INTRODUCTION
This all began with Gary.
We were a group of strangers, who had come to the Lot Valley in central France to play the piano for a week; keen amateurs all. There was Stuart, the retired stockbroker; Liz from Manchester, who miraculously combined teaching, nursing and bringing up five kids; Fiona, the psychotherapist; John, the engineer; James, the paint company middle manager; Martin, the senior arts fund-raiser; Wendy, the clinical physiologist. And Gary.
Gary seemed the outsider – a little awkward, unfinished around the edges; at times distant, melancholy; troubled even. There had been hints about Gary’s life – time spent as a Manchester cab driver; anecdotes about a pub he’d once run. And now, he’d produced business cards for his latest venture: a website for leather and PVC clothes. (‘There’s leather’, he would say knowingly over dinner one night, ‘and then there’s … leather.’)
A couple of days into the course, he’d broken off his masterclass – an overambitious attempt at some Liszt – saying he felt unwell. He was more than unusually withdrawn in the run-up to his final recital, when the nine of us played to each other. But then, on the last evening, he sat down and played Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23.
In that bare stone-floored room in the Lot Valley, we were all transfixed. Gary’s fingers seemed possessed. His customary sense of distraction had been replaced by complete absorption. He was playing one of the most complex and technically demanding pieces in the canon, and he was playing without the score, as if carrying the music inside him. All the hesitancy from earlier in the week had vanished. Something about this music had totally transformed Gary. As the piece picked up, moving into orgiastic furies of blurred finger-flying magic, Gary kept pace. Most of the notes were there and in the right place. The final Presto was both demonic and dramatic. The last converging octaves crashed out defiantly. He’d done it! An amateur pianist – no better than any of us – had just knocked off one of the most daunting pieces in the piano repertoire. There was a moment of stunned silence. Gary turned round and looked a little sheepishly at us. And then the audience of eight burst into amazed applause.
A week or so later, I was packing for our annual August holiday in Italy, when at the last minute I found myself slipping a score of the Ballade into my suitcase. In our rented farmhouse, there was a cheap upright piano and, one day – the house was empty and with no danger of being overheard – I tentatively tried to pick my way through this formidable piece. I’d known the Chopin Ballades since university, but it had never before occurred to me to try to play any of them. In mountaineering terms, it would be akin to a middle-aged man deciding to climb the Matterhorn – something a few obsessive and foolhardy amateurs do, indeed, attempt, but fraught with peril.
I was the archetypal amateur who’d returned to the piano in middle age. My musical education had begun at the age of 6, when I joined the church choir. By 8, I was learning the piano. By 10, I had taken up the clarinet too, and then joined the cathedral choir at Guildford. For the next three years, I had a rather extraordinary immersion in music, with a rigid daily timetable of piano and clarinet practice, alongside choir rehearsals and church services.
I changed schools at 13, and arrived at Cranleigh School in Surrey – then a middle-of-the-road private school – where, for the next five years, singing and piano took a back seat to an intensive concentration on the clarinet. If, as the scientific consensus now apparently has it, it takes 10,000 hours to become expert in piano playing by the age of 18, I had missed the mark by a good 8,000 hours. I mucked around on the piano – often playing duets with friends – up to and including my days as a cub reporter on the Cambridge Evening News. Wherever I was living, I would enlist as a clarinettist in the local amateur orchestra, and seek out people who were up for piano duets. At Cambridge I rented pianos all through my undergraduate years. But I think I can safely say that I never seriously practised a single piano piece during my three years there. I certainly played a lot but I was, at best, a pianist endlessly replaying the few pieces I knew from school.
When I was about 19 I had a girlfriend, Ros, whose father was a slightly forbidding headmaster, a big gruff bear of a man, who seemed a rather nineteenth-century figure. Ros’ parents had a grand piano in their sitting room and a few volumes of music, including some Chopin, which I would pick away at of an afternoon. To this day I remember her father challenging me on my opinion of Chopin. He demanded to know whether I took the fashionable view that Chopin was a sentimentalist.
I shifted uncomfortably on the sofa under his beady eye. And of course I denied it. Not at all. Chopin, sentimental? How ridiculous.
But, away from the head’s study I realised that was exactly what I thought. Looking back now I guess it was purely a reaction against my parents’ musical taste. A mild reaction, you might say, but a reaction nonetheless. Actually it wasn’t precisely my parents’ taste I was reacting against – Chopin was the sort of stuff my grandparents liked, and how on earth could you be drawn to anything like that?
Philip Feeney, one of my closest friends at Cambridge, a working-class boy who had won a musical scholarship to Winchester, eventually knocked this pretentiousness out of me. Philip’s favourite piece of Chopin was the Nocturne No. 16 in E-flat major, Op. 55, No. 2. He’d play it repeatedly and I became enchanted by the way he performed the soaring leaps, the internal trills, the apparently endless melodies. So I’d found Chopin ‘sentimental’, but there was nothing sentimental about Philip, who was soon writing atonal music I couldn’t begin to understand. That was a new prism for me: it was OK to be musically avant-garde and still like Chopin. Philip was the most unpretentious musician I knew. He almost physically prickled at the effete public-school atmosphere of Cambridge in whose midst he’d – reluctantly, it sometimes felt – arrived. He grew a shaggy beard, wore the same pair of unwashed jeans and T-shirt every day and would take me off to play darts every night in an attempt to knock some rough edges into me. If he liked Chopin, so could I.
My father – retired, no musical training, hobbies: newspapers and gardening – was also, improbably to me, falling in love with Chopin at the same time. He had been to hear the veteran French pianist Vlado Perlemuter play and something had gone pop in his brain. For the next twenty years he would buy his recordings and – right up to his last concerts (Perlemuter went on playing into his 80s) – would try to make it to hear him whenever he played in the UK. He travelled up to Cambridge to see the old man – who had a terrible musical memory – give a masterclass.
I started buying Chopin records and scores. The Etudes, the Nocturnes, the Preludes and concertos. And – in my second year at Cambridge – the Ballades. All I can remember of the cover of the Ballades LP was that it was sky blue. They were a revelation: almost a religious epiphany. Piano pieces on such a scale, of such intensity, with endless melodies; of such exquisite contrasts. This was sophisticated, large, elemental music of the heart. What on earth had I been thinking of – sentimental? Later I stumbled on the third sonata, which became a kind of anthem for me when I first moved to London until the tape wore out through constant repetition in my Renault 5’s cassette player.
Which is not to say that I could play very much of it. I tried all the obvious pieces beginners try. I wasn’t ready for the challenges of Chopin. I didn’t learn these ‘beginner’ pieces properly; I just dabbled, as I did with all my piano playing for thirty years. It was only when I took a modest prelude to a teacher in my 40s that I realised what was involved in actually reading the notes; working out exactly where they fell; how to do legato fingering; how to pedal; how to bifurcate the brain so that the melody could float over a deep well of undulating harmony.
It was when I moved to London in 1979 to work as a journalist in Fleet Street that the real difficulties over keeping up with music began. I could never predictably be free for rehearsals or concerts: a reporter is always on the move, at the mercy of the news cycle. I moved from rented flat to rented flat – and, though I did buy an old upright piano somewhere along the way, it was always difficult to play in someone else’s house. And then I moved to a flat too small for a piano.
By the time I got round to buying another old upright, it was the mid-1980s. I had married, Lindsay and I had two young daughters – Isabella and Lizzie – and my job involved long hours, foreign travel and, in 1986, six months abroad. My clarinets gathered dust. My piano repertoire dwindled to a handful of nursery rhymes. And then in my early 40s I became editor of the Guardian and had one of those jobs which expands infinitely to fill the time and then spill beyond it. An editor, particularly within a modern global media company, is never truly off duty. A news website churns away night and day, demanding constantly to be fed and refreshed. Emails gush in round the clock. Correspondents in far-flung parts find themselves in trouble; lawyers are threatening or suing; politicians are alternately cajoling or aggrieved. There’s no time for a life, let alone a hobby. To be sure, some of my fellow editors would find time to go to the gym, or jog or play squash. They might even carve out a few hours at the weekend to play golf. But time to play the piano seriously? When?
Yet something in the creative DNA was stirring – a distant memory of that flourishing musical inner life that had been almost an obsession until my mid-20s.
‘Creative DNA’ is, obviously, not a precise statement of the science. Something I once read by Carl Jung best captured the sense of what was stirring within me. He wrote of how, as we approach the middle of life, we may well have succeeded ‘socially’; that is, had children, become more comfortable materially, perhaps even gained status or modest recognition in our chosen field. But, at the same time, he said, we can ‘overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of the personality’. ‘Many – far too many – aspects of life which should have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories,’ he wrote. But all is not lost, because sometimes these memories ‘are glowing coals under grey ashes’.
For Jung – and, please, I have Pass Notes Jung, not a PhD – middle age and the years that follow may in fact constitute our chance to do something about these ‘glowing coals’:
Copyright © 2013 by Alan Rusbridger