The Pianoplayer
A lesbian love story
from
Rosalie Summer
1st edition
March 2020
© Copyright 2020
Rosalie Summer
All rights reserved.
Cover photo:
Pixabay.com
Thank you!!
Thank you to all who have supported me on this journey so far.
Thanks also to all who knowingly or unknowingly were part of my
Inspiration for this novel.
And also thanks to you out there, the one or the other
on Amazon, looked at it with interest and finally bought it.
Thank you for giving this little novel the attention it deserves.
Learn more about me at
https://www.rosaliesommer.de
And finally a big thank you for your rating at Amazon:
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For Kirsten
Love of my life, best friend and partner in life.
You are beginning and end, my home and answer to all questions.
Thank you for being my constant inspiration and spiritual guide,
for your positivity, your laughter, your support and your eternal belief in the impossible.
Thank you for this wonderful journey together.
Please look at the words in the lyrics at the appropriate place
as valid for you and written for you.
The love story between Adolé and Michelle is fictitious. Similarities between actual events and living persons are purely coincidental.
Table of Contents | Chapter | Page numbers
Prologue
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
Epilogue
Whenever a pain has happened to me, a double desire for life always seizes me - never actually resignation.
(Franziska zu Reventlow 1871 - 1918, German writer)
Prologue
It was cold, so cold. Bare tiles were shining at her. Hygienic. Sterile. And bright. The brightness hurt her eyes. Everything was white, so white. Uncomfortable and hard.
Fear pervaded them. She tried to move, but she couldn’t. The effort was too great, the pain too much.
Her head was buzzing. What had happened? Everything hurt. Every movement was too much. Had it happened again? Her memory was blurred, weak, too pale. She could not think clearly, the fog was impenetrable.
No matter how hard she tried, she could not move, could not get up. This pain. She moaned. She felt a twinge in her left arm, but she could not reach the source of this pain, could not prevent it.
Her mind could not remember, could not grasp the origin of all this, could not explain it, could not improve it.
Everything was blurred, muffled, quiet. So indirect.
As she tried breathlessly to move to escape, she noticed the shadow on the wall moving slowly towards her.
Panic broke out inside her, her pulse rate increased.
She tried to scream, but her neck just snapped. She couldn't get a sound out. Her eyes were wide open, cold sweat was pouring off her forehead.
Her movements became weaker and weaker, more and more powerless.
Eventually she surrendered. She sank back. Her eyes closed. It got dark. Quiet. She fell into a restless, cold sleep.
1.
"That's not how it works! It just doesn't sound right!"
Roswitha Bergener had her palm slammed loudly on the table parallel to her loud outburst of emotion, all the more so to help her extremely strong disapproval to become even more expressive.
Adolé paused instantly. Her singing froze, while the playback music circulated through the room for a short moment until the startled studio technician interrupted her as well. Discontented, Adolé dropped onto the bar stool, which made the mostly long recording days in the recording studio a little more comfortable for her.
"Exactly what is it this time?" snatched her away with a slight touch of resentment. She could no longer hide the fact that she was annoyed - and didn't want to. After all, they already spent five hours in the studio today, which would have been fine for a normal day of recording, if they had at least been productive during that time.
Instead, they tried their hand at different compositions, worked out different variations, approached different pieces from different directions, but after the hours in this stuffy little studio, they were still not one step further.
Roswitha Bergener had no understanding for this. She had been Adolé's manager for many years and was always concerned about what was best for Adolé. And usually she knew this very well and always found appropriate ways to make this clear to Adolé and to lead her in the right direction on her career path. Today, however, by her standards, she was increasingly rustic. Adolé didn't really offer her a reasonable reason for this, because they all did what they always did in the studio: namely their job. But obviously that was exactly the problem.
"It all sounds so unlovely... unimaginative... It's not the quality you usually deliver. You just drone on like that. It's no fun to listen to.
You've been in business so long. In fact, you need something different, a blood boost, something new and exciting. You've heard this a thousand times. It's just arbitrary and boring," Roswitha puffed angrily into the microphone on the other side of the glass.
"I see," thought Adolé. So that's the subject again and rolled his eyes in secret. She knew how much she owed Roswitha, because she had discovered her in her early twenties at a small singing competition in a disco and had made her the biggest pop and pop star in Germany that she is today.
At the beginning of her career it hadn't been usual to commit herself 100 percent to hits. Roswitha, however, did not allow herself to be put off, and with her decision to dust off the Schlager, to reinvent it, to make it more modern and to free it from the old stink of "Zum Blauen Bock" and "Musikantenstadl", she had not only won over herself, but also other advocates.
And she should be right. At first they tinkered through furniture store openings and village discos, were the unloved supporting programme for the set stars of the industry. But with "Seelenklang", a swinging number in the pop universe, came the long-awaited breakthrough. The success of almost twenty years now simply proved her right. Roswitha and above all Adolé had not only the German, but also the European stages firmly under control during this time with pleasing, easily sung along and above all danceable Schlager disco anthems.
They were a good team in this as well. As Roswitha made her contacts and expanded her rich network of useful connections, making even the largest stages accessible to Adolé, Adolé in turn did everything she was told to do. She subordinated almost ever
ything to the common success, was punctual, reliable, paid attention to her diet and sufficient sleep and to what she revealed about herself in public.
Together they created the public figure that Adolé Varell was now for everyone and that the German music scene could no longer be imagined without. She was the omnipresent Schlager queen, who was the first to dare to mix Schlager with danceable pop music in order to expand her spectrum of pure folk sounds. She deliberately went for rhythmic catchy popular music, which soon was to be found in every disco, at weddings and many other occasions. Her greatest commercial success "Herzschlager" has been a fixed component of every bachelor party, wedding, club evening, but also of every dance lesson for years and is celebrated in the stadium before and after every football match just as it is still played remarkably often on the radio.
In short: financial and personal success were no longer their greatest challenge. More important to her now was to express herself through her music, to be creative and to find new ways to reach her many fans who gratefully absorbed everything she had to say to them.
Roswitha Bergener played a major role in this, as her intuition for the situation, her connections and her experience in the music industry had always ensured that she had her finger on the pulse with her music releases. Today, Adolé's production and the release of a new CD were happenings throughout Germany that people were eagerly awaiting. Musical failure was a foreign word for Adolé.
And so she was now torn between what she herself intended to do with the new CD and what Roswitha apparently imagined. So far, she had only imagined "something completely different" - what exactly that should be, she had not yet expressed any concrete opinion about.
But Adolé had learned over the years to trust Roswitha. So they broke off the recordings they had made anyway and, together with the other members of the recording team, went to a nearby restaurant they had often visited and whose discretion they could rely on.
"What exactly do you have in mind now?!" Adolé asked Roswitha, who was so concerned about her. "Unfortunately, I'm not sure of that myself right now. But I do know that what I just heard in the studio is useless. It's nothing new, nothing surprising, nothing fresh, it's all so, so worn out. We can't seriously reissue something like that. Your penultimate CD was already better than that," she replied truthfully.
For this Adolé Roswitha appreciated. Sometimes she simply relied on her intuition, despite the fact that the studio and its staff had been booked months in advance and were expensive. If she felt that the recordings did not do justice to the joint project and her high quality and entertainment standards, she went against all other opinions and against everyone, uncompromisingly preventing a bad production that would have done more harm than good to Adolé. Without ifs and buts!
"Do you at least know roughly in which direction it should go?", Adolé begged and made a final attempt to at least tickle something out of her that would come next. She at least wanted to be able to prepare herself for it. But Roswitha was silent and waved away. She preferred to devote herself to the menu.
"Fine," thought Adolé. "At least it gives me one of those rare breaks in show business."
2.
A few weeks had passed. Adolé still did not really know what Roswitha wanted for her new CD. But she had - after enjoying the days off resulting from the studio's nonrecording and rebooking - come to terms with the fact that she would probably inform her when the time came.
Maybe she just didn't have a real idea yet and just still had this feeling of where to go. After all, you couldn't keep reinventing the hit song. So she had to come up with something completely new so that new CD stood out from everything else and Adolé was aware that something like that sometimes needed time.
But since she herself of course had enough press appointments and other appearances, she was by no means bored. So there was little opportunity for her to think about how to proceed with the recordings for the next release. She knew what she wanted and what not. And many a suggestion that Roswitha had made to her was at first considered crazy and then she did it - and usually with great success. So she did not push. She had learned to just keep still and wait.
She had just retired to her dressing room and was about to put on make-up when her mobile phone vibrated softly in front of her. "Hello, darling", it sounded to her. "What?! ", she returned a little gruffly.
"I just wanted to come by and wish you good luck right away..." Julius really meant well, but Adolé sometimes wished for more freedom. "Thanks - I'll be fine," she replied monosyllabically, pushing him away.
"That he really still has to remember before every performance," she thought angrily and shook her head. She actually liked Julius. They got along well. He had been one of Roswitha's strokes of genius when it became clear that Adolé would not be the complete heterosexual image of an exemplary pop queen. Too often just enthusiastic blondes twisted her pretty head, too often one could have twisted it into a rope.
But thanks to Julius' dedication and good looks, they were able to nip all rumours in the bud and for years have been the perfect showpiece couple in the Schlager cosmos, performing together at public events and TV shows just as confidently as the popular self-productions on the red carpet. For the sake of the press, they even lived together, but then they actually had their own closed-off areas within their detached house, which Adolé had vehemently insisted on.
After Julius had initially made arrangements to take an interest in them beyond his official "engagement", a serious conversation had taken place, and the separate residential units had played a decisive role in his resignation to simply being a "staffage" and limiting his caresses and declarations of love to the public part of their common existence.
While she continued to get ready for the upcoming show, she shook her head from time to time out of incomprehension for her fake boyfriend. "What is he thinking!?"
The performance itself ran smoothly as always. Playback events were against her and so she insisted since the beginning of her career on singing live whenever possible. Since she was a professional, the craziest locations were no problem for her. Live performances in front of many or few people, in front of other celebrities or "normal people", on sailboats, in stadiums and in small groups on breakfast television at bedtime did not even raise her blood pressure. Appearances at radio stations were just as routine for her today as long awaited premiere appearances for a new album or cosy, intimate performances on talk shows.
What was unusual, however, was the fact that Roswitha called her late at night after her performance. Contrary to her other habits, where she sometimes didn't answer her cell phone because she was too tired and then called back the next day, Adolé answered the call while already in bed.
"Yes?" she tried to appear reasonably pleased.
"Got it!" Roswitha didn't usually spend long on introductions and got straight to the point. "What exactly?" replied Adolé, thunderstruck.
"The idea for your new album!" Roswitha rejoiced at the other end. Adolé could literally hear her smile.
"Well, let's have it!"
"Do you know Michelle Mimieux?"
"Of course. Who doesn't know her. She is THE classical pianist of our time. She is world-famous and always fully booked, but probably as difficult as she is successful. Why?"
Roswitha didn't miss the opportunity to savour this moment to its fullest and took a promising break.
"Because you have the great luck to record your new album together with her. This is what was missing all the time. That certain something. The twist to something new, unusual and unexpected!"
Adolé thought he couldn't hear. "What?!! Where did you get that idea?!?!". She was terrified. She sat up straight and squeezed the words out of her mouth. Her amazement and her unwillingness to believe that Roswitha could actually mean it, could not be overheard. For a short moment she even thought about hanging up. But she knew that this wouldn't stop Roswitha from her plan, as she thought her new idea with this bitchy piano pla
yer was so great.
"It's simple - I've been thinking all along about how we can do something like this famous "unplugged" from MTV for you without it looking cribbed. Unfortunately that doesn't exist anymore. But that was just honest music, simply produced, little junk and stuff. But I didn't want to just copy it and put you in the studio with two guitar guys and a double bass.
But when a distant acquaintance called me today, who also happens to be Michelle's manager, and complained to me of her grief because a long-agreed television format for her protégé failed, it immediately "clicked".
I discussed this with her immediately - she thinks the idea is as great as I do. You both have everything to gain. You are THE superstars in your respective music genres. Together you will be unbeatable," Roswitha rejoiced into the phone.
Adolé still believed the whole thing was a dream. She took a deep, resigned breath.
Half-heartedly she tried to convince Roswitha that this was not possible. "But our music is so different. We don't fit together at all. She has specialized in classical piano pieces, is constantly on the road in world history, plays in the Elbphilharmonie as well as in the Royal Albert Hall in front of the Queen and the whole royal family. How is that supposed to go together with my completely different kind of hit disco music?"
"That's just it," Roswitha casually countered this desperate advance with a smile. "It is precisely because it is so unexpected that it is so brilliant. I mean, who expects you to find each other at all? It is precisely because you are so different that it is so original! But still, this has happened very often in the history of music. Unexpected is good. Almost ingenious! Just think of Metallica playing together with a symphony orchestra. Great!!!! Or Nick Cave with the then still little Australian pop star Kylie Minogue! Who'd expect that? Or Jennifer Hudson and Iggy Azalea with "Trouble"! World class! Or Aerosmith and Run DMC? Or Run DMC with Sarah McLachlan? Or or or or!"
The Pianoplayer: A lesbian love story Page 1