‘You’ll get there,’ he’d say, ‘just take it one day at a time.’ But I was tiring of his clichéd encouragements. I might as well have complained to my parents: their uniform response to any expression of frustration or difficulty was the highly irritating ‘You’ll figure it out.’ Even though they were mostly right, I had concluded long ago that asking anyone for help was futile.
I continued practising daily, coaxing the reluctant fingers of my left hand to gain fluidity and evenness in playing the Revolutionary Study’s long semiquaver passages. Oscar Wilde quipped that ‘the typewriting machine, when played with expression, is not more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation’, and on reflection my repetitive keyboard exercises must have been one of the banes of my brother’s adolescence. But no sooner had I surmounted the difficulty of the left-hand part than I realised the semiquavers’ dense trees obscured the forest of an even greater challenge: the chord clusters in my right hand that announced the stirring main melody.
With typically dramatic flair, Chopin enunciated the melody in chords for the right hand of between three and five notes played at once, spread over the reach of an octave. That means my right thumb and little finger played the melody using two notes—actually the same note, eight notes apart—while my second, third or fourth fingers played the remaining notes of any complex chords. When the piece is performed properly, the effect is of a bell-like clarity from the obedient multi-voiced choir of the pianist’s right hand. But achieving this effect isn’t nearly as easy as it may sound. The melodic chord passages demand a dual function of the one hand. While my ‘outside’ fingers were occupied in hitting the melody notes with precision, my second, third and fourth fingers had either to step high above the keyboard, like a woman lifting the hem of her dress above the muck, or to stretch up and out over the notes as written, like a can-can dancer wearing the same dress. All of it at precisely the right tempo and at a volume that ranged from the softest piano to the loudest forte, or in the case of this work, sforzando.
There was no getting around the main problem: my right hand was too small for the job. My battered copy of J.S. Bach’s Two-Part Inventions is dotted with my first teacher’s amended notation for seven-year-old hands that could not yet stretch to a single octave. I often suspected that Johann Sebastian—whose pudgy face beneath a ridiculous wig stared out at me from the cover—was not impressed by his exercises being rewritten so that I could splay my undisciplined fingers across the modern keyboard. Now, although my fingers were extremely disciplined, the Revolutionary Study demanded that my right hand play four and five notes simultaneously across an octave. This required the dexterity of a crab’s claws and a handspan of ten notes. In every sense of the word, it was a stretch.
About three months before the competition, a fleeting sensation of tightness in my right forearm began to come and go during my daily practice sessions. It usually appeared when I played a lot of fast notes, and sometimes during the running octaves in the Revolutionary Study. The feeling was most like muscle soreness, as if I had hit too many practice serves on the tennis court. Yet I thought little of it because the strain always receded. To interpret the Chopin with authority, or to hang an Associate of Music Diploma above my desk, meant many hours of training each week. The countless repetitions of the muscles of my hands, strenuously exerting themselves on the most unnatural of movements, was what being a serious piano student was all about.
The idea that some physical discomfort was the inevitable by-product of intensive practice felt natural to me. If the tightness disappeared as soon as I stopped playing, that meant I was working hard. Surely this was a good thing. In the house I grew up in, industriousness ran a close second to cleanliness. After so many years of discipline, it never occurred to me that my technique could be faulty. Assuming that such an error could be observed, I trusted that Mr McFarlane would have seen and corrected it. I deduced that my right forearm was fatigued from practising the consecutive octaves, and that I needed to accept and endure it. There was no point in mentioning it. What could my teacher do except express sympathy?
I also suspected that I was exaggerating the pain I had begun to feel. I had recently played the Revolutionary Study for my father’s Rotary Club to give the work a public trial run one month out from the eisteddfod. Artistically, my performance had as much revolutionary spirit as a can of Coke, but it went off without a technical hitch. Maybe the stiffness in my arm was all in my head.
The Chopin competition was scheduled to begin in a half-hour or so. I had hopped on the 506 bus to Circular Quay as if I travelled there every day, and arrived with plenty of time to turn myself into a nervous wreck. As I slowly made my way along the curving promenade towards the Opera House, my empty bladder insisted it was full. Perhaps I could register for the competition then hide in a toilet stall until show time. On my left, the green and gold ferries nodded encouragement from their watery berths. My black pants felt tight, and I fretted that the lines of my underpants would be visible beneath the stage lights.
Over the days leading up to the competition, the tension in my forearm had become increasingly severe. I’d hoped the sensation would go away of its own accord, but the tightness began seizing the muscles of my right forearm within minutes of practising
