My grandmother’s brief career in music was a tantalising and inexplicable development. The few odd pieces of Alice’s puzzle that I possessed formed no coherent picture; instead, they created a portrait defined by what was missing. Suddenly I felt pulled toward Alice by what little I knew and an urgent desire to find other parallels between our experiences as musical girls. I wanted to use her scant biographical record to explore these parallels, and the ways in which our experiences reflected those of other girls drawn from the pages of history and fiction—aristocrats and spinsters, entrepreneurs and writers—who had sat at the piano over the course of its history. I came to believe that setting aside Alice’s frightening mask of old age might help me to understand my own voyage around the piano—and help me to find my way back.
4
MY FIRST PIANO WAS A BABY GRAND. I loved the instrument’s glossy black lid, the clink of its metal keys, and the way it was light enough for me to tuck under my left arm. It would definitely have been the left arm because at five years of age I sucked my right thumb with a degree of attachment that not even my favourite toy could compete with. Security Is a Thumb and a Blanket, according to Peanuts comic-strip creator Charles Schulz’s book of the same name. There must have been something to his claim because the book outsold two volumes on the John F. Kennedy assassination to become the second biggest-selling book of 1963.17 But blankets were for babies. For me, security was a thumb and a miniature piano.
The only toy pianist—or any kind of pianist—of my acquaintance was Charlie Brown’s friend Schroeder. We seemed to be around the same age but judging by his technical facility Schroeder must have started playing as soon as he emerged from the womb. I was encouraged that he could produce such exquisite music from his instrument, because it was exactly the same shape, colour and dimensions as mine. He was so good that he hardly ever referred to printed music and never needed to practise, and yet he practised all the time. It was from the blond boy-genius that I learned to crouch at my toy piano: back bent over, shoulders hunched up around my ears, legs crossed, fingers dropping from my hands held high and close together like pedigree paws.
Schroeder’s appearances were the second-best thing about the Peanuts comics and television specials, which I watched sitting on the olive-brown linoleum floor, Gail’s decapitated head in my lap and my thumb in my mouth. Above Schroeder’s voluminous golden hair a series of black squiggles and lines and symbols sometimes materialised. Despite having never seen written music before, I understood that somehow the lines and dots represented the sounds that Schroeder produced at his toy piano. Did he know what each dot and line meant? How had he learned that? I watched Schroeder’s little fingers chase each other all over the keys as the score—which Charles Schulz faithfully transcribed—keeps pace with him, one or two bars at a time. It seemed both beautiful and incredibly difficult.
If Schroeder’s taste had mirrored Schulz’s, we would associate the child prodigy with a love of Brahms. But for the purposes of the cartoon strip, ‘Beethoven was funnier,’ he admitted.18
Lying on his back on the piano lid, Snoopy reaches up to plant a big kiss on Schroeder’s nose. ‘You never know how Beethoven is going to affect someone,’ he says.
Schroeder wasn’t alone in respecting the emotive potential of Beethoven’s music. Lenin listened to the ‘Appassionata’ piano sonata number 23 every day, though he thought it was too much of a distraction. He famously walked out of a performance of the work, saying, ‘If I keep listening to Beethoven’s Appassionata, I won’t be able to finish the revolution.’19
Leo Tolstoy suspected that Beethoven’s virtuosic ‘Kreutzer’ sonata for piano and violin could arouse a murderous passion. In 1889 Tolstoy wrote out his fear in the novella The Kreutzer Sonata, in which the narrator Pozdnyshev murders his accompanist wife out of jealousy over her musical relationship with the male violinist while they rehearse and perform that work.
Happily in the world of Peanuts, all Schroeder had to worry about was the unwanted attention of Lucy van Pelt. In the stage play You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Lucy confesses to Schroeder while he plays Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ sonata that it’s always been her dream to marry someone who plays the piano. As soon as he reaches the end, he frowns at Lucy and walks away. I couldn’t blame him—why any little girl would be thinking about getting married was beyond me. When Lucy replaces Schroeder’s portrait of Beethoven with a framed picture of herself, Schroeder goes berserk. He may be able to ‘save…himself from everyday neuroses by sublimating them in a lofty form of artistic madness’, as Umberto Eco has suggested,20 but he could not play Lucy away. Undaunted, she shrugs, remembering the wise words of her aunt Marion, who told her, ‘Never try to discuss marriage with a musician.’
Watching these child-adults as a child, I was exasperated by Lucy’s refusal to leave Schroeder alone to practise. How could you improve with someone like her around? All she ever wanted to do was go outside and play. Schroeder knew that to be an excellent pianist you had to do it alone, without anyone bothering you, spend lots of time practising, and not worry that you were missing out on anything. Schroeder was my introduction to the physical and social isolation necessary to become an instrumental virtuoso.
From Monday through Saturday the talkback radio presenters shouted in the background of our family life like angry gods, but for one morning each week my mother allowed the wireless, as she called it, to be switched off. My parents obeyed their day of rest with their
