The Virtuoso (15 page)

And I would sit, quietly enthralled throughout the performance, not even realising that I’d been crying until I felt the stream of tears rolling down my neck and dampness spreading along the edge of my collar.

I was twenty years old, and gradually being regarded as one of the top pianists at the Academy. Fellow students, I found, wanted to make my acquaintance. All in all, it ought to have been a very happy period in my life, and perhaps, relatively speaking, it was. But it’s clear to me now that, despite all the success and coquettish behaviour (I really was becoming quite the libertine), my hedonism was close to getting the better of me. At the time I was quite chuffed to wake up after a night out drinking with classmates to find myself in another student’s bed. To me it showed an element of spunk that had been absent in my make-up until that point. I was aware I was drinking more than most (and once did have to call upon my aunt to bail me out from a debt at the licensed grocer), but failed to see, when I was doing so well with my musical studies, why a bit of nightly decadence was such a problem. Especially when it provided relief from the one tangible complaint I could claim: my invisible ailment—the pain in my arm—that worsened over this time.

It was not so much during, but after, my practice that I’d often be in so much agony that I’d lie on my bed in tears—not simply from the blazing sensation
running down from my shoulder and the near paralysis of my wrist, but also from complete exhaustion and fury. I was at a point in my life when I was as close as ever to embarking upon a career as a pianist, and accompanying me on my way was this troll on my back, trying to force me to the ground, ruin me.

Schumann too, at a similar age, suffered a mysterious accident to his right hand, making piano-playing excruciating. The story my father told me was that Schumann had injured two tendons by attempting to stretch his hand in a homemade sling. Another version of the story was that in an effort to cure the syphilis he had contracted during his student days, Schumann had absorbed mercury (a treatment often prescribed at the time), damaging his nervous system. Schumann was, naturally, devastated and tried numerous suggested remedies, including immersing his hand in cattle secretions, despite being terrified that the cattle’s characteristics might infiltrate his own. In the same year, his brother and sister-in-law both died, and near the end of the year, Schumann attempted suicide for the first time.

Even though Schumann’s injury forced him to abandon playing the piano and put all of his energies into composing, I had far less estimation of myself as a composer than as a performer, so managed to find little in the story of Schumann with which to console myself.

Without resorting to the voodooism Schumann eventually turned to, I did try everything I could think of to fix my condition, going back through all the
piano techniques and exercises I’d been taught over the years—circling my wrist in loose exaggerated loops as I played, or practising entire pieces in staccato. I visited numerous doctors and other specialists, but nothing—except a nip or two of gin before I sat down to practise—seemed to help me in the slightest.

At one time I had a brief liaison with a singing teacher called Leonard, an affair that probably wouldn’t have extended beyond one night had he not informed me he was training to be an Alexander Technique practitioner. Leonard instructed me that it was impossible to separate mental and physical processes in the body; that our will to do something arose from deep within the brain, in our subconscious and unconscious mind; and that I had
learnt
this crippling behaviour—he could see it in my body: my tense shoulders, my stilted walk, my constant fidgeting—and I now had to re-learn, to stop these unconscious processes from taking their pre-set path. He said that the only hope for me was to
inhibit
my old way of thinking and acting (starting with total abstinence), and as he told me this he’d draw to his chest his dainty hands—I could never get over how impuissant those fragile instruments looked—and motion in the air as if doing invisible needlework. But he only needed to gauge an inkling of interest from me and he’d jump from his chair—I’d sense those little silky-skinned hands with their bristling fingers clambering towards me and I’d run to pull my new Brahms recording from its sleeve and make another pot of tea.

I did, however, ponder all Leonard told me and was impressed by his many stories of recovery—from famous violinists who’d indefinitely postponed world tours, to ballerinas who’d been told they’d never dance again—to which he resorted when assailed with too many questions. I was momentarily intrigued and found myself quietly delighting in the idea that I had resigned myself to being a pitiful invalid of my own innocent and clumsy making. But like the rest, Leonard, with his pinstriped pants and colourful bow ties, passed in and out of my life so fleetingly, before I would let him anywhere near my ailing limb, or could digest the kernel of his words. Sitting at my small sunlit table only minutes after Leonard’s final exit (‘You’re making a big mistake, young man—I could really help you!’), it was far easier to pour myself another drink and cradle my rotten arm than to deliberate over any remnants of Leonard, including his inspired teachings, having so cleanly eliminated him from my life.

I ended up deferring my studies several times, convincing myself that I’d been overworking my arm and that a period of inactivity would be of the most benefit in the long term. Anton wasn’t much help at all, once even becoming irate and calling me a drunk; he’d just shake his head with growing dismay each time I left the Academy halls to work at Boosey & Hawkes, the Albert Hall or the Steinway showroom. My position at these places never rose above that of sales or tea boy, and, quite frankly, I preferred making pots of Earl
Grey to approaching customers who might correct me on the year of the Leipzig pressing of some ancient and unremarkable manuscript. But after a period of several months in each job (and usually on the verge of being sacked due to my slovenly appearance and crankiness with other staff) I would turn on the wireless at work and hear, ‘And that was Chopin’s F minor concerto performed by the pianist Noël Mewton-Wood.’ Suddenly everything about me would seem to tremble, my job would appear a sham, and I would run all the way home and find myself lifting the stained oak lid of my piano and staring devoutly at the keys.

Each time it was Anton who lured me back to the Academy, and no time more successfully than the last. The knock of Ma O’Grady came on the door one evening as I sat alone in my room listening to an old Schnabel recording. I followed her large dumpling hips down the stairs and, as I leaned against the mottled wall of her apartment, holding the telephone receiver in my hand and preparing myself to weave my way through another of Anton’s brusque check-ups, he said to me the words that every aspiring pianist dreams of hearing one day. He told me that if I returned to the Academy and learnt to curb my erratic behaviour, I could solo with Clarence Raybould and the senior Academy orchestra. It would be my turn, at last, to perform a concerto.

Ever since seeing Noël’s 1940 Queen’s Hall performance, I’d tried to visualise my own public debut—the venue, the audience, my entrance on
stage, my bow and, most importantly, my programme. I’d decided that solo recitals, though empowering for the performer, can sometimes seem a little thin. A solo pianist becomes his own orchestra, he creates his own world; he is everybody and everything. But in a concerto the soloist is elevated above the
tutti—
the
everybody—
of the orchestra. The soloist is seated separate to, and on top of, the world.

In a certain mood I did enjoy listening to the baroque concertos: symphonic pieces with solo parts written for a particular instrumentalist the composer had in mind. I found them fortifying, perfect for a sunny autumn morning after a vigorous walk through the commons. But for performance, one really couldn’t go past the virtuoso concerto, where the soloist has true isolation and supremacy within the orchestra. They are the ultimate form for showcasing a soloist’s virtuosity, a flamboyant display that culminates in that signature cadenza just before the end of each movement—an extraordinary flourishing passage from which the audience can judge the musician’s ability. Always the most thrilling moment in a concerto, I find: holding your breath while the soloist embarks upon this daring display, the conductor and orchestra lowering their baton and instruments, seated in reverent silence.

Although Mozart was the father of the virtuoso concerto, establishing its form and writing close to fifty, it was not Mozart, with his ordered phrasing, his innate politeness, whom I wanted to play. No, the man I would perform had carried the Classical into the
Romantic era, combining Mozart’s attention to form, design and beauty with the desire to express ideas, emotion and passion. Ludwig van Beethoven was the composer who completed the final transformation of the concerto from a baroque
concerto grosso
, with its tapestry of alternating groups of strings, into the musical hero myth: the soundtrack to the struggle and triumph of the individual within the world.

Over the first few weeks Anton and I listened to all of Beethoven’s concertos, contemplating each in terms of its musical and technical demands. Anton was a boffin of the Napoleonic wars, and for that reason alone it seemed for a while that we might choose the
Emperor
, Beethoven’s fifth and final concerto, written in Vienna the year of Napoleon’s second onslaught and occupation of the city. We listened to it over and over. Each time that regal fanfare began I’d imagine the truculent Beethoven sheltering in his brother’s cellar, listening to the gun and cannon fire of the encroaching French army; and in the second movement, during the slow, dignified march of the orchestra, the piano singing out pleadingly, I’d see the composer stepping out from his refuge the following morning to find his city freezing, on fire and in ruins.

Anton eventually dashed the idea of my taking on the
Emperor
; he didn’t believe I could yet muster the exhilarated defiance and quiet restraint that were required. Incensed by his judgment as I was, the only thing that stopped me telling him he clearly didn’t know me at all was his following comment that he
thought I had the perfect temperament for pulling off the Third—the C minor concerto—brilliantly.

I worked on my part with Anton for several months. It was a momentous project and one for which I attempted, at first, to remain relatively sober. Sometimes we’d work on just the first-movement cadenza for the entire hour, him standing and conducting next to me through three tempo changes, singing in his deep baritone, his arms paddling in front of his chest as if he were spooling wool, tapping in the air with his invisible baton, or closing his eyes and whispering the
bom ba-bom ba-bom
of the timpani entry at the close of the cadenza.

These lessons were the most trying, my right hand spidering up and down the keys, Anton shouting out commands—‘Back to the Presto-faster-slower-more crescendo-more decrescendo-more resolution-more anticipation-again, again, it must be perfect!’—and the pain in my arm so great that blood would drain from my face and I’d be willing the clock on the wall to move at the pace I was being forced to play.

Four weeks before the performance, the orchestral rehearsals began in the Duke’s Hall every Thursday and Friday afternoon. Although each rehearsal went for three hours, while I was at the piano, carried along by the exultant sound of the orchestra, I rarely thought about my arm. Strangely it was the more technically challenging orchestral sections, those that ought to have stressed my arm and mind the most, that I
preferred to play. During the cadenzas and the languorous second movement, I would often be oblivious to the orchestra, and become more frighteningly aware of myself: I would remember the pain in my arm, and fret about what came next. But those spirited sections in the
Allegro con brio—
arpeggios tearing up the keyboard in lively discourse with the strings, the entire orchestra trumpeting out notes below me like footholds on which to climb higher, and Clarence Raybould heaving over the orchestra, shouting out, ‘Like a cavalry charge!’ or ‘Onward, onward, strings, to its doom…’—those were the times I forgot about my pain entirely.

At the end of each rehearsal, as others stood about cleaning their instruments, chatting about the music, whistling phrases, stacking chairs and folding stands, the pain would arrive like a burst of flames shooting up my arm, and I’d pay all at once for the pleasure I’d just enjoyed. The music would vacate my body like a passing spirit and I’d think of nothing else but breathing through the agony. I’d decline offers to join the others for a beer at the Glue Pot, and wander home on my own, nursing my arm like a sick animal.

Back in my room the most I could ever manage was to lie on my bed with a bottle of gin and listen to recordings of the concerto—Schnabel, Rubinstein, Curzon—imagining how wonderful to be pain-free and able to comfortably perform this great work. I was fascinated by the differences in each pianist’s interpretation, and thought about Noël and the way he
had played it at the Queen’s Hall, combining volcanic power with such trembling beauty, notes that barely whispered above the heads of a thousand listeners.

People always remarked upon his musical intelligence, his ability to
understand
a piece of music. I would understand this piece too, intimately, as if it were a person—know every twist and turn in its character.

I listened to the recordings for hours on end, following the score with my finger, sometimes as the viola, other times as the oboe, wanting more than anything to own this piece, to make this concerto mine. So that Noël would hear me play it as he’d never heard it played before.

I started to practise technical work and pieces entirely in the key of C minor, wanting to feel Beethoven’s obsession, bordering on mania, with this
Sturm und Drang
key. When Beethoven wrote the C minor concerto he was nearing the end of his first C minor period, and this
tono tragico
coloured much of the music he wrote. In the years leading up to and during this time, Beethoven had witnessed the final stages of his mother’s battle with consumption, and the death of his drunken, tyrannical father. Then, in the autumn of 1802 when Beethoven was thirty-two and in the middle of his work on the concerto, it was confirmed that he was going deaf. From Heiligenstadt, a village outside Vienna, he wrote a will-like document to his two brothers describing his despair:
Little more and I would have put an end to my life—only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world
until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce, and so I endured this wretched existence—truly wretched…