I had always worn shoes and socks in Melbourne, but in Perth a lot of people seemed to go around barefoot, and I quickly discarded my footwear when running around both at home and when playing with friends in the streets nearby.
Although Perth may be isolated, many people have heard of it. In the 1960s, its citizens burned their lights all night to guide the American astronaut John Glenn, who in 1962 became the first American to orbit the earth. The first thing Glenn saw when he entered the earth’s stratosphere were the lights of Perth, and the city is still now known by many as the City of Lights.
It came to international prominence again in 1987 when it hosted the America’s Cup—the first time the famous yachting trophy had been held outside the United States. Perth has also had its share of wealthy tycoons, such as Alan Bond, who in 1987 paid a then world record U.S. $53.9 million for Van Gogh’s Irises, and Robert Holmes a Court, who in the 1980s was one of Australia’s richest men.
The city’s climate was truly tropical. Summer nights could be very hot, and sometimes we used to drag our mattresses out onto the back lawn and lie on our backs, looking up at the stars. And Dad would then treat us to an astronomy lesson. He had taught himself an impressive amount. He would explain the way the galaxies were constructed. He would point upward and show us the Milky Way, the Three Sisters, the Southern Cross—everything that could be seen in Australia’s night skies.
The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, was four and a half light-years away. My father would explain how the light took off from it and how it would take four and a half years to get to Perth. All this was fascinating for young children: David and I just absorbed it all and asked lots of eager questions. These were our science lessons, although we didn’t even think of them as lessons; it was just a natural part of growing up. And where another family might talk about who won the soccer game or what the neighbors were doing, we would discuss the nearest star to earth, or which ran faster, a leopard or a puma, or the best move to make in a chess game when your king is trapped between two bishops.
We regularly crossed to the south side of the city to visit the zoo, one of our favorite places. We all loved these outings, especially since my father was such a great guide. He told us all about the animals, and would conjure up wonderfully exotic memories from his time in the circus.
We had a good life, even though we were relatively poor. My father even bought me my first camera when I was eleven years old. I loved it, and started taking pictures of the whole family; most of the pictures of my father and David in this book are ones that I took myself. There aren’t many photos from earlier years because no one in the family actually owned a camera before that.
5
“MUSIC WILL ALWAYS BE
YOUR FRIEND”
I asked my father one day why he had taught us all music and he replied: “If I had given you money and possessions, they could have been lost. But if I give you music, no matter where you are in the world, even if you are alone or without money, music will always be a friend to you.”
His passion for music was tied to the notion that once you mastered it, it was yours, it was part of your being and no one could take it away from you. His love for music was, I believe, innate and not the result of some external factor or influence.
As with most of the things that he had learned, Peter Helfgott was a self-taught musician. He had mastered the piano while living in Melbourne, essentially by going to the houses of friends whose children were learning to play. He would sit with the child who was taking piano lessons and ask them to show him how they played, tell him the name of the notes, and so on. In this way, he learned both the piano and later the violin.
He was always drawn to music. He often used to play for us at home in the evenings. He would pick up the violin and play various Gypsy tunes—both joyous, invigorating ones and also melodies of the haunting, soulful kind, the product of centuries of persecution and rootlessness that the Gypsies have suffered in much the same way as the Jews. When in a different mood, my father would play the romantic Mendelssohn violin concerto, a melody from Tchaikovsky, or music such as “Liebesfreud” or “Schön Rosmarin” by the brilliant Vienna-born violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler.
At other times he would sit down at the piano and play something from the romantic period such as Liszt or Chopin, or a more popular piece such as “South of the Rio Grande” by Jacques Miller. It was remarkable how much he had taught himself, considering he had never taken a proper lesson in his life.
He told me that he would love to have become a musician but that the nature of his family in Poland had prevented him from fulfilling this dream. My father’s longing for music dated back to his childhood in the shtetl. At that time he had even managed to scrape together enough money to buy a little violin. But when he brought it home, my grandfather, who intended my father to study to become a rabbi, was horrified. He took the violin and snapped it across his knees. This broke my father’s heart and may well have contributed to his longing to run away.
Eventually, in Melbourne, my father did get to perform a little, entertaining the customers in his coffee lounge by playing the violin or piano and singing. But the fact that he was never able properly to fulfill his dream may have given him an added incentive to pass the gift of music on to his children. All of us play an instrument, and, at present, four of us are earning our living from music. Leslie plays the violin, performing in various ensembles as well as appearing as a soloist. He also teaches school children Australian bush dances together with other local folk dances. Louise has been teaching piano in the last few years. Perhaps more than any of us, she resembles our father in the sense that she is completely self-motivated and self-taught. She recently put herself successfully through both her theory and practical examinations without having had any formal training at all. Her pupils do exceptionally well. I myself teach piano and accompany various singers and instrumentalists. And of course, there is David.
Even Suzie, my one sister who doesn’t actually earn her living from music (she’s a social worker), obtained a music diploma from the Australian Music Examinations Board, which is a university-standard qualification.
There was other musical interest in the family, too. My father had a cousin who sang in a chorus in Czestochowa for two years and another who sold miniature musical instruments. According to Zelig Lewcowitz, my cousin in Tel Aviv, my father’s father was also a very musical man, in spite of having broken Dad’s violin. He would sing for hours on the Sabbath, which is a common practice in religious Jewish households. “David Helfgott loved to sing Hassidic melodies,’ Zelig told me. “All the family used to go to David’s sister Zelda on the Sabbath and gather round and listen to David sing. These were wonderful occasions. It was a way of life that has all but disappeared from eastern Europe.”
Each night when we were children, my father would come home from work, have something to eat, and then sit with David and me and teach us to play the piano. The odd thing about David is that, though in the end he really did emerge as a child prodigy (he was undoubtedly a better pianist as a teenager than he is now), for the first two or three years of studying piano—until he was about eight—he totally failed to recognize the various notes that my father taught him. He was completely incapable of distinguishing one note from another. I used to think: Why can’t he remember a C from a D or a G from an A? My father would say, for example, this is a G and it’s on the second line of the treble clef, but the very next day David couldn’t remember or began playing some other note. My father would patiently explain to him over and over again. “David,” he would say, “that’s a G, not an E or a B,” and so on.
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.
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