I had mentioned this problem to no one. Shame at my physical limitations as a pianist was a large part of my decision to remain silent, but I had no vocabulary to describe my vague and transitory symptoms. As far as I knew they had no name, and Mr McFarlane had noticed no change in my playing. Nor did it occur to me to withdraw from the competition—finishing things I had started, whether it was a novel or the food on my dinner plate, was a long-ingrained habit. I had agreed to compete with the best of my contemporaries, and I would show up as planned.
‘Athletes of the small muscles.’ That’s what American pianist Leon Fleisher calls professional musicians, who ask extraordinary feats of their fingers and hands. Fleisher was a child prodigy who first performed on the concert stage at the age of eight. After almost twenty years of public performance, the fourth and fifth fingers of Fleisher’s right hand started to curl in on each other as he practised passages of octaves in the Tchaikovsky First Concerto for a forthcoming tour. ‘A hand can take only so much brutalisation before it starts to fight back,’ he writes in his autobiography My Nine Lives. In 1963, with no one to advise him, Fleisher decided to address the problem by practising harder. But his right hand began to feel numb, and his fingers began to cramp. Within a year his career as a concert pianist was over.
Inside the Opera Theatre, which seats 1500, perhaps forty friends and family of my competitors were scattered among the first dozen or so tiered rows behind the orchestra pit. Just twelve of us were playing the Revolutionary Study in competition, and eleven of them were wearing stony faces and Sydney Conservatorium of Music High School uniforms. I realised my solitude was no accident but a strategy to protect me from seeing disappointment in the eyes of those who thought me talented. Despite my regular accompanying, and without being conscious of it, over the course of my high school years I’d grown to associate playing the piano with being alone. It was a safe, controlled, isolated environment. Like a bell-jar.
The first competitor walked on to the stage. He was so petite that a strong gust of wind could have knocked him sideways, but he approached the piano with a confident stride. I wondered if the Conservatorium high school taught him to do that or if it came naturally. When he sat down he spent what felt like a great deal of time adjusting the stool, just as every concert pianist I’d seen had done. Before he’d touched a single note I was completely intimidated.
He executed the Revolutionary Study not only with fire, but also the precision of a machine gun. I hadn’t even played yet and it was all over. As I listened to his faultless interpretation, I diagnosed myself as a fraud. My competitors had chosen to study classical music with such dedication that they had competed successfully for a place at the Conservatorium high school, the main talent pipeline for the Conservatorium of Music. At some critical moment each of these teenagers had decided to pursue classical piano performance exclusively, and had taken what felt to me an almost religious vow by joining the Order of the Conservatorium. The idea of forsaking all other creative possibilities, which was how I regarded their commitment to the classical repertoire, felt like a death. I must have shared a high level of technical skill with my competitors to have propelled me into the ranks of advanced amateurs. But as I heard a succession of good to excellent Chopin interpreters, I understood that their superior ability wasn’t simply a matter of greater dexterity than mine, or more hours devoted to practice: they were passionately attached to their repertoire, whereas Chopin was what I practised in between teaching myself songs by the composers I preferred listening to, such as George Gershwin and Duke Ellington. To perform the Revolutionary Study in public was for me an intellectual challenge rather than an expression of monogamous love. Simply willing myself across the line would never work.
Finally my turn came. I stepped onto the stage of the Opera Theatre and sat at the prow of the gleaming Steinway. I felt the sharp heat of the stage lights on the back of my neck and a cold weight in my abdomen. In the piano’s polished black surface I saw my own reflection. An uncanny sense of familiarity and novelty dazzled me. That long moment before I started playing was the culmination of all the hours and months and years of practice that had brought me here. I had done the work—sometimes joyful, often grinding—that enabled me to compete today. Perhaps I wasn’t at my competitors’ level, but I knew the Revolutionary Study inside out, and in a sense that was enough. My goal was to play the piece through with no mistakes, as if the pain that I had come to associate with this composition had been a hallucination. In The Piano Teacher, Erika Kohut tries to ‘talk a blue streak about interpretation’ to her students, but ‘the only thing the students wish to do is play the piece correctly to the end’. Like me, they ‘are afraid that when they play at the examination, their sweaty, fear-filled fingers…will slip to the wrong keys’. In my focus on technique rather
