An apology to Bertha and Wolfgang

I found the book of Mozart piano sonatas in mama's basement. Mrs. Lang was already pretty old when I was taking lessons from her, so this and a few other books are the remaining artefacts of that time. It is full of Mrs. Lang's arduous annotations, fingering, pedal markings. It tells me that I started learning the second movement of the A-minor sonata on July 22, 1989. But I know this to be the revised date. Because I was auditioning with this piece, she erased and edited the date so it would seem as if I had learned the music in half the time it actually required. And if you look very carefully, you can see the erasures, traces of embellishments (232312 343423) spelled out and measures subdivided: "The judges don't need to know I'm spoon-feeding you like a baby."

When I quit piano, I had some grievances. At the time, Mrs. Lang stuck to a policy wherein I was disallowed from learning anything my sister played, because the temptation to imitate rather than to interpret would be too great. This would have been perfectly fine except for what I believed to be an inequitable division of works. It seemed to me (totally unfounded) that I ended up at-best with all of the minor efforts of demigods. And my sister got to play with the gods. I mean, how was it fair that my sister got Bach when I got Scarlatti? Or she had Beethoven but I had Kuhlau? Of course, it wasn't true that Mrs. Lang saved only the best for my older sister. In my narrow understanding, I saw value only in the music bounded by that time period between Beethoven and Debussy. And I resented the fact that when I asked for music from that era, it would end up being some weird work of Schumann or small-scale Moszkowski. I wanted virtuoso pieces that would impress people, that was fast, that thundered, and... well, satisfied my taste for sublime melodrama. (Funny how my sister would complain that all of the pieces she got were the schmaltzy emotive stuff, and that I got the stuff requiring real technical skill.)

Anyway, I don't deserve Mozart.

I could still see Mrs. Lang's permanent wince: "Stately & elegant. Do you know what stately means?" She would place her hands over her eyes as if to say: "If you can't even hear how bad that is, I don't even know how to help you." By most standards my Mozart sounded pretty "cheap." I used pedal the way a whore applies makeup. My fingers hadn't the dexterity for the speed at which I played the piece. Mrs. Lang pointed out that it's hard to be stately when you're running for dear life. And if I insist on going at that speed, at least my runs should be even, my trills unsticky and...Christ, can I make an effort not to play random intervals with my left hand?

There is plenty of power and thunder in Mozart, but in less obvious ways. And I've always regarded his music--even the most accessible stuff--as pretty but opaque. I just couldn't hear it. Even after all these years, his A-minor Sonata is in the muscle memory of my fingers, but I was never able to make it intelligible. I think it's rather like having a non-English speaker play Lady Macbeth. Without having first developed an ear for the musical cadences of the English language, the actor's delivery would sound unnatural even if all of Shakespeare's words were memorized perfectly.

What I ended up doing was an exaggerated pantomime of a virtuoso pianist, hoping that the excessive swaying and undulating would somehow liberate the musical animal inside of me. That is, I fully expected that if I could just suppress the rational mind I would be possessed of some wild Orphic spirit, creating music so moving that even rocks would weep. Or at the very least, impress Mrs. Lang who simply said: "Stop it. Flapping your arms like that isn't making the piano sound any better."