To the untrained eye, the daunting number of notes in Bach’s Prelude 2 in C Minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier give the appearance of ants crawling over the page. On closer inspection, the ants run rather than crawl, moving allegro almost from beginning to end. They’re well trained, too, running in consistent semiquaver patterns that give every finger work to do. The trick to performing the prelude is to have perfect fingering—so that you never get caught midway through without the best possible finger to play a particular note—and to make sure you don’t start off too quickly. If you begin too fast, then there’s little room for acceleration during the six-bar section towards the end that Bach, with uncharacteristic prescriptiveness, indicated should be played presto.
Of course, nervous tension causes many amateurs to do the opposite, and I was no exception. Particularly in competitions such as the one I was performing in right now, inside a nondescript church hall somewhere on the northern beaches of Sydney. A location where almost every other girl my age was tanning her smooth shaved legs or frolicking in the surf on this hot Saturday afternoon.
But after so much practice, speed didn’t worry me. My main concern was forgetting the notes. Though I had a knack for committing pieces to memory, I spent every solo performance in a bind of conflicting messages from my brain that assured me I wouldn’t forget while at the same time instilling dread at the imminent likelihood of forgetting. I visualised the work in my mind’s eye as my hands scurried over the keyboard, terrified and relieved at every turn.
The biggest threat was to stumble over the fingering, which would interrupt the largely unconscious flow of notes. Hardly any of the countless bits of information committed to memory—not just the notes, but also the structure of the piece, the tempo, the dynamics of how loud and how soft to play at any given moment; when to pause slightly, and when to accelerate just a touch; when to lift my right hand off the keyboard at the end of a phrase; when to depress the sustain pedal that ran a sequence of notes into one another; when to walk smoothly along the notes, legato, or to leap off each one in staccato fashion; and the fingering required, tucking the thumb underneath the index finger here, using the fourth rather than fifth finger there, so as to manage that jump in the next bar—occurred to me consciously while I played a piece from memory. The purpose of memorising is that, ideally, you’re so thoroughly knowledgeable of the composition’s mechanics that you can let your subconscious take them over while you concentrate on the emotional interpretation. To me, getting through a performance without a technical hitch—like the Olympic gymnast who stays upright when she lands that final flip—was the ultimate achievement. It was proof that somehow through intense repetitive practice the music had lifted off the page, flown like Tsvetaeva’s sparrows into the air I breathed, and entered my bloodstream.
Clara Schumann was one of the first virtuosi to perform from memory in public. She had learned to memorise music from an early age, studying with her exacting father. Playing without printed music was sufficiently unusual that when she did so in an 1828 public concert at the age of nine, reviewers commented on the practice—and not favourably.37 Years of publicly performing don’t abate your nerves at the prospect of your memory failing. Decades into her career as a concert artist, Clara confessed to a close friend, the composer Johannes Brahms, her increasing anxiety about performing without music: ‘Though I am often so nervous from one piece to the next,’ she wrote, ‘I cannot make the decision to play from the music; it always seems to me that it is almost as though my wings were clipped.’38 Clara had long been her father’s caged bird. Wieck had trimmed those wings well; she didn’t resort to having the music in front of her, but neither did she forget the notes.
For better and worse, Clara Schumann established the model for the concert instrumental virtuoso—and even for pianists in their earliest years of study—that continues to this day. My father couldn’t have cared less if I played Bach with the music or ‘by heart’, as we used to say. But by virtue of the generations of solo instrumentalists who followed Clara’s example, Mrs Wilcox and now Mr McFarlane had encouraged me to memorise the notes—and, whether or not it contributed much to my musicianship, the practice gave me great satisfaction.
When I returned to my seat after playing the Bach prelude, my father gave me a gentle dig with his elbow. ‘You should have smiled,’ he said, referring to the way I’d pursed my lips when I bowed at the audience. He was sweet, but he had no idea. Eisteddfods are the dog shows of amateur music: the judge evaluates each competitor for how well she conforms to the ideal standard of her breed, rewarding the winner for her proximity to an ideal that may well exist only in the judge’s imagination. Rows of braces conformed to no adjudicator’s ideal pianist.
The next competitor stood from her chair and walked to the stage, her long pale hair resting obediently behind her narrow shoulders. She wore a Laura Ashley paisley-print dress in swirling oceanic colours and a pair of knee-high brown boots that sported a one-inch heel. They may have been synthetic and rubber-soled, but those boots screamed sophistication to me, and they were the last thing my mother would think to buy. (Somehow I had become my toughest censor; I considered it out of the question to tell Mum what I really liked.) The girl’s posture was so straight
