10 Ehrlich, The Piano: 92.
11 Roland Barthes, ‘Musica Practica’, in Image Music Text, essays selected and translated by Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977): 149–154.
12 Ehrlich, The Piano: 102.
13 Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (Knopf, 1998): 211.
14 Robert K. Wallace, Jane Austen and Mozart: Classical Equilibrium in Fiction and Music (University of Georgia Press, 1983): 250.
15 Charles Czerny, Letters to a Young Lady, on the Art of Playing the Pianoforte, from the earliest rudiments to the highest state of cultivation: written as an appendix to every school for that instrument, trans. J.A. Hamilton (Firth, Pond & Co., 1851): Preface.
16 James Leggio, Music and Modern Art (Routledge, 2002): 58 n. 31.
17 David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (HarperCollins, 2008): 339. It beat out Victor Lasky, JFK:The Man and the Myth, in the wake of the president’s assassination.
18 Charles M. Schulz, Play It Again, Schroeder! (Ballantine, 2007).
19 Maxim Gorky, quoted in Georg Lukacs’ 1967 Postscript to his own work, Lenin:A Study on the Unity of His Thought (1924).
20 Umberto Eco, ‘On “Krazy Kat” and “Peanuts”’, translated by William Weaver in the New York Review of Books, 13 June 1985.
21 Alexander Wheelock Thayer, Life of Beethoven, volume I, edited by Elliot Forbes (Princeton University Press, 1967): 323.
22 Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts: 348.
23 The words are scribbled across a sketch of composed music from c. 1809, reproduced in Lewis Lockwood, Beethoven: The Music and the Life (Norton, 2005): 281.
24 Glasgow Herald, 25 November 1891.
25 Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: pp. 418–29.
26 All references are to Maria Tsvetaeva, ‘Mother and Music’, pp. 271–294 in Marina Tsvetaeva, A Captive Spirit: Selected Prose, edited and translated by J. Marin King (Ardis, 1980).
27 Yo Tomita, in his essay ‘The Inventions and Sinfonias’, published online at http://www.music.qub.ac.uk/~tomita/essay/inventions.html and used as the liner notes for Masaaki Suzuki’s 1998 recording of the Inventions, quotes this translation from the autograph fair copy in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin but does not identify the translator from the original German.
28 Letter dated 19 Jan 1864, in George Eliot’s Letters, edited by G.S. Height (Yale University Press, 1954).
29 Czerny, Letters to a Young Lady: 26.
30 François Noudelmann, The Philosopher’s Touch: Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the Piano, trans. Brian J. Reilly (Columbia University Press, 2012).
31 Nancy B. Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (Cornell University Press, 1985): 285.
32 Henry Handel Richardson, Myself When Young (W.W. Norton & Company, 1948): 117.
33 Henry Handel Richardson: 117.
34 D.H. Lawrence, ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’, in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (Heinemann, 1936), pp. 133–40: 138.
35 There is a Google Group devoted to the attribution of this description.
36 George Holbert Tucker, Jane Austen the Woman: Some Biographical Insights (Palgrave Macmillan, 1995): 104.
37 Aaron Williamon, ‘Memorising Music’, pp. 113–26, in Musical performance: a guide to understanding, edited by John Rink (Cambridge University Press, 2002): 113.
38 Reich, Clara Schumann: 272.
39 Fred M. Hall, It’s About Time: The Dave Brubeck Story (University of Arkansas Press, 1996): 63.
40 In the Course of Performance: Studies in the World of Musical Improvisation, edited by Bruno Nettle with Melinda Russell (Chicago University Press, 1998): 240.
41 Reich, Clara Schumann: 236 n. 66.
42 Czerny, Letters to a Young Lady: 74.
43 Nettle, In the Course of Performance: 255.
44 Letters dated 10 June and 22 June 1853, in Berthold Litzmann, Clara Schumann: An Artist’s Life Based on Material Found in Diaries and Letters, volume II (Litzmann Press, 2013): n.p.
45 Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: 422.
46 See William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge, 2008).
47 George Eliot, George Eliot’s Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals, edited by John Cross (1885; Cambridge University Press, 2010): 26.
48 Williamon, ‘Memorising Music’: 114.
49 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (Appleton, 1871): 272.
50 Charles Darwin: 272.
51 Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: 335.
52 Parakilis, Piano Roles: pp. 127–28.
53 Ehrlich, The Piano: 97.
54 Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAS_Berrima.
55 Holly Brubach, ‘A Pianist for Whom Never Was Never an Option’, The New York Times, 10 June 2007.
56 E. Altenmüller and H.-C. Jabusch. ‘Focal Dystonia in Musicians: Phenomenology, Pathophysiology and Triggering Factors’, in European Journal of Neurology 2010, 17 (Suppl. 1), pp. 31–36: 33.
57 Schulz, Play It Again, Schroeder!: 69.
58 https://www.findandconnect.gov.au/ref/nsw/biogs/NE01696b.htm
59 Reich, Clara Schumann: 265, n. 65.
60 Terry Eagleton, The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2008): pp. 98–100.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book originated with my enduring love for the piano, which I thank my parents for cultivating. They encouraged my interest in music and bought me that upright Yamaha, which I now play with and for my daughter.
My aunt Charlotte Butler, now 94, has been a generous source of inspiration, documentation, anecdote and insight into her own childhood and the life of her mother Alice.
During the writing process, Ian Hicks buoyed my sometimes flagging spirits in New York with occasional long-distance calls from Hobart to ask after the book’s progress.
I’m very grateful to Geoff Dyer for selecting me to work with him at a residency at the remarkable Atlantic Center for the Arts in 2013—and for the tennis.
Old friends Daniela Fornasaro and Kelsey Bray provided details from adolescence that prodded my own memories or filled in details I had lost, while Derek Van Giesen sustained me at the Oneida with cocktails, meals, music and humour.
Madeleine Beckman, Lily Brett, Madonna Duffy and Jennifer Fleming provided constructive feedback in addition to friendship.
At Allen & Unwin, I was delighted to find a simpatico publisher in Jane Palfreyman. I am particularly indebted to Ali Lavau for an editorial report that helped me see how to get to where I wanted the manuscript to go. And my thanks to Siobhán Cantrill and Kate Goldsworthy for fine-tuning the instrument.
As my friend and mentor, Mary Folliet was unflagging in her support for this project from its earliest stages, and always knew the right questions to ask. Her understanding, encouragement and hospitality were invaluable to the development of this book.
I could not have written this book without the love of Nate
