Out of Tune (6 page)

This went on almost every night for two years. It was as if my brother couldn’t catch on at all. Then one night, to our complete
surprise, after his previously almost unbelievable nonrecognition and non-comprehension of the music, David suddenly burst
forth and found he could play the Polonaise in A-flat by Chopin, a very difficult piece that has two pages of octaves repeated
in the middle section. As a pianist myself, I know how technically demanding this is even for an adult.

For a child of eight to play it so well was astonishing. I’ve never witnessed anything like it. It was as though David had
started with no talent and gone on to win a medal at the Olympics. Even now in my work as a piano teacher, though I regularly
see the way some children take an inordinate amount of time distinguishing notes whereas other children grasp them immediately,
David’s dramatic change in musical ability strikes me as exceptional. Having struggled in vain to learn even the most basic
notation, David suddenly blossomed into playing difficult pieces superbly—it all seemed to fall into place. After that, he
took off like a rocket; his hands performed brilliantly. As he put it some years later: “My fingers suddenly got hot.”

Even before his breakthrough, when as a child of five or six in Melbourne my father first started to teach him, David had
an absolute passion for the piano. During our time at primary school, we would come home fairly early and David would rush
off to the piano and start tinkling away. Then at night he couldn’t wait to be at the piano again for his lessons with my
father. He certainly wasn’t the kind of a child who had to be told, “Oh you must practice, and practice every day.” I, on
the other hand, had to be reminded to practice by my father and I was always making excuses about having other things to do.
But David was completely in love with the piano from the minute he could touch the keys. He was both entranced and seduced
by the sounds he could produce. The fact that he was having difficulty distinguishing the notation didn’t make any difference;
the love was already there.

After David’s miraculous breakthrough, his passion intensified. He was intoxicated by the music: you literally couldn’t keep
him away from the piano. The lessons with Dad were fun and not very serious—he wanted us, above all, to enjoy playing. David
would discuss the music with my father, who would ask him questions or point out features in the music. Dad used to say that
each note is like a diamond. “It’s an important note, don’t skip over it. It’s like a gem, let it shine out.” David and my
father had a wonderful rapport at the piano.

That was the beginning of David’s musical career. From then on he went from success to success. He could play virtually anything,
however technically difficult. My father began to take us to small musical competitions. These were known in Perth by their
Welsh term,
eisteddfods
, and were made up of different levels for different age groups. David and I would enter these competitions together, frequently
as a duet. My father had built a long piano seat so that David and I could practice duets, and also so that my father and
David could sit on the same seat and my father could guide David as he was learning.

David and I loved playing duets. Among our favorites were the “Jamaican Rumba” by Arthur Benjamin, “Schwanda the Bagpiper”
(which comes from an opera by Prague-born composer Jaromir Weinberger, who based many of his melodies on Czech folk tunes),
and classical duets by Mozart, Weber, and the German-born Danish pianist Friedrich Kuhlau. Obviously we aimed to do well,
and I still possess some of the diplomas that we won, both playing separately and when we triumphed together. But in general,
they were gentle little affairs, where taking part was as important as winning.

Usually at the
eisteddfods
there would be a set piece for all the contestants in each particular level. For example, twenty eight-year-olds would each
play the same set Minuet in G Major by Bach, which is a relatively simple piece. On other occasions, contestants were allowed
to choose their own music. One such event, shortly after David’s breakthrough, is portrayed in a scene near the beginning
of
Shine
. David had entered the competition for nine-year-olds, which was not, of course, of a particularly high standard. But, to
everyone’s amazement, my brother went to the piano and played the Polonaise in A-flat. The packed hall went silent. You could
have heard a pin drop. Nobody present could believe what they had heard.

The winner of this level was announced before the evening ended. David had undoubtedly performed best; he was head and shoulders
above everybody else. But the judges said that it wouldn’t be fair to the other children to give David the prize. “It would
be like judging a primary school math class by the standard of Einstein,” said one. They only wished to judge the children
by a standard that was appropriate to that group. So even though they said that they were extraordinarily impressed with David,
they gave the prize to someone else. In other words, David had been disqualified for being too good.

My father was absolutely flabbergasted by this reasoning, since David had won fair and square. He decided that it was time
to leave. He took us by the hand, and we walked off home. It was not, however, as shown in this and other scenes in
Shine
, with my father deliberately walking ahead of David. Dad always walked with us. He never stomped off in front of us. He was
annoyed not because he regarded winning as all-important, but because he felt upset for David, who had played so beautifully
and was feeling upset and confused at having been deprived of the prize. I remember feeling just as David and my father did.

Later we received a letter telling us that at the end of that evening the judges had decided to create a special prize just
for David and that he had been awarded one guinea, which was an enormous amount of money for an
eisteddfod
. (At that time Australia still used the old British currency and hadn’t yet introduced Australian dollars.)

In the scene in
Shine
based on this
eisteddfod
, the actress playing my sister Suzie, seeing my father stomping angrily down the street, asks the actress who plays me: “Did
he win or lose?” And I reply apprehensively: “He lost. Now we’ll cop it.” But in reality my father never stressed winning
competitions, only doing one’s best. As with virtually every other line attributed to “Margaret” in
Shine
, I certainly never said “we’ll cop it” or anything of the kind.

My father taught us until I was about eleven and David was about nine. After David’s breakthrough, my father felt he had taught
us all he knew, and set about finding us a professional piano teacher. He read in a local Perth newspaper about Sue Tilley,
a pianist who had received extensive training abroad and who had recently come back to Perth after working as a musician overseas.
He rang her up and she suggested we come and see her. Having heard David and myself play, and been very impressed, she put
us in touch with a music teacher friend of hers, Frank Arndt. When Frank heard us play, he was so excited by the standard
we had reached for our ages that he agreed to take us on as pupils even though my father couldn’t afford his fees. My father
was extremely grateful to him for this.

So Frank became our main piano teacher, and he is the man on whom the character of Mr. Rosen in
Shine
is based. Except that in reality, far from Mr. Rosen suggesting we have professional piano lessons and my father being very
reluctant to agree (as is depicted in
Shine
), it was my father himself who wanted us to have proper tuition and set about finding us a teacher. And at no stage was there
the kind of animosity between my father and Frank as there was between my father’s character and Mr. Rosen in the film.

David and I used to go together to Frank for our lessons. The first few times my father took us there, and then we went by
bus on our own. Frank, who was then in his late twenties, lived with his parents in a large house near the University of Western
Australia. He owned a beautiful maroon-colored Citroën car—it was a great treat when Frank took us for a drive in it. We felt
like royalty. He also had a huge Labrador dog, which was bigger than I was and made me very nervous. David and I always held
hands tightly when it bounded up to us as we went in the front door.

I remember the beautiful rosebushes and flowers in Frank’s garden. By coincidence, the Arndt family gardener, Harry Millson,
whom we used to see at the house, is now my mother’s very good friend and companion in Perth. My mother and Harry met at a
pensioners’ social gathering, where they renewed their acquaintance. Their respective spouses both passed away some years
ago, and Harry (at the ripe old age of eighty-nine) and my mother (who is seventy-seven) now regularly go out dancing and
play bingo together.

We were taught by Frank for about four years. He was a great teacher, a wonderful person, and a marvelous musician. He deserves,
together with my father, much of the credit for David’s development as a pianist.

On a visit I made to Australia in 1996, after
Shine
had already been released there, Frank heard that I was in town and invited me to lunch. When we met it became clear that
he did not just want to renew our acquaintance after so many years, but also to discuss
Shine
, which he said had dismayed him. He was extremely upset, he said, at the way in which Peter Helfgott was portrayed. “Your
father was not like that at all,” he reassured me, knowing that I had also been unhappy about the film. “He was one of the
most gentle, nicest, and charming men I have ever come across.” (No doubt fearing the strength of objections about the antagonistic
relationship he had created between my father and David’s music teacher, Scott Hicks changed Frank Arndt’s name to Ben Rosen
in the film.)

Under Frank’s tutelage, David had made a lot of progress by the time he was twelve and he didn’t seem to have any problem
in learning difficult pieces. David was always practicing, so all his siblings would absorb the melodies of various concertos
by constant exposure to them. I would hum a tune from one of them around the house as a matter of course, in the same way
as a child today might sing something from MTV.

David used to perform at the Capitol Theater, which was then Perth’s main concert venue and the seat of the West Australian
Symphony Orchestra. (The Capitol has now been demolished and replaced by the Perth Concert Hall.) The whole family would go
and hear him play and it was a thrilling experience for us all. We had to ensure David looked good and was properly dressed
for such grand occasions, so any spare money would go toward clothes for him. My father had a lovely green corduroy jacket
specially made up for him and he also wore smart trousers, nice shoes, and a cute little bow tie. David looked very elegant.

I felt very proud of my little brother up there playing with an orchestra. If it had been me performing in front of such a
sizable audience at that age, I would have been very nervous; I used to keep my fingers crossed, hoping desperately that David
didn’t forget anything or make mistakes. But not only did he always get through the pieces without any problems, he played
beautifully.

David soon began entering Australia’s principal concerto and vocal music competition for young musicians, which was held every
year under the auspices of the Australian Broadcasting Commission. First there were rounds in each state, then the winning
pianist, instrumentalist, and singer would go forward to the nationwide final, known as the Commonwealth final, which was
usually held in Sydney or Melbourne.

Every year David would enter this competition with a different piano concerto; he played concertos by Tchaikovsky, Ravel,
Mozart, and Bach, interpreting their complexity quite brilliantly. He not only played them, he mastered them. He also played
Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. He did not, as is strongly suggested in
Shine
, play Rachmaninoff’s Third for the first time many years later in London, which supposedly led to his collapse. He had played
it on a number of occasions, both publicly and privately, over a period of several years, before he even went to London.

All in all, David was creating quite a sensation with his musical excellence and was constantly being written about in newspaper
reports. By the time he turned thirteen in May 1960, not a month seemed to go by without David receiving several rave reviews
and write-ups.

“Head judge Dr. William Lovelock complimented thirteen-year-old pianist David Helfgott, who brought the most sympathetic applause
with his dextrous handling of Ravel’s often difficult Concerto in G Major,” wrote the music critic Francis King in
The West Australian
on June 17, I960.

“The audience was startled as thirteen-year-old David Helfgott gave an amazingly strong performance of the difficult Ravel
Piano Concerto … David has that indefinable something—a quality which marks him for the future,” wrote James Penberthy, the
music critic for one of Perth’s leading newspapers, the
Sunday Times
. “This is the first sight of a rare and prodigious talent, startling from one so young,’ he added.

“Individual talent was present in a highly promising young pianist, David Helfgott, who played three Hungarian dances by Brahms,”
said another review.

The music critic Sally Trethowan, writing in another newspaper under the heading “Youth Shines in Concert” (which may have
provided the inspiration for the title of Scott Hicks’s movie), said: “[Watching] the West Australian Symphony playing selections
from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty ballet … in the State Final of the Concerto and Vocal Competition … Joseph Post, as spokesman
for the three judges, said that the standard of piano playing was very high … and they had chosen David Helfgott as winner
of the piano section.”

These reviews of David’s performances come from my father’s collection of David’s clippings, which he certainly never burned
as is depicted in
Shine
. After he died Leslie kept the clippings, and then passed them on to David. I made myself some copies years later.