Girls at the Piano

by Virginia Lloyd

  And did those feet in ancient time

  Walk upon England’s mountains green:

  And was the holy Lamb of God,

  On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

  And did the Countenance Divine,

  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

  And was Jerusalem builded here,

  Among these dark Satanic Mills?

  These lyrics, taken from William Blake’s 1808 poem, suggest England might have briefly enjoyed a stint as heaven on earth if, as the apocryphal story has it, the young Jesus took a holy detour to Glastonbury in the company of his uncle Joseph of Arimathea. Somehow he’d turned up a few centuries early for the music festival. Performing the anthem was a dissociative exercise in separating the affecting melody and its melancholy harmonies from the ludicrous words—in my mind, the obvious answer to each of Blake’s four questions as they were sung was a resounding no, no, no and no. The idea remained as fantastic as it had been in 1916 when Sir Hubert Parry set Blake’s poetry to music during wartime and turned ‘Jerusalem’ into a rousing nationalistic anthem.

  ‘Thank you, Victoria,’ said Miss Jackson, immune to my silent scepticism. As far as she was concerned, my name was Victoria and ‘Jerusalem’ was top of the hymnal pops. The idealised England in the anthem must have stirred our Lancashire-born leader, though it was no more likely that Jesus of Nazareth had blond hair and blue eyes than that he ever set foot in that faraway country. She fantasised about the grass being greener in a land quite literally more verdant than in her adopted home. One thing I knew for certain: Jerusalem was not to be found at the top of Walker Street, North Sydney.

  Among the parents of the Kates and Sarahs and Fionas who populated my year, my father seemed to be the only one who performed anything close to physical labour outside of the home. As far as I could tell, other girls’ fathers paid for their white-collared uniforms by working white-collar jobs. They were CEOs and lawyers and doctors and pharmacists, men who wore jackets and ties in office buildings. My father rose each day at dawn; put on his white singlet, khaki work shorts, long white cotton socks and boots; ate his cornflakes with warm milk; then drove his yellow Holden ute for miles to building sites where he worked alongside the men who subcontracted to him until the light gave out. My father was most proud of the fact that he had always been, from the time he was a teenager, his own boss. As a boy he was never interested in books or sitting still; he wanted to be out with his father on the farm, playing with his dog Barney, or pitching cricket balls at a water tank for batting practice. He laughs recalling how intimidated he was by the three girls in his class of seven students, who weren’t only much smarter than he, but also the daughters of his teacher.

  When my father finally had money to spend, he wasn’t interested in strolling the Champs-Élysées or sailing Sydney Harbour in his own catamaran. He would provide for his family, whether or not they wanted him to. He would insist that his wife stop working outside the home though she loved her job as a comptometer operator—the precursor to the electronic calculator—at Amalgamated Wireless. He would send his children to expensive schools to have the formal education he did not. At his wife’s urging, he would buy his daughter a piano.

  It was just over one hundred years since the farmer Gabriel Oak first proposed to Bathsheba Everdene in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. Oak sweetens his futile offer to make Bathsheba happy with the promise of her own instrument: ‘You shall have a piano in a year or two—farmers’ wives are getting to have pianos now—and I’ll practise up the flute right well to play with you in the evenings.’ By the late nineteenth century the piano might have been within reach of working-class families, and domestic music-making a common entertainment, but ownership of an instrument was hardly a sign of leisure. A farmer might be able to afford a piano, but not the time for his wife to play it. Anyway, Bathsheba wasn’t having a bar of it.

  A century later, the builder’s wife had the time to play, but no longer the inclination. Their daughter would be the beneficiary of piano lessons. She would have a piano. She would be their instrument. ‘The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread,’ D.H. Lawrence wrote in his 1929 essay ‘Nottingham and the Mining Countryside’. ‘The middle classes jeer at the colliers for buying pianos—but what is the piano, often as not, but a blind reaching out for beauty.’34

  ‘I think it’s time you started competing in eisteddfods,’ my new piano teacher announced to the middle of my back after a few weeks of lessons.

  Mr McFarlane taught in a ground-floor studio apartment on the corner of two leafy streets in Sydney’s lower north shore. Upstairs lived his mother, whom in eight years of instruction I never met but who made her presence felt, rattling pans and dragging chairs above my head like some irritable landlord of ancient mythology. The small teaching studio undulated in mounds of books and sheet music, as if a blizzard had never managed to melt. A bust of Beethoven frowned at me from the lid of the black upright piano, which was graffitied with scratches and fingerprints.

  Mrs Wilcox had ambushed me at the end of my last lesson of the school year. ‘There’s nothing more I can teach you, dear,’ she said by way of explaining that our lessons, like primary school, had come to an end. Though my feet now touched the floor, I was devastated. While I was proud of my technical accomplishments, after hurdling the annual grade examinations like a prize show pony, the news stung. I was not quite twelve. ‘Mr McFarlane is his name,’ she said, thrusting an envelope into my hand as I sat dumbstruck on her piano stool. ‘Give that note to your mother. I’ve sent a few of my students to him over the years. You’ll have to audition, but you’ll get in. He’s very good.’

  E-sted-what?

  Despite having been accepted as his student, I felt daunted by Mr McFarlane’s thick glasses, his balding head of honey-coloured curls, and his severe demeanour. Even now I can’t specify what I was so frightened of. I can’t imagine anything in particular that caused my anxiety, because generally speaking, everything did: saying the wrong thing, playing the wrong note, it was all the same. I spent each piano lesson in a straitjacket of fear, looking directly ahead of me at Beethoven from the first greeting to the last minute, except when I cast furtive glances over my right shoulder now and then to gauge Mr McFarlane’s speaking tone. Always on high alert for the nuances of my mother’s voice, I wrongly heard in any voice of authority a punitive tone—and lived with the constant feeling that I had either just made a mistake or was about to.

  My teacher sat a few feet behind me on a wooden chair, the ankle of one chubby leg resting on the knee of the other. He couldn’t have been far into his thirties but he had a paunch that hid the waistband of his pants. Maybe one of the many things I feared was ending up as a piano teacher.

  And had he said compete? I loathed any kind of competition. The word was shorthand for hours wasted on redundant activities such as field hockey, long jump and tunnel ball, not to mention the cacophony of the annual swimming carnival. How I loathed the swimming carnival, having to fake enthusiasm over human bodies moving through water. The stink of chlorine. The snap of elastic. It would be at least 11 p.m., after piano practice and homework, before I could return to my bed and the sensuous miseries of Tess d’Urberville.

  ‘Eisteddfods are annual music competitions, arranged by age,’ Mr McFarlane explained. ‘You could still enter the twelve and unders this year, but I think you should compete in the fifteen and unders.’

  It wasn’t a question or open for debate. Part of me felt excited that my new teacher wanted to nudge me into the older age group where he thought I was the right technical fit, but after quickly jumping over the successive hurdles of new teacher, new school and new friends, I just felt like another rug was being pulled from my feet. What excited me was learning new music and becoming a better pianist; I thought I could achieve that by practising alone at home. Unlike my teacher, I failed to understand the role of competition in pushing a young pianist beyond the level that was comfo
rtable for her.

  Each time Mr McFarlane shifted in his seat I got a whiff of his body odour. A sleeveless white cotton singlet beneath his short-sleeved white polyester shirt did little to control his tendency to perspire, evinced by damp patches around his armpits. At moments like these I was grateful for the flute lessons I had taken with Mrs Wilcox. Despite a few years of diligent practice, the instrument had bored me rigid; on the subject of woodwinds, I sided with Oscar Wilde, who is attributed with describing the clarinet as ‘an ill woodwind that nobody blew any good’.35 The silver lining was that, having learned how to breathe using my diaphragm, I could hold my breath for a long time. Until I met Mr McFarlane, that skill had come in handy only when swimming underwater—an activity that never made it onto the swimming carnival program.

  ‘I practise every day as much as I can—I wish it were more for his sake,’ wrote the twenty-year-old Jane Austen to her beloved sister Cassandra in September 1796. The man she refers to is her piano teacher, George William Chard, who had been the assistant organist at Winchester Cathedral since 1787.36 Austen’s father knew Chard, who was ten years older than Jane and by all accounts a lively and handsome man. To supplement his salary, Chard gave private lessons around Hampshire, riding forty miles to the rectory at Steventon to give lessons to Austen. She was his student during the time she started writing a novel with the working title First Impressions.

  In a memoir, her niece Caroline Austen recalls that ‘Aunt Jane began her day with music—for which I conclude she had a natural taste; as she thus kept it up—tho’ she had no one to teach; was never induced (as I have heard) to play in company; and none of her family cared much for it.’ Not a terribly inspiring environment to play in—closer to Mary Bennett than Jane Fairfax. Of Anne Elliot in Persuasion Austen wrote that ‘in music she had been always used to feel alone in the world’. I wonder where she got that idea.

  On leaving her childhood home in 1801, Austen sold her piano for eight guineas. She wrote little during the following years when she lived in Bath and Southampton; whether coincidence or not, neither did she have an instrument of her own. But in July 1809 she moved to Chawton, in Hampshire, where she had an allowance from her father’s estate of twenty guineas per year, and few social obligations.

  There’s some confusion as to what proportion of her income went on her new piano. One source suggests that she blew a year and a half’s allowance on it: thirty guineas on a twenty-guinea budget. Perhaps her wealthy brother Edward contributed. A second source suggests that by the time Austen moved to Chawton, her allowance was closer to fifty pounds a year. Even then, to spend thirty guineas on an instrument takes a giant bite from the budget.

  However she paid for it, Austen’s new piano announced to her family, and to herself, that at Chawton she would spend her money as she would spend her time: in writing books and playing the piano. Her domestic husbandry wouldn’t be focused on the procurement of a husband—she was thirty-three and well beyond the likelihood of marriage. Neither she nor her piano would be moving from Chawton.

  Today any Janeite can visit Chawton Cottage and inspect the author’s music library. According to Caroline, Aunt Jane transcribed pages of waltzes and marches ‘so neatly and correctly, that it was as easy to read as print’. One book in her own hand contains thirty-six songs complete with lyrics and keyboard accompaniment; another one mixing songs with instrumental works runs to eighty-four pages of manuscript. This can only be described as a manual labour of love. Anyone who has written out music by hand can attest to its being a job for only the most detail-oriented and fastidious copyist.

  After ten years in which she wrote almost nothing, the arrival of Jane Austen’s piano ushered in a period of great creativity. She began work on Mansfield Park in early 1811, revised First Impressions (which was later published as Pride and Prejudice), and in 1814 began writing Emma.

  Austen’s women pianists—Anne Elliott, Marianne Dashwood, Mary Bennett, Jane Fairfax—are products of their era: they dutifully play for others when requested, but do not actively seek opportunities to perform. To compete for a judge’s approval or a vulgar trophy—that’s the last thing an Austen heroine would do.

  To the untrained eye, the daunting number of notes in Bach’s Prelude 2 in C Minor from the Well-Tempered Clavier give the appearance of ants crawling over the page. On closer inspection, the ants run rather than crawl, moving allegro almost from beginning to end. They’re well trained, too, running in consistent semiquaver patterns that give every finger work to do. The trick to performing the prelude is to have perfect fingering—so that you never get caught midway through without the best possible finger to play a particular note—and to make sure you don’t start off too quickly. If you begin too fast, then there’s little room for acceleration during the six-bar section towards the end that Bach, with uncharacteristic prescriptiveness, indicated should be played presto.

  Of course, nervous tension causes many amateurs to do the opposite, and I was no exception. Particularly in competitions such as the one I was performing in right now, inside a nondescript church hall somewhere on the northern beaches of Sydney. A location where almost every other girl my age was tanning her smooth shaved legs or frolicking in the surf on this hot Saturday afternoon.

  But after so much practice, speed didn’t worry me. My main concern was forgetting the notes. Though I had a knack for committing pieces to memory, I spent every solo performance in a bind of conflicting messages from my brain that assured me I wouldn’t forget while at the same time instilling dread at the imminent likelihood of forgetting. I visualised the work in my mind’s eye as my hands scurried over the keyboard, terrified and relieved at every turn.

  The biggest threat was to stumble over the fingering, which would interrupt the largely unconscious flow of notes. Hardly any of the countless bits of information committed to memory—not just the notes, but also the structure of the piece, the tempo, the dynamics of how loud and how soft to play at any given moment; when to pause slightly, and when to accelerate just a touch; when to lift my right hand off the keyboard at the end of a phrase; when to depress the sustain pedal that ran a sequence of notes into one another; when to walk smoothly along the notes, legato, or to leap off each one in staccato fashion; and the fingering required, tucking the thumb underneath the index finger here, using the fourth rather than fifth finger there, so as to manage that jump in the next bar—occurred to me consciously while I played a piece from memory. The purpose of memorising is that, ideally, you’re so thoroughly knowledgeable of the composition’s mechanics that you can let your subconscious take them over while you concentrate on the emotional interpretation. To me, getting through a performance without a technical hitch—like the Olympic gymnast who stays upright when she lands that final flip—was the ultimate achievement. It was proof that somehow through intense repetitive practice the music had lifted off the page, flown like Tsvetaeva’s sparrows into the air I breathed, and entered my bloodstream.

  Clara Schumann was one of the first virtuosi to perform from memory in public. She had learned to memorise music from an early age, studying with her exacting father. Playing without printed music was sufficiently unusual that when she did so in an 1828 public concert at the age of nine, reviewers commented on the practice—and not favourably.37 Years of publicly performing don’t abate your nerves at the prospect of your memory failing. Decades into her career as a concert artist, Clara confessed to a close friend, the composer Johannes Brahms, her increasing anxiety about performing without music: ‘Though I am often so nervous from one piece to the next,’ she wrote, ‘I cannot make the decision to play from the music; it always seems to me that it is almost as though my wings were clipped.’38 Clara had long been her father’s caged bird. Wieck had trimmed those wings well; she didn’t resort to having the music in front of her, but neither did she forget the notes.

  For better and worse, Clara Schumann established the model for the concert instrumental virtuoso—and even for pi
anists in their earliest years of study—that continues to this day. My father couldn’t have cared less if I played Bach with the music or ‘by heart’, as we used to say. But by virtue of the generations of solo instrumentalists who followed Clara’s example, Mrs Wilcox and now Mr McFarlane had encouraged me to memorise the notes—and, whether or not it contributed much to my musicianship, the practice gave me great satisfaction.

  When I returned to my seat after playing the Bach prelude, my father gave me a gentle dig with his elbow. ‘You should have smiled,’ he said, referring to the way I’d pursed my lips when I bowed at the audience. He was sweet, but he had no idea. Eisteddfods are the dog shows of amateur music: the judge evaluates each competitor for how well she conforms to the ideal standard of her breed, rewarding the winner for her proximity to an ideal that may well exist only in the judge’s imagination. Rows of braces conformed to no adjudicator’s ideal pianist.

  The next competitor stood from her chair and walked to the stage, her long pale hair resting obediently behind her narrow shoulders. She wore a Laura Ashley paisley-print dress in swirling oceanic colours and a pair of knee-high brown boots that sported a one-inch heel. They may have been synthetic and rubber-soled, but those boots screamed sophistication to me, and they were the last thing my mother would think to buy. (Somehow I had become my toughest censor; I considered it out of the question to tell Mum what I really liked.) The girl’s posture was so straight that it seemed as if she were not flesh and blood at all but carved from wood. She was as ideal an example of the young girl at the piano as if she had stepped out of Renoir’s Jeune filles au piano series of the 1890s, porcelain skin and all. The image made flesh even had a French name: Jacqueline.

  I looked down at my outfit of pants, short-sleeved cotton top and brown flats, embarrassed. As far as Mr McFarlane was concerned, my wardrobe was the major impediment to a career in music. A raised eyebrow greeted me one day when I showed up in a favourite pair of grey overalls; later I learned from another student of his that he had told her I’d turned up ‘looking as if she’d just come in from the garden’. My piano lessons had been the last place I expected my sartorial decisions to be judged, especially by someone overly attached to polyester.