I can’t remember not being a mediocre piano player, though there must have been a time when I was worse. I wasn’t born vamping through the easy movements of Best Loved Classics and burying their tricky parts in clouds of pedal. (Take that, Moonlight Sonata!) No, my kind of musician is made—by going to lessons but not practicing in-between.
With middle age came the resolve to do something about that, in the summer, when the hills are alive with the sound of music camps. I chose the Taubman Summer Institute, whose Basic Training sensibility speaks to someone always happy to defer gratification past the grave. Yes, there would be dedicated teachers, explanations of pianistic physiology and phenomenology—blah, blah, blah. What mattered was the chance to become a moral and aesthetic athlete, someone who deserved to play better.
Two weeks of twice-a-day lessons, plus systematic lectures on technique, would be the first small steps in the process of retraining—rebuilding my playing from scratch. I could then look forward to a long and patient follow-up, a road stretching virtuously to the horizon and beyond. Picture the young Liszt who, awed and shamed by Paganini’s virtuosity, withdrew to retool; then adjust the focus until I come into view.
On my return from camp the upstairs neighbor had to endure scale fragments, one-octave scales, multi-octave scales, an album for 8-year-olds, and four pages of Mozart repeated endlessly in disjointed scraps. On these activities I put a misterioso spin, refusing to play when others were present and explaining with dark significance that it was because I was “retraining.” I hoped someone might run with that and say, “Like Liszt!” But no one ever did.
There was a catch. I knew it from the start, as one knows, without at first quite believing it, that one is going to die. I would have to give up all the things I used to play. They were sanctuaries for bad habits, now being starved, that could metastasize if disturbed. At camp, we discussed how to take that sacrifice in stride: “The literature is so rich,” someone said, that “you can’t run out.” And, “Besides, I never played those pieces all that well.”
It felt as if I had agreed to ditch old friends in favor of more useful ones. They passed before my mind’s eye as in the epilogue to a war movie—the roll-call of fallen comrades shown one last time in their joy and strength—or as a series of doomed, sentimentally recalled love affairs: pages of Chopin or Gershwin or Bach (or, full disclosure, the theme song from Dr. Kildare) reclined alluringly on the piano’s music desk; exploratory fumbling with the most exciting bits; a brief triumph of the ideal over the real, the music imagined over the sounds actually produced.
Then things go downhill.
Unlike other boyhood aspirations, the hopes invested in that music have stayed fresh. The curtain was always going up. Going up, for example, on Sounds of the Sixties, centerpiece of a failed attempt in junior high school to become with-it. (To gauge its chances of success, picture a pubescent song-stylist belting out, to his own accompaniment, “Flamingo / Like a flame in the sky!”) All that remains of that songbook is the cover with its art deco graphics—a background of spreading ripples, the roster of the 32 Outstanding Hits within.
Art music is packaged more chastely. Volumes from the Chopin Institute come in beige covers with dignified typography (if orange-on-beige can be dignified) and a blurry ceremonial seal. On my copies the prices are given in zlotys. All were bought from discount tables when, as a Polish friend likes to say, we were young and beautiful in Warsaw. The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music publishes Bach and Beethoven in austere gray, accompanied by the magisterial (i.e., demoralizing) commentaries of Sir Donald Tovey, which make it plain that my interpretive opinions are among those that cannot be seriously entertained.
One of my oldest music artifacts is a disintegrating Chopin sampler patched with tape. The sight of it cues a painful montage from a friend’s housewarming—lashings of alcohol; brief furious polonaising that screeches to a blank-minded halt; and postmortem commentary by the evening’s hostess (at whose request I had tried to play): “That was a bit of a disaster, wasn’t it?” Another flashback is triggered by a fading xerox copy of a four-handed arrangement of the William Tell Overture. The party, this time, at my house: my thesis adviser, sight-reading his part with panache, beating me to the finish line by a good half-second.
But it’s when I looked at my copy of Rhapsody in Blue, begrimed at the corners I had grabbed hundreds of times to do speedy page turns, that I felt true grief. It was my signature tune—though, to be honest, I never played it all that well.
Retraining ought to close the book on those affairs. And I was committed, I thought. I wanted to deserve what deserving would forbid me to have. So, goodbye, Rhapsody in Blue, “I Got Rhythm,” Lady, Be Good. Goodbye to the A-flat Major Ballade. Goodbye, “Take Five” and “Raggy Waltz.” Goodbye to half of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, Kinderszenen, the Visions Fugitives, the Pathétique Sonata. And good night, Moonlight.
David Guaspari is a writer in Ithaca, N.Y.
