As my shift wore on into the early evening and the girls grew taller and older, I couldn’t deny the physical benefits that years of ballet lessons and home-based practice had effected in their adolescent bodies. Looking at the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old swans from the corner of my eye, I could see that their training had literally shaped the young women they would become. All those countless exercises and repetition to drill technique into their minds and muscles would influence both the shape of their thighs and their capacity to do the work required to reach any goal they set themselves.
Despite my serious piano study, I had developed a strong aversion to repetition as a way of rejecting the routines of my own childhood. Now I saw that repetition—the self-discipline and satisfaction accrued in days, weeks, months and years of activity and practice—could be, in and of itself, honourable. I had interpreted Mrs Dalton’s self-presentation as a passive resistance to change—she still wore her straight grey hair in the same severe style, blunt cut at her collarbone, and she still stood at the front of her classes in third position—but suddenly I saw her, solid and implacable, as part of a continuum of knowledge. Her life had been shaped by ballet, and she had chosen to pass on her expertise to generations of future dancers. Teaching was a manifestation of personal value, and repetition its necessary and active expression. This was as true at the barre as it was at the piano, on the tennis court, in my father’s fundraising efforts and even in my mother’s domestic routines.
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
