Girls at the Piano

repertoire from those individual works that loom disproportionately large in their imagination. Jane Austen, who was born in 1775, was a diligent piano student. She practised every morning before nine, when she prepared a breakfast of tea and toast for her father and the rest of the family.¹³ The last quarter of the eighteenth century was a time when Beethoven was composing and Mozart famous, but they don’t make it into her novels. Jane’s heroines perform works by Haydn, Hoffmeister, Pleyel and Sterkel—composers whose music she learned as a teenager.¹⁴ As a piano student, my holy trinity was Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. In the same way that we are what we eat, we become whom we play. The principle holds true for the professional as well as the amateur musician.

Amateur. It’s a French word that comes from the Italian amatore, which itself descends from the Latin amator, or lover. In the coy phrasing of the OED, an amateur is someone who is ‘fond of something’ or who ‘has a taste for something’. But fondness seems a rather pastel version of love to me. When I hear the word lover it’s painted in bold primary colours, conjuring messy bedsheets, open mouths, a reward worth vigorous effort. It’s passion, not fondness, that drives the amateur football teams, the needlepoint obsessives, the mobile-phone photographers, the community theatre junkies and the garage bands. The amateur is the person who chooses to spend time practising the thing they love—and more often than not, they’re doing it without hope or expectation of monetary reward, an attitude that today is increasingly regarded with suspicion if not downright hostility. The person who pursues a passion without a plan to ‘monetise’ the skill or knowledge is considered foolish rather than wise. In its adjectival form, amateur is defined by contrast with professional, which is all about getting paid. As a result, the amateur is associated with a lack of skill.

What the women at my high school reunion did not know was that, having experienced a spectacular failure, I had concluded that I would not—more definitively, could not—become a professional musician. After an adolescence characterised by intensive practice and regular public performance, I had all but renounced my love of the piano. Ever since, I had felt ashamed of being an amateur and could not enjoy playing for its own sake. I had given up all performance opportunities and come to loathe anyone listening to me play; I heard only the gulf between how I used to be able to play, when I practised for hours every day, and how I played now.

After the reunion, I was tormented by the suspicion that I had made a profound mistake. Though I had lived with a keyboard or an upright piano nearby for most of my adult life, my playing mostly felt half-hearted. When I moved to New York in 2006, there was no longer even a wobbly keyboard in my apartment. Widowhood had made me feel as isolated as I had as an adolescent, hiding in plain sight at the piano in an auditorium full of my peers. Two decades later, the reunion made me suspect that my early dedication to the piano had shaped my life in ways I had not fully understood, and that by cutting myself off from the instrument, I had lost something. After years of self-enforced hibernation, the reunion forced me to recognise that I yearned to connect again—with other people, and with the piano.

In 1840, the composer and piano teacher Carl Czerny published Letters to a Young Lady, on the Art of Playing the Pianoforte, from the earliest rudiments to the highest state of cultivation. The ideal piano student of the nineteenth century was a marriageable young woman from a respectable family, and at the time of the book’s publication, thousands of them were actively—if not all enthusiastically—learning to play.

Famous as one of Beethoven’s star pupils, Czerny was a natural self-promoter. The previous year he had published the four-volume Great Pianoforte School, modestly describing it as ‘beyond all comparison the most extensive and complete method for that instrument ever published’. My mother often told me that self-praise is no recommendation, but Czerny’s chutzpah only fanned the flames of his reputation as a teacher. In Letters to a Young Lady he identified an untapped market—young girls who are studying the piano; or, to be more precise, their paying parents—and his fame spread.

Czerny addresses his ten-part correspondence to an imaginary beginner named Cecilia whom he fantasises to be a ‘talented and well-educated girl of about twelve years old, residing at a distance in the country’. Cecilia’s upper-class parents—who supported her acquisition of keyboard skills as a tactical advantage in the years-long battle to snare an eligible bachelor—agreed with Czerny that ‘pianoforte playing, though suitable to every one, is yet more particularly one of the most charming and honourable accomplishments for young ladies’.¹⁵ By the time Czerny capitalised on it, this shtick had been around for nearly a century. In his Encyclopédie, a series of volumes published between 1751 and 1777, the philosopher and critic Denis Diderot listed piano-playing as ‘one of the primary ornaments in the education of women’. The belief was so prevalent that in the 1830s, mass-market reproductions of female music-makers were as widely available as prints of Robert Doisneau’s photograph The Kiss today. For the Cecilias of the world, their amateur musicianship was as ornamental as the pianos themselves, expensive luxury items of domestic furniture that signified wealth and social status.

In 1774, Goethe’s lovesick hero in The Sorrows of Young Werther was so carried away by his passion for pianist Charlotte that he decided suicide was the only way out of his torment. But a century on, the Victorians made an art out of portraying the piano as an outlet for emotional girls. Edmond de Goncourt described the piano as ‘the lady’s hashish’, while the Reverend Haweis’ bestseller Music and Morals went through sixteen printings, purchased by parents and pastors