The Spell of the Piano

By the time Frau Lyons came to our house in Wiesbaden to give me my first lesson, I had already fallen under the spell of the piano. When we went visiting, ladies who smelled of lavender whispered to my mother that she really must get me a piano. “She wants to learn, you can see that she already loves the piano.” I was five years old.

The moment I first touched a piano, I understood its power. Inside the piano, the music waited. Outside, my hands had to get ready. The piano waited, a mysterious wooden entity, asleep until its curved top was opened and the right touch released its music.

Frau Lyons was a German lady with soft white hair and Old World manners. Her English husband had died years ago and she gave piano lessons to make ends meet. She wore black dresses and had a sweet, encouraging smile. She started me on Mozart, Bach, and Haydn. I wanted to play them all. In addition to the beginner’s preludes and sonatas, Frau Lyons presented me with music books of less charm—tall, stern, yellow music books containing not gorgeous melodies or resplendent chords, but homework for the hands, scales and arpeggios. I was expected to work through these exercises, over and over, for at least an hour each day. It was my first lesson in how long an hour can be.

The rewards came slowly, and in direct proportion to the hours I spent on those unappealing scales. Once I grew tall enough for my feet to reach the pedals, I learned the joy of making the fierce chords last. For me, the piano was a boulevard to places of complex ecstasy. When I played Mozart, I could feel that he had been there too, exactly in the place that I was—a place he inhabited and invented in his sonatas. These places can only exist when we play his music. The piano was not only a time machine, it presented the possibility of transformation. As often as I played, I was transported.

When it came time in my studies to move further, into Schubert études, Chopin preludes, and Bartók concertos, the slope of mastery steepened. The results of my practice were not quite as sweeping and beautiful. I would need much more work and dedication to make significant progress. Being carried away at the piano was a far cry from playing with great style and virtuosity. Nonetheless I continued, juggling piano practice with new interests in boys, hairstyles, and writing poetry. I augmented my piano practice by singing with the school’s madrigal group, expanding my interest in intricate classical music into vocal performance.

When Frau Lyons retired, I continued on with a new teacher who had many other students. In the back of my mind, I harbored unspoken dreams of performing professionally. At our annual recital, I moved up in the pecking order until I was next to the last on the program, which was almost there, but not quite the top student. Yet that didn’t seem to matter. Until it did. After six years of studies, my piano teacher looked me in the eye and told me gravely, “You’ll never be a concert pianist.”

I was stunned. Was she actually telling me that passion couldn’t be converted into expertise? Actually part of me was relieved. Somewhere inside I had known that my affair with the piano was always one of the heart, not of a concert-quality talent. I made a brisk pivot into the world of voice lessons for another year, and then turned my attention to anthropology, fraternity men, and preparation for grad school.

Even so, to this day if I get anywhere near a piano, I cannot resist sitting down for a rendezvous with my childhood heroes, Mozart and friends. Those early melodies are still in my hands, waiting for the piano to play its part. My teacher was right; I was never destined to play the world’s great stages. But Mozart is mine forever.