school job, I had sequestered my musicianship into rigorous private practice and study for my final examination: the gruelling performance diploma, called the Associate of Music Australia.

  During lessons with Mr McFarlane I had begun hearing more frequently about the virtuosic feats of his star pupil, Jonathan Holmes. Now it appeared that nineteen-year-old Jonathan, a year older than I, was preparing for his debut concerto with a local amateur orchestra. ‘Perhaps next year you’ll be ready for that,’ my teacher suggested one afternoon as we hunched over Chopin’s Revolutionary Study. The staves snapped back into focus like the bars of a cage. I had been daydreaming—and not of playing with an orchestra.

  If I’d thought about it seriously, I would have noticed that, outside the extreme demands of the world of classical music, thousands of musicians forged satisfying careers without reaching the level of technical dexterity I had. The most important thing for a musician is having your own voice, your own approach, and sounding like no one else. Guided by my punitive self-talk, by an upbringing that emphasised a pay cheque over creative play, and by my very limited understanding, a life in music just never seemed a possible course of action for me.

  20

  AS ALICE WALKED TOWARDS THE ALTAR of Dowanhill United Free Church on 5 September 1917, in the same pale-grey dress she had worn to sing at Windsor Halls just weeks earlier, she didn’t mind that the wedding she’d never expected to have had been so hastily arranged. Nor was she troubled by the fact that some of those who had known her the longest appeared to have difficulty in feeling genuinely happy for her. As she walked up the aisle on her father’s arm, wearing her grandmother’s pearl earrings and matching choker, all she could see was John Henry Edwards. There he waited, the buttons of his uniform winking as he grinned with pride and anticipation.

  Standing beside the man who would soon be her husband, Alice sensed her own life beginning to blossom at last. She would have time alone with John and discover all the secrets of a honeymoon, before he rejoined the Mameluke next week. Alice’s blood surged in her veins. She had never known such impatience before, or this longing for things she did not yet understand. She did not doubt that John would return safely to her. But for now, Alice’s wait was over.

  When Mrs Edwards sang solo on the first Sunday after John sailed back to the North Sea, not one parishioner among the two congregations who heard her wasn’t moved by the power and devotion in her voice. Alice herself was shocked at the sound she produced. It was as if a secret chamber of emotion had suddenly unlocked, unleashing a depth of feeling that no one, not even the soloist, had imagined had lain dormant inside her modest upright frame.

  21

  IN APRIL 1822, WHEN LUIGI CHERUBINI began work as the new director of the Conservatoire de Paris—then the most esteemed institution of music study in the world—he was shocked to discover there were forty-one women and thirty-two men in the piano performance stream, a combined total that far outweighed students for any other instrument. Cherubini declared the abundance of aspiring virtuosi ‘abusive et pernicieuse’ and enforced a balance of fifteen men and fifteen women.51 Despite his best efforts, women continued to dominate piano studies in many conservatories during the nineteenth century, though for many women this was a professional dead end.

  Women weren’t permitted to join professional orchestras, and Clara Schumann’s public performances were the exception that proved the rule that women concert pianists had almost no career prospects. Nor did specialised training guarantee a woman pianist that she would be a good piano teacher, or that she would be paid well enough to support herself.52 The nineteenth-century piano virtuosa was the terrible progeny of Dr Frankenstein’s monster: a previously unimaginable creature with extraordinary powers, for which there was no corresponding social function.

  In his Letters to a Young Lady, his ideal piano student, Czerny makes no reference to the idea of her teaching. Nor does he mention solo performance, accompanying, or any other method by which Cecilia could earn income. Czerny assumes that Cecilia has a stable home while she secures her financial future; the art of playing the pianoforte was for domestic cultivation and enjoyment only. Czerny could compose and teach, and perform in public, but not Cecilia—her skills were only ever to be employed indirectly in the securing of income. They would serve as the amusesbouche to the main meal: finding a suitable man to marry.

  Musical women without the financial security of a family or a husband were in a much more precarious social and economic position. The one respectable profession available to an unmarried woman was to become a governess. The stories of other fictional nineteenth-century women, such as the orphans Jane Fairfax and Jane Eyre, and Miles Franklin’s Sybella Melvin at the turn of the twentieth, demonstrate how piano skills formed a crucial part of a young woman’s economic value as a governess.

  In Emma, before Jane Fairfax’s secret engagement to Frank Churchill is revealed, she is destined to become a governess. In this exchange between Jane and Mrs Churchill about finding a suitable position, Austen makes clear her thoughts on the subject: ‘“I did not mean,’ replied Jane, “I was not thinking of the slave-trade; governess-trade, I assure you, was all that I had in view; widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies.”’

  The heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847, though set earlier in the nineteenth century) has only a basic competence at the keyboard, but this is combined with her French language skills, her embroidery and her minor works on canvas. Her accomplishments paint her, in the words of her former nurse Bessie, as ‘quite a lady’. If Jane were a real lady of her era, she wouldn’t need to travel alone to Thornfield Hall to teach Mr Rochester’s ward Adèle in exchange for a roof over her head. Having come to hope that she might be the object of Mr Rochester’s affection, Jane learns the painful news of her employer’s visit to the Leas estate, where—according to the housekeeper Mrs Fairfax—he sang duets with the beautiful heiress Blanche Ingram. In order to sober up, Jane forces herself to imagine drawing a chalk likeness of what she sees in the mirror. ‘A more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies,’ she concludes of herself, before setting to work on two portraits: one based on the reported loveliness of Miss Ingram, the other an unvarnished self-portrait in crayon. She titles the latter Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain.

  Charlotte Brontë dedicated Jane Eyre to William Thackeray, whose heroine Becky Sharp, another orphan, makes a giant leap forward for women at the piano by tearing off her velvet gloves. ‘Give me money, and I will teach them,’ declares Becky to Miss Pinkerton in Vanity Fair (1848). In one sentence the enterprising Becky announces herself to be a woman of high ambition and low social standing. In having her teach the aristocratic young ladies among whom she is billeted at Miss Pinkerton’s Academy, the headmistress is hoping to save money. Becky’s classmates and teachers cringe at her insistence on being paid, but she doesn’t think twice about using her piano skills to earn money, and in so doing to assert her financial independence. In this respect, Becky Sharp is an important figure in the genealogy of piano-playing literary heroines: she’s the first to reject the servitude of being a governess and embrace her ability to provide a service with economic value.

  As a teenager I never understood why becoming a governess was such a terrible misfortune. You could read, write, play the piano and have a secure roof over your head. Jane Eyre was settling in pretty comfortably until she fell in love with her boss. But without choice, the life of a governess is one of vulnerability and shame—most vividly demonstrated in My Brilliant Career, in which Sybella Melvin is forced to become gov
erness to the eight children of Peter M’Swat in order to pay off a debt her father incurred.

  Many real musical women across Europe enacted the same small-scale tragedy of market forces suffered by Chekhov’s fictional Ekaterina Ivanovna. The laws of supply and demand applied equally in the concert halls of Vienna and Paris as they did in the small towns of Russia. In the 1881 British Census, 26,000 people counted themselves among the category of ‘Musicians and Music Masters’. The 1911 census records more than 47,000 in the same category.53 Any freelancer can understand the implications.

  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Jane Austen’s heroines played the piano while waiting for marriage proposals. By the end of it, when Ekaterina resigns herself to becoming a governess, piano teaching had become a respectable profession for unmarried women. In fact, teaching was the only opportunity available to the dozens of musically gifted women returning home from years of dedicated study on the Continent. The figure of the spinster piano teacher or governess was perhaps a little to be pitied, though far from rare. The invention and mass production of the piano had led, like all technologies do, to unintended consequences. Those who didn’t nab a husband looked to teaching to earn an income while remaining respectable. Kitten and her cohort found themselves valued at a dime a dozen. The excess supply of talented women created a new musical underclass: the overeducated private piano teacher.

  22

  ‘HELLO, RICHARD, COME ON IN,’ I said to the head of fair hair bent over his satchel at my front door. He gripped the leather bag to his chest as if it were a Homeric shield. I couldn’t imagine what he carried inside it. To get to my house, he had only to descend the driveway from his own home, which perched on the steep hill on the north side of sleepy George Street, and cross to its south side. An odyssey of less than one minute.

  ‘Hello,’ Richard mumbled, his eyes darting in every direction except my face. He stood with his shoulders hunched, as if expecting someone more important to sneak up behind him at any minute. My first task would be trying to get him to relax. I closed the door behind him and set off up the stairs to the piano room, which was still Sitting Quietly after all these years.

  Richard looked so grown up. Though it had been two or three years since I had been this close to him in person, we’d been neighbours all our lives. Most of our recent communication had been conducted in sedan semaphore, hands waving inside the windows of passing cars. He was taller than I’d expected: I was used to seeing him sitting inside a car rather than standing up, and he was only thirteen. Even so, he already dressed like a suburban dad. His sports jacket was ubiquitous among men who looked as though their only relation to physical activity had been to observe it from distant sidelines—men like his father, one of the wealthiest property developers in Sydney. I was unsure whether our mothers’ agreement that I would teach Richard in half-hour increments once a week reflected my mother’s marketing chops, his mother’s faith in my untested teaching ability, or the serendipitous intersection of frugality and geographical convenience.

  Although I had drawn the obvious conclusion that teaching beginners from the comfort of my home was better than any other part-time paying job I could get, Richard was my first student. Like my father, I had a knack for mining endless seams of volunteer work. During high school there had been my work experience stints at two different radio stations and one local newspaper. During the first year of my degree, in the fullest phase of my anxiousness to be useful in the world, I rose willingly at four in the morning in order to drive to the headquarters of a community radio station, where I paraphrased items from the local paper and read them on air every half an hour between 5 and 9 a.m. I had scored this dubious work experience myself. Among my father’s Rotary coterie there were no contacts in the world of magazines and newspapers, where I sometimes fancied myself a budding Lois Lane.

  My mobility at that moonlit hour had been due to my parents’ generous gift of a second-hand Nissan Pulsar hatchback. Having to pay for my own petrol, insurance and registration was a key factor in my capitulation to the idea of teaching beginners. So was my mother’s insistence that I pay her a weekly board now that I had left school. She was unapologetic in viewing my continuing to live under her roof, as she had begun referring to the house I’d grown up in, as an economic transaction. Like the women in the novels I was reading, my mother did not generate an income. Despite advocating my financial independence, she never seemed concerned that she depended entirely on the man she married, as Earth does the sun. The economic exchange they had entered upon marriage was the crucial but invisible element of their ecosystem, rather like oxygen to the survival of the species. My mother’s insistence on my financial contribution to the household—which I thought fair enough—meant I’d have to rustle up a few piano students. That wouldn’t mean that I was, you know, becoming a piano teacher.

  Richard slumped at the piano stool and looked directly ahead, as if waiting for take-off. I sat down behind him and to his right like a copilot. It then occurred to me that I had placed my chair in relation to the piano exactly where Mr McFarlane used to sit in relation to me. It was uncanny to be sitting in the teacher’s seat, watching someone else—my student, no less—play my own piano. Instead of a mirror, it was like a window on an earlier self.

  It was difficult to believe that Mr McFarlane made a satisfying life’s work out of staring at the backs of adolescents, and unimaginable that my stint as a teacher was anything other than temporary. I hadn’t a clue about what I’d eventually do for a living, but the thought of repeating myself was intolerable. Despite my observations of Mrs Dalton’s older ballet students, the idea of doing the same thing year in year out—which is how I thought about everything from gaining a Law degree to raising children—still induced paralysis. If I chose not to think about the future, then it might just fail to show up.

  ‘It might be a bit easier for you to play if you sat up straight, Richard.’

  He pulled himself upright but kept his hands hanging at his sides like levers waiting to be pulled.

  ‘Now, take your right hand and press this note here with your thumb.’

  Richard touched the white note gently, as if it might set off an alarm.

  ‘Do you see how that note is in the middle of the keyboard? We call that note Middle C.’

  He remained silent.

  ‘Try placing your second finger on the note to the right of Middle C—yes, good—and your third finger on the note to its right. Great!’

  Richard stretched his fingers over the notes so tautly that the tips were almost raised off the tarmac, but it didn’t matter. First contact had been made. The correct hand position would come. The piano police would have admonished me for this introduction of hand to keyboard, but Richard was at least five years too old for any passionate dedication to the instrument to stick.

  I experienced a surprising sense of dominion over my student. As the piano teacher I assumed a position of authority that I felt I hadn’t earned but would savour anyway. At least I was earning money. For an eighteen-year-old my habits were expensive, though I didn’t buy illegal drugs or even cigarettes. After my car expenses, my spare change went on live performances by Vince Jones, special-import jazz CDs, and a subscription to The New Yorker. Each issue arrived by boat several weeks after publication, reinforcing my conviction that life was taking place elsewhere, a party to which I not only hadn’t been invited, but which was over before I’d even heard about it. The magazines piled up on the carpet by my bed in a bonsai skyscraper as I dreamed of real ones: the Chrysler Building and Empire State.

  Richard pressed Middle C again and kept his hand hovering over it while the sound died.

  ‘Just like the alphabet has letters, the piano has notes,’ I said. ‘There are seven notes that repeat at different pitches, or levels, up and down the keyboard.’

  Richard said nothing, but bent forward over his hand. It was amazing how he just sat there, listening to everything I said. The authority was int
oxicating.

  ‘I think you’re a little close to the piano, Richard. Try moving the seat back a bit. And remember to sit up str—’

  He raised his hands as if to grab the edge of the piano stool, then they paused midair and shivered. At first I took this for an expression of rebellion, a refusal to accept either the form or the content of my instruction. But I concluded it was anxiety—I’d had no idea he would be so nervous.

  ‘Richard, are you all right?’

  He gave no response, but jerked his head in a precise flicking motion a lawn-watering system might make. I leaned forward to catch his eye, but he was somewhere else. Wherever he had gone, there was no music.

  Prior to the lesson, Richard’s mother had explained they were trialling new epilepsy medication that could have the paradoxical side effect of increasing the frequency of his seizures. Behind his twitching head I glanced at my watch. The lesson was fast disappearing. I had taught him nothing. Richard cradled his head in his hands. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. I let out the breath I’d been holding for the duration of his epileptic fit, somewhere between twenty seconds and two minutes. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked again, for something to say. Thankfully he nodded, keeping his head down as if he wished he could plunge nose-first into the shag pile.

  When Richard politely declined my offer of a glass of water, I decided to proceed as if every student had a seizure during a lesson with me. I got up from my chair and propped open a beginner’s book on the piano’s music shelf. It seemed too much for me to ask Richard’s brain to process new information, but I didn’t know what else to do. He looked up.

  ‘Have you seen music written down before?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. I worried the action might trigger another fit, but the electrical storm in his head seemed to have passed. The rest of his body was eerily still.