In Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mary is the most musically accomplished Bennet sister, but Austen has little patience with her: ‘Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.’ She prefers the heroine, Elizabeth, who ‘had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing half so well.’
The most famous virtuosa of the nineteenth century was Clara Wieck, known as Clara Schumann after her marriage in 1840 to the composer Robert Schumann. Clara’s father, the pedagogue Frederick Wieck, had groomed her from the age of five for a career as a concert pianist. Despite a long and influential career as a performer, she encouraged her daughters Marie and Eugenie to teach rather than become soloists. They worked alongside her as teaching assistants at Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt in the 1880s, helping students not yet at the technical level to study directly with Clara.31 The majority of those wishing to study with the mother had no choice but to study first with one of the daughters—an impressive feminist twist on the Biblical promise of the Son being the only way to the Father.
As an aspiring pianist, Australian author Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson—better known by her pseudonym, Henry Handel Richardson—sailed with her mother via the Cape of Good Hope to the Leipzig Conservatorium in 1888. In Leipzig, Richardson’s loyalty to the piano was tested by her love of literature. It was Tolstoy whom she propped on her music stand to read while she ‘ploughed through the needful but soul-deadening scales and exercises’. In her 1948 autobiography, Myself When Young, Richardson writes of not wanting to disappoint her mother:
Here was I, who had been brought to Leipzig at what, for Mother, represented a considerable outlay; on whose behalf she put up with living abroad, which she detested, among people she didn’t like and whose language she could not master. Yet all this she was willing to endure, provided she might take me back to Australia a finished pianist, there to make not only money but a name for myself.32
A professional pianist, making her living in the country in which she had been born and raised: that was all her mother asked. But she had fallen in love—in Germany, with a penniless intellectual to boot. ‘For me now to blurt out that I didn’t propose to put my training to any use, but, instead, contemplated marrying an insignificant young man, would be a cruel blow to her dreams and ambitions.’33 Like Marina Tsvetaeva, Henry Handel Richardson didn’t become a professional musician or put her studies directly to use; but the love of music travels along winding pathways, and in her case produced fiction in which the piano figured prominently. In her 1908 debut novel, Maurice Guest, she describes the tragedy of a young pianist who arrived in Leipzig in the 1890s, wanting desperately to be a concert artist, only to embark on a self-destructive and ruinous relationship with another musician.
Tsvetaeva’s understanding that she would be a poet, not a musician, came as a relief. Yet it was her relationship with her mother, forged at the piano, that shaped her poetry. Her writing was inextricably linked with music because her mind had been shaped by her mother’s passion for it. The torrent that flowed from her pen over the next thirty years reflected a sensibility that had been immersed in a ‘pianohood’ which replaced her childhood. Reflecting on the hours she spent at the instrument as a child, Tsvetaeva saw that it gave her, as an aspiring poet, a place that was both part of her and apart from her. A way of seeing one thing through another: a double vision in which she could be inside and outside her experience at the same time. To play the piano was a simultaneous act of self-discovery and self-expression, a powerful act of metaphor.
I can only be eternally grateful that neither my mother nor father played the piano, and that they outsourced my instruction to Mrs Wilcox. When I first started learning to play, I was so eager to improve that I sat at the piano daily. Other parents had to force their children onto the piano stool or bribe them with television or ice cream. My parents, who were thrilled simply to be able to afford lessons for their daughter, never applied any pressure on me to practise. I applied more than enough of my own. There was so much internalised pressure that it felt as if there was no pressure at all, because it was there all the time. I rode the tension like a monocycle and never fell off.
9
AT THE FRONT GATE OF MY new high school, I arrived early and staked out a position like a guard dog expecting its master. In my pleated grey hound’s-tooth tunic, my action-back creases ironed to perfection, I waited for my friend Suzanne. As the one girl out of six hundred whom I knew, she had agreed to meet me at the gate and show me around. Thanks to sitting straight-backed at the piano as I practised my scales and arpeggios every day, I stood erect in what I believed was the image of grown-up poise. My dark brown hair was gathered in
