James and Charlotte had the excuse of visiting Nance and her family in Newcastle, but their decision to accompany Alice strikes me as a conscious if belated effort at protection and supervision. I’m not convinced they weren’t suspicious that Alice was capable of disappearing—whether by melting into the crowds on her arrival at the Port of Sydney, or by throwing herself into the steely depths of the Atlantic.
26
AT NINETEEN, THE EXAMINATION FOR AN Associate of Music Diploma in Piano Performance loomed on the horizon as prominently as my virginity. A handsome 24-year-old tennis coach had recently offered to seduce me. His tone was that of a man bestowing a great favour, as if my innocence were as easily unzipped as the cover of my wooden Chris Evert racquet. Reader, I wish I could say that I let him, but I was too uptight to return his volley. Madame Bovary used her piano lessons as a ruse to meet her lover; but I used mine as a sublimation of lessons of an altogether different kind.
I channelled my sexual curiosity into piano study, interrogating the pieces my teacher had selected from the works considered suitably challenging by faceless music bureaucrats for the award of diploma. Mr McFarlane was best placed to identify those that suited my temperament and my technique. The A-Mus., as we abbreviated it, was of a different order of magnitude from the annual grade exams: to be eligible for the diploma, the candidate must have completed satisfactorily all grade exams in performance as well as a certified level of music theory. As I approached the summit of amateur musicianship, the sudden rise in the expected level of technical skill induced in me a kind of musical vertigo. A chiselled jaw or a pair of well-developed shoulders would only have caused my concentration to slip.
Frédéric Chopin’s twelfth étude, known as the Revolutionary Study, opens with a declamatory five-note chord in the right hand and a run of semiquavers descending rapidly in the left. Like all études, this is a composition specifically designed to strengthen a pianist’s technique. The demanding work isn’t known as the Revolutionary for nothing. The Polish composer wrote it in despair on learning that the November 1830 Warsaw uprising, led by a group of young military officers against the occupying Russian Army, had failed. Chopin directs the pianist to play allegro con fuoco, or cheerfully with fire, which I interpreted as a highly ambivalent instruction along the lines of grin and bear it.
To open the Revolutionary Study was to encounter the sobering truth that despite more than ten years spent learning the language of music, some works required a native speaker’s fluency that was still beyond my reach. There were too many notes to get under my fingers for me to imagine ever being able to play the piece with feeling and musicianship—let alone cheerfully, or with fire. Which was a bit of a problem considering I was set to perform it in competition at the Sydney Opera House in six months.
My emotional connection to the work was another challenge. I had got a long way on the combination of attention to detail, an obsession with technical improvement, and self-discipline. Despite my ability, the gap between technique and feeling had widened. I was struggling to fake a passionate attachment to the works I studied intensively. Performing Brahms, Bartók and Mozart for my annual exams was an exercise in displaying myself for third-party judgement on a functional, specialised level. Every year my examiners praised my ability to memorise long works and included marks for ‘expression’, but to my ears the production of a feeling—melancholy, passionate or militaristic—smacked always of artifice and cultivation. I knew how to produce the sound of such a feeling, irrespective of whether I felt it. This to me seemed a detached and cynical approach to music that I felt I should have loved intensely; it was little wonder that I considered myself a fraud at the piano. When playing the works of composers for whom I had the greatest affinity—Bach and Beethoven—it seemed on the contrary that my innate love of their structures and harmonies led me to express myself too much, so that I was always having to rein myself in.
Most interpreters of the Revolutionary Study focus on the technical demands made of the performer’s left hand. These demands require the seamless legato playing of semiquaver passages that distinguishes a real pianist from a hack. My instinctual response to the challenge of there being too many notes and not enough time was still to rush through learning the piece as though I were frantically completing some last-minute Christmas shopping. It didn’t matter whether I was eating, reading a novel or walking, I was always in a hurry. At the piano I couldn’t understand anything in part unless I had first awkwardly embraced the whole. Beyond the piano stool, in the real world, I barely said boo without first carefully pondering the implications of a syllable. But at the piano I was cavalier and careless, riding roughshod over the delicate intricacies of melody, harmony and rhythm just to play the complete work poorly with both hands. Too often during practice my lazy fourth and fifth fingers would ride in the slipstream of their stronger siblings. Missed notes and wrong notes were the inevitable result.
‘This is too difficult,’ I finally complained to Mr McFarlane. It was one of the few times in our seven years together that I admitted what I felt about any of the pieces I studied with him. Intimacy was a kind of music I had yet to practise in public—or anywhere, really.
‘No, it’s not,’ he said.
Clearly not every teacher remembers his first time with the Revolutionary Study. He sat behind me in a chrome chair upholstered in fuzzy grey carpet, a benevolent dictator fallen on hard times. And like Mr McFarlane himself, the new chair was wider than the rickety wooden one
