Her tone sliced me to my stomach, but already I knew better than to ask if anything was the matter. Nothing ever was.
Years later, I wondered if she felt excluded by my relationship with my father, which was bound up in our love of music. It makes me sad to think that she might have longed for the two of us to share something of our own, and perhaps felt—despite the hours we spent together reading and talking—that we did not. So calling out to her from my piano stool wasn’t for coaching or technical improvement: it was for reassurance that she remained pleased. It was she for whom I played, her approval that I sought. The need to hear my mother’s brief encouragements was insatiable. Our ritual of call and response provided regular confirmation that everything was still all right.
I am grateful to my mother for teaching me to keep my ears open at all times for nuance and imminent catastrophe. I developed a finely honed sixth sense for when a musician needs reassurance about when precisely to come in again after several measures of rest, or a subtle advance sounding of the note she is due to sing. Which phrases need extra punctuation, or where in the score the soloist is likely to start running ahead of the tempo. My capacity for attentive listening, when paired with the sight-reading, made me a popular accompanist.
Away from the piano, I was less charismatic. At Hunters Hill Public School, Greta Mitchell wielded social power over me like my mother did in every other aspect of my life. Recently Greta had excommunicated me from her circle without warning. Somehow she had the authority to decide who was in and who was out, as if by being in the same group of friends we formed a scale whose notes only she knew. I was devastated: I looked up to Greta, who had olive skin and played the cello. But she no longer wanted to make even the slightest eye contact with me. When my mother sometimes stopped talking to me or pointedly refused eye contact, I knew, deep down, that her silent withdrawal—those hours and days that felt as if they lasted for weeks—would end eventually. She never explained her silences, though I understood that I had done something wrong. Greta didn’t explain herself, either, but her decision was final. At home I cried at the piano and sobbed into Gail’s matted hair.
‘What a lot of rot!’ my mother exploded when I explained through tears what had happened. ‘Why do you want Greta to be your friend, for god’s sake? Get yourself some new friends.’ The concision and force of her blast stunned me as if I had been wounded. She turned back to the kitchen sink, where potatoes awaited peeling.
What more was there to say, even if I could have found my voice? Empathy was in short supply around our house, whether you were a permanent resident or, like the piano tuner, just visiting. Clearly, the things I felt or had trouble explaining weren’t for telling other people but for keeping to myself. I’d learned my lesson, and I’d never share anything important with my mother again. ‘To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly perhaps but differently,’ Virginia Woolf’s heroine Rachel Vinrace concludes in The Voyage Out. ‘It was far better to play the piano and forget all the rest.’ Like Rachel, I stayed quiet except at the piano, where my fingers spoke with increasing confidence and fluency.
Behind most talented girls at the piano is a highly influential mother. Maria, the mother of Marina Tsvetaeva, was a gifted amateur pianist. But Maria’s father refused her ambition to pursue a professional music career, objecting to the idea of women performing in public. In this attitude Mr Tsvetaeva agreed with most people of the Victorian era, who regarded the stage as next door but one to the brothel. In Miles Franklin’s 1901 novel My Brilliant Career, on learning that Sybylla Melvyn entertains notions of taking singing instruction and ‘going on the stage’, her grandmother says insistently: ‘promise me you will never be a bold, bad actress’.
In ‘Mother and Music’, Marina Tsvetaeva writes about how her mother transferred her professional goal to her daughters. Marina wasn’t the boy whom her mother expected to deliver in 1892. From the moment of her birth, she became her mother’s plan B: ‘When, instead of the longed-for, predetermined, almost preordained son Alexander, all that was born was just me, mother, proudly choking back a sigh said: “At least she’ll be a musician.”’
Poor Marina. At least my mother’s psychic had been able to confirm my gender and musical tendencies prior to my birth. Great expectations are best managed in advance. Marina’s thwarted mother told her: ‘My daughters will be the “free artists” I wanted so much to be.’ And then she forced Marina, the one daughter who showed some natural aptitude for music, to practise for hours daily from the age of four.
‘You’ll sit through your two hours—and like it!’ Marina reports Maria saying to her in the tone other mothers might reserve for the eating of vegetables. Nothing is free, least of all freedom.
In 1906 Marina was headed straight for the Moscow Conservatory when her mother died of tuberculosis. The budding poet-pianist was fourteen. ‘I certainly would have finished at the Conservatory and emerged a fine pianist,’ she reflected almost thirty years later, ‘for the essential capacities were there.’ Instead she became a writer and composed ‘Mother and Music’ as a prose tribute to the fierce ambivalence of the love between mother and daughter. ‘After a mother like that I had only one alternative: to become a poet,’ she writes.
Maria’s high ambition for her daughter to become a concert pianist is radically different from the common expectations of women pianists held throughout the nineteenth century, when it was believed they should be competent but not
