Introduction

Beautifully written and strikingly honest, Piano Lessons takes the reader on a journey into the heart and meaning of music. As Anna discovers passion and ambition, confronts doubt and disappointment, and learns about much more than tone and technique, Mrs. Sivan’s wisdom guides her: "We are not teaching piano playing. We are teaching philosophy and life and music digested.” Piano Lessons reminds us all how an extraordinary teacher can change a life completely. A work that will appeal to all music lovers and anyone who has ever taken a music lesson, Piano Lessons will also touch the heart of anyone who has ever loved a teacher.

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Excerpt

Chapter 1: Bach

It was my grandfather who found her. He pronounced her name

with an extravagant French accent that spoke of her mystery, her

glamour.

Mrs Siv-an.

She had recently arrived in Adelaide with her husband and

teenage son and was teaching piano at a western-suburbs high

school. My grandfather was a regional director of the Education

Department, and he had chanced upon one of her lessons

during a routine inspection.

‘He was true gentleman, of course, very charming,’ she

told me later, ‘but with a natural authority.’ She furrowed her

brow and pointed her finger: ‘You will teach my granddaughter.’

I was nine years old and learning piano from a local jazz

muso. After our lessons, he liked to join my parents in the

kitchen, roll strange-smelling cigarettes and talk about Stevie

Wonder. My father had for many years resisted my grandfather’s

natural authority, and saw no reason for this arrangement

to change, until one afternoon the jazz muso rolled a

cigarette and announced it was time for me to move on.

‘She got an A for First Grade, man! Where to from here?’

It was no longer only my grandfather’s idea: my father

could safely take it up.

‘Mrs Sivan is from Russia,’ he told me that night at dinner.

‘She’s on the Liszt list.’

‘What’s the list list?’

‘The Liszt list. Liszt taught the teacher of her teacher’s

teacher.’

‘Who’s Liszt?’

He gave me one of his looks. ‘A very famous composer.’

I liked the sound of that. If I learned piano from Mrs Sivan,

then I too would be on the Liszt list. It sat well with the grand

narrative I had in mind for my life.

A week later, my grandfather drove me to Mrs Sivan’s house for

the audition; my mother sat beside him in her lavender pantsuit,

smelling of Chanel. As we drove down North East Road,

he recommended I pay serious attention to directions.

‘We now approach Ascot Avenue, elsewhere known as Port

Rush Road. Here we undertake a right-hand turn.’

This was a journey that would be tracked into my body

over the following years, as I made it once a week, then twice

a week, and then sometimes every day. But for now, my grandfather

might have been taking me on an intergalactic voyage

from my suburban Adelaide childhood to somewhere very far

away.

‘At this point, we arrive at our destination,’ he announced,

as we pulled up outside a cream-brick bungalow. ‘The home of

the distinguished Mrs Eleonora Siv-an, formerly of the Leningrad

Conservatorium of Music.’

At the front door there were courtly nods and handshakes

all round, and my grandfather and mother speaking too loudly.

‘And how are you enjoying your new house, Mrs Sivan?’

my grandfather asked.

‘Yes, we like enormous. Much more comfortable than

Pennington Hostel.’

They all laughed, and I dared look up. How to describe

her? In my mind she is less a character than a force. Music is

coiled inside her under a pressure that demands expression,

and from the moment she opened the door she did not stop

talking. She must have been in her forties, but was not much

taller than my nine-year-old self, and had the peachy, springy

skin of an infant. I met her powerful gaze and blushed and

dropped my eyes.

‘We are not teaching piano playing,’ she said. Her English

was new, and I was not sure if I had heard correctly. ‘We are

teaching philosophy and life and music digested. Music is

yours. Instrument is you are. Come in, please come in.’

She ushered us into her living room and directed me to an

ancient upright piano with yellowing keys.

‘Music is logically created fantasy,’ she continued. ‘When I

give information, this information comes to student to digest.

When digestion coming, the nutrition is his own – is not

mine.’

I scanned the room, searching for something of the known

world to which I could anchor myself. The piano was pushed

against a wall painted a lurid, metallic pink. In the middle of

the wall there was a calendar, and I pinned my hopes on this.

‘What is the result of a clever, clever heart, and a very kind

and generous brain?’

I stared at my mother, willing her to answer, but she

avoided my gaze.

‘It is clever hands!’ Mrs Sivan declared.

‘Indeed it is,’ said my grandfather. ‘Now, I imagine you

would like to hear Anna play her Mozart sonata.’

‘Of course. Please, make yourself comfortable. Always

think first of music, and not to impress us. And never start

until you are ready. This is first arts of any music: learn to listen

to silence, atmospheric silence. Only then can we understand

future and perspective.’

‘Where should I begin?’ My voice was very small.

‘What?’

My father had urged me to begin with the slow movement,

because I played it ‘very musically’. ‘Should I begin with the

second movement?’

She looked shocked. ‘Always best to start story from beginning,

yes? Of course must be first movement.’

At this stage, I viewed piano pieces as obstacle courses for

fingers, in which the object was getting through, largely unscathed.

The first movement of the Mozart sonata was a hazardous

place, but I dodged a few accidentals in the development

section and made it through to the end.

There was silence. I looked at my mother, who looked at

my grandfather, who looked at Mrs Sivan.

‘Thank you,’ she said, finally. ‘You like chocolate, yes?

Come with me, and I give wonderful chocolate.’

My mother nodded encouragingly, and I followed Mrs

Sivan out to the kitchen, where she gave me a Baci chocolate,

wrapped in silver foil, and then another, and then two more.

‘You are good girl, and now must enjoy your life.’ She called in

her teenage son, Dmitri, to sit with me, and returned to the

lounge room to speak to my mother and grandfather.

I looked around the room as my heart beat wildly in my

chest. There were framed photographs of dogs on the walls,

dressed in spectacles and hats.

‘Who took these photos?’ I asked Dmitri. He had dark hair

and gentle eyes.

‘My uncle.’ He named the dogs, one by one.

‘Do you come from Russia?’

‘Yes.’

I had no further small talk, so I munched through my hoard

of chocolate in silence.

Eventually, Mrs Sivan collected me. ‘I give you kiss,’ she

said. ‘Nine-year-old girl who tries so hard. Of course you must

be allowed to learn. But always remember music is not just

playing right notes in right time, but digestion hugely important.

Music is greatest joy and greatest freedom, and gives you

wings, absolutely. But first we must build our wings, bit by bit.

Enormous job really, but so rewarding, and so makes it worth

to live!’

There was a festive atmosphere in the car on the way home.

‘Fancy that!’ said my mother. ‘My clever baby.’

‘My dear, you are to be commended on making such a fine

impression,’ my grandfather declared.

Later, Mrs Sivan explained that she had taken pity on me.

That any child who laboured through a Mozart sonata, so illequipped,

deserved to be taught.

‘Her acceptance is not without conditions,’ my grandfather

continued. ‘Mrs Sivan expects you to practise more.

Two hours a day. But not all at once. Forty minutes before

school, forty minutes in the afternoon and forty minutes in

the evening.’

Two hours a day. It sounded catastrophic, but also thrilling.

The jazz muso had asked me to practise for five minutes every

day.

Five minutes every single day? For the rest of my life until I died?

I was not sure that I could make such a commitment.

‘You find time to brush your teeth every day,’ he said, but

even that seemed a barely endurable ordeal. He never enforced

this practice regime, but had a laissez-faire approach to teaching,

humming quietly while I played, occasionally pencilling in

a remark on my music: Dynamics. Once he told me not to move

my bum up the piano seat to reach a high note. Bum. I giggled

to hear the word.

The most passionate I ever saw him was when my father

told him I hated Stevie Wonder’s ‘Lately’. ‘How could you hate

“Lately”?’ he asked. His hippy eyes widened; his head shook to

a disbelieving slo-mo beat. ‘Wow. It’s such a beautiful song.’

I could not explain why I hated ‘Lately’ any more than I

could explain why I hated milk, or trains, or the wood shop.

There was something about its chromaticism that bothered

me, something unsettling about the way my father crooned it,

late at night, at the piano: Lately I’ve been havin’ the strangest

feelings with no vivid reason here to find.

‘I just hate it. It’s yuck,’ I said.

As a six-year-old, the first piece I had loved was an anonymous

gig from the Australian Music Examinations Board Preliminary

book. At the climax, it detoured briefly into the secondary

dominant, as I would later learn. There was a piquancy to this,

as B flat yielded to B natural and then reasserted itself. It was

the piece’s sweet spot: a rudimentary version of what George

Sand called Chopin’s ‘blue note’. I had played these two bars

over and over again; I had wanted to rub them into my skin.

After too many repetitions, they had lost their magic, and I

had to return to the piece’s beginning to recharge them.

One Sunday lunch at my grandparents’ house, the men had

retreated to the music room for their weekly Chopin play-off.

My grandfather began with a sprightly waltz, my father played

the polonaise that was my bedtime lullaby, and then my uncle

trumped them both with the Fantasie-Impromptu.

‘Bravo,’ applauded my grandfather.

‘My smarter younger brother!’ my father cried out, jumping

up from his seat. ‘Now kiss the carpet!’

As they wrestled, I slipped onto the piano stool and performed

my gig, hoping to silence them.

‘That’s lovely, darling,’ my grandmother said, bringing in

the tea.

‘We really have to consider a more serious teacher,’ my

grandfather declared, missing the point entirely.

Now, when we returned home from the audition, I phoned my

father at the surgery to tell him the good news.

‘Excellent work, Pie! What did you play?’

I confessed that I had only played the first movement, and

there was a disappointed silence at the other end of the line.

‘Imagine the impression you would have made with the slow

movement!’ he muttered, finally.

My first lesson with Mrs Sivan was scheduled for the following

week, and to please my father I brought along the second

movement. Now that I had passed the audition, I felt more

confident: the hard work was done. I put the music on the

stand and positioned my hands over a G-major chord.

‘Not!’ she called out. ‘Stop!’

‘But I haven’t even started.’

‘Of course music has started already!’ She reached over and

took my hand. ‘The fingers are the orchestral musicians. The

elbow must be here, for to conduct. We must hear the sound

before, and then immediately we relax.’

As she demonstrated a chromatic scale, her hand had the

grace of a small animal.

‘I am relaxed,’ I insisted, and imitated her, but my little finger

stuck up vertically, an incriminating, impertinent erection.

‘Not. You are playing. Not listening.’

This was something she repeated for years before I started

to understand it. It is only by hearing a sound first in your

imagination that you relax. And it is only by relaxing that you

properly hear that sound, be mindful of that sound, understand

it as a sound in time, in context of a past and future.

‘Not. Not like this. This is spaghetti fingers.’

As I played, I skated across the top of the keyboard, but

now she took my fingers and introduced them to the bottom

of the keys, so that I felt the security of gravity, of contact

with the earth. ‘Here, feel the depths.’ Slowly I would learn to

live here, transferring these safe depths from sound to sound,

avoiding spillage.

‘You must have strong fingers!’ She burrowed her fingertips

into the top of my arm, so that I almost fell off the stool. ‘My

darling, I am sorry! I forget my strength.’ She laughed. ‘Always

remember, your hands must speak. Your hand and your instrument

are one, not two, and your music inside of you.’

Somehow, over the years that followed, she transferred a

physical knowledge from her hands to mine. You do not consciously

mould your hands into sounds, any more than you

consciously shape your mouth to form a word. You put them

on the instrument, and you speak.

‘Every note is important,’ she said, ‘every sound says something.’

I examined the score warily, wondering what this F sharp

said, what the meaning of this embellishment might be.

‘Every piece tells a story,’ she concluded. ‘Next week I want

you to tell me story of this second movement.’

Back at home, I placed the Mozart score on the kitchen

bench and stared miserably at the second movement, waiting

for it to talk to me.

‘What sort of story?’ I asked my mother, as she prepared a

stir-fry.

‘You’re good at stories. Why don’t you just make one up?’

‘Like what?’ I asked.

She stopped slicing vegetables and came over to look at

the score. ‘I don’t know. A little girl goes to the zoo, or something.’

So I invented a story, and grafted it onto the movement.

Here a little girl buys some fairy floss; here she sits in the

rotunda; at the reprise, she meets a rhinoceros.

What did music mean to me at this time, when I knew nothing

of it, when it was a language I did not yet speak? My dream was

to be a singer, and I spent much of my spare time singing

‘You Light up My Life’ in the study, twirling dramatically

between verses, while my father accompanied me on piano.

There was an older girl at my primary school, Erica, with a

beautiful voice. How marvellous to be able to sing like that!

Better than having supernatural powers! Much of my fantasy

life involved Erica and me and Tiny Tina and Little Joey from

Young Talent Time, dressed in flowing white robes, singing on

a revolving stage under a disco ball. We looked like angels;

sometimes we even were.

At carols night at school, Erica sang ‘The Little Drummer

Boy’. ‘Do you think I’ll ever be able to sing like that?’ I asked

my mother on the way home, with a false, preening modesty.

She thought for a moment.

‘No, darling, I don’t think you will.’

For the rest of the car trip, I sat in shocked silence. That

was not what a mother was supposed to say.

I tried again a few weeks later. ‘Do you think I’ll ever go on

Young Talent Time?’ I asked my parents as they watched the

evening news. Perhaps if I caught them off-guard, they would

give me the response I required.

They exchanged uncertain glances.

‘Maybe if you practise the piano really hard,’ my father

offered.

My brother and I had a babysitter who claimed to play the

Moonlight Sonata. In her interpretation, she transposed the

first movement into E minor, forsook the left hand and soprano

voice, and removed all harmonic progression, until the movement

was reduced to an E-minor broken chord in second

inversion, repeated indefinitely.

‘Do you want to hear Moonlight Sonata?’ I asked visitors,

in preparation for Young Talent Time. I played this broken

chord over and over again, faster and faster, my hand cramped

in a spasm of effort. B—E—G, B—E—G, B-E-G, BEG, BEGBEGBEGBEG.

‘The Moonlight Sonata is a cinch,’ I said modestly. ‘It’s just

B-E-G, or in other words beg.’

This was my knowledge base. This was what I took to my

first lessons with Mrs Sivan. At the Leningrad Conservatorium,

she had been preparing students for international competitions;

before coming to Adelaide, she had never taught

children. During our second lesson, I began telling her my

story about the zoo.

‘This is where the little girl sees a chimpanzee,’ I said,

pointing to a chromatic embellishment. My voice faltered.

Even I did not believe it.

She took my hand: ‘My darling, we must sit and work.’

After my first few lessons, my parents swapped shifts at their

doctors’ surgery so that my father could take me to Mrs Sivan’s

house. For the next eight years, he accompanied me to my

lessons every Tuesday afternoon, listening, day-dreaming,

taking notes. Mrs Sivan was a born performer, and enjoyed

having him there. I feel it myself now as a teacher: the extra

voltage an audience lends to a room.

‘Let us talk about the fingers,’ Mrs Sivan said. ‘This finger,

the pointer finger, is good student. This third finger, it is very

– what you say – reliable. But this finger … oy.’ She shook her

head. ‘Fourth finger very lazy!’

Her words were picturesque but to me entirely abstract.

Over the years, my body came to understand them for me.

‘It is the thumb that makes a pianist,’ she said, and showed

me what the thumb can do, her hands fluttering over the keyboard,

kneading at it, producing sounds of striking intensity.

Over time, I learnt that the thumb is the key to the hand’s

relaxation, its checkpoint, navigator and conductor. There is

an instinct to grab with the thumb, which turns it into a brake;

pianistic fluency depends on letting it go, on trusting the

hand.

Then she took my little finger into her hand: ‘It is the little

finger that makes an artist.’ She winked her little finger at me,

demonstrating its independence. ‘Like waving to a friend: bye

bye.’ I imitated her movement and waved back to her, but at the

piano I still used my little finger as an approximate edge to my

hand. It took me a decade to understand its possibilities: the

tiny candle-lights it sets at the top of a melody, its sleigh-bells,

its coloratura, its left-hand foundations and invitations.

We began work on Bach’s small preludes.

‘Bach basically is father of all music,’ she told me. ‘He has

huge influence on everybody. He was educator of Chopin, of

Beethoven, of Schumann. And even all modern jazz already

here. You can try anything, and Bach already do it. Of course,

Bach never knew piano.’

‘Why not?’

‘Piano not yet invented.’

I glanced dubiously at my father, who gave an emphatic

nod.

‘But piano absolutely instrument of imagination, and we

can create anything on it. Clear organ here.’ She demonstrated

a small prelude. ‘Remember always that Bach represents God

in this world, with his wisdom, his acceptance, his forgiveness.

Like he always bless you.’

‘I’ve already learnt that prelude,’ I told her, imagining it was

possible to complete a piece. ‘I finished it with my old teacher.’

‘Bach is never finished. Life in this music endless.’ She took

my finger and dived with it into the key; it plunged to the bottom

with the precise weight of a ball bearing. ‘And here, very

harpsichord touch. What Bach gives? Peace, of course, and

bells.’

The evenness she demanded went well beyond the physical

handicaps of a lazy fourth finger or attention-seeking thumb.

It was an evenness of thought, a spiritual discipline. ‘We play

with our ears,’ she reminded me. ‘Seeing ears, hearing eyes.

Clever heart, warm brain.’

My hands, brown with the Australian sun, tripped across

the keyboard beside hers, as pink and round as starfish. ‘Not,’

she said, as I guessed at a sound, and then she took my hand

and guided my fingers to the right attack. Often I didn’t even

register the precise spins she put on every sound; I was as

tone-deaf to inflexion as a person speaking a foreign tongue.

To me the keys of the piano were still on–off buttons, which

could be played loud, or soft, or somewhere in between.

At home, I was not yet practising two hours a day, but I told

my friends that I was. On one camping trip with our neighbours,

around the fire, I gave a self-aggrandising account

of my life as a junior concert pianist. As we drove home the

following day, my brother and baby sister dozed beside me.

I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep too, so that I could

listen to my parents speaking sotto voce in the front.

‘Lizzie thinks we’re pushing Anna,’ said my mother. ‘That

she’s missing out on a childhood.’

‘That’s bullshit,’ said my father. ‘Did you tell her how much

she enjoyed the piano?’

‘I told her about the little stories she makes up for her

pieces. But Lizzie said that this only proved her point. That

this was her way of getting the childhood she was missing

out on. She said it was one of the most tragic things she had

ever heard.’

I lay in the backseat and rehearsed this in my mind. Tragic.

Me. Missing out on a childhood. The melodrama of it delighted

me; a tear of the most exquisite self-pity formed in my eye and

then rushed down my cheek. I let it dry on my skin. If I wiped

it away, they would know I had been eavesdropping.

In fact my parents rarely pushed me to practise. ‘Practice

makes perfect,’ my mother said occasionally. I was not sure

that I believed her, but I took it on faith, like so much in childhood.

Sometimes my father sat beside me when I practised;

sometimes he sat behind me in the study and wrote poetry.

Usually, I was glad to play the piano. I was an unco-

ordinated child, and playing an instrument offered me purchase

on the physical world: a small realm of possible mastery.

Each night, my parents took me out the back for remedial ball

skills.

‘Hands ready,’ my mother coached, as my father lobbed a

soccer ball at me. It approached with the precision of a heatseeking

missile, its black and white hexagons swirling towards

my face.

‘Catch!’ they cried out, in unison.

I always lost my nerve at the key moment.

‘You’ll never catch it if you don’t look at it,’ my mother repeated,

running inside to fetch a flannel. I waited for my nose

to stop bleeding, and then returned inside to the piano.

Every now and then I resented it, and Lizzie’s words echoed

in my head. One Saturday morning, I rallied the neighbourhood

children in a new business venture. We sifted the

neighbours’ driveway, searching for pieces of gravel of the

utmost beauty and rarity, which we painted in watercolours

– sapphire, amethyst, ruby and emerald – and marketed to

passers-by

as ‘precious stones’. We had sold four bundles

before lunch-time, including one to a stranger, clearing twelve

cents in profit, when I had to return home to practise Bach.

My father sat behind me in the study, typing a short story;

behind him, three windows framed a Saturday sky. It was a sky

that was blue with possibility: a sky that contained my missing

childhood.

I slammed the piano lid shut: ‘I hate Bach.’ The words felt

blasphemous in my mouth: I knew immediately that this was a

much greater sin than hating Stevie Wonder.

At my piano lesson the following Tuesday, my father gave

me a mischievous look and turned to Mrs Sivan. ‘Anna said

she hated Bach.’

‘No I didn’t!’

Mrs Sivan remained very calm. ‘Of course you did not. It

is impossible. Bach chooses himself who he will like, and who

he will not.’

At the end of the year, there was to be a concert in Elder

Hall.

‘We have excellent name,’ Mrs Sivan said. She collected

English words like small coins, and her cache was overtaking

mine. ‘A Spectrum of Piano Music.’

‘That is an excellent name,’ said my father.

‘You like, yes?’ She flushed with pleasure and turned to

me. ‘The stage must be like another room in your house.

When you step out there, you smile at your friends, you bow,

you enjoy sharing your music. You feel like fish.’

‘A fish in water?’

‘Of course.’

At nine, I fancied myself a veteran of the stage because of

my starring role as the Fairy Queen in the Year 3 operetta. My

mother had made my first diva frock, with a satin, sequinned

bodice and tulle skirt. Armed with a cardboard wand coated in

glitter, I had stepped out onto the stage and found myself at

home. On the final night, as I delivered a bouquet of flowers to

Mrs Vaughan at the piano, a smile seized control of my face

and threatened to consume my head.

A Spectrum of Piano Music promised an equal glory. It was to

be on 18 September; all other dates in the calendar now existed

in relation to this. In our lessons, we moved through the small

preludes and the Anna Magdalena Notebook to the inventions

and sinfonias. Mrs Sivan took me through each part repeatedly,

considering the intention of each note, the attraction that

bound it to its neighbours. It was not enough to play each part,

to feel it in my hands: I had to sing it in my head, follow its contour,

tell its story. Then, when I put the parts together, by a

sudden miracle I could hear them all at once. It was as though

I had three minds, or three sets of ears, operating in parallel.

The first time this happened, I turned to her, astonished. My

consciousness had expanded; I could feel air rushing into

unused parts of my mind. ‘Exactly!’ she said. ‘Otherwise will

be awful.’

As the concert drew nearer, my lessons became longer.

After one lesson in the school holidays, I went to my best friend

Sophia’s house for a sleepover.

‘What took you so long?’ she asked. ‘We’ve been waiting to

watch Thriller!’

‘My first two-hour lesson,’ I explained smugly.

In our lessons, Mrs Sivan sat beside me at the piano, seizing

my hand and correcting it, forming my fingers into shape,

or playing alongside me two octaves above, the intensity of

her sounds ringing in my ears: ‘Do you know how little is

different? But huge, huge. This we call science in arts. The

more you understand each little thing, the more you understand

all.’

As I played, she talked or sang with the music. Sometimes,

she asked me to move aside and played for me, but this was

rare. ‘I don’t want you to copy, monkey-style.’

She explained the circle of fifths to me, piling fifths one

above the other, always brightening, until we arrived back in

the key where we had begun. I blinked, amazed: it was improbable

as an Escher drawing. Then she unravelled us through

perfect fourths, travelling backwards past G-flat major and

C-flat major, with their great hoards of flats, returning to the

daylight of C major. The mathematics of it delighted me.

‘Do you understand?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

She turned to my father, beaming. ‘I have never met such

an intelligent nine-year-old, who can understand at first telling

the circle of fifths.’

At such moments, I walked out of her lessons sky-high,

unassailable. At other moments, I felt smaller. When I was tiring,

she would stop and address me urgently.

‘What is we need is to feed our spirit, constantly. And feeding

ourselves with other people’s food is not great nutrition for

our soul. Must digest. Look sometimes at people growing

older, and wisdom coming inside. Start of what I call digested

wisdom.’

In the early days, these speeches baffled me, and I sat there

with eyes averted, trying to make myself as inconsequential as

possible. When the great force of her conversation halted at a

question mark, I ventured a tentative yes or no, searching her

face for the right answer.

‘You are too intelligent a girl to guess,’ she reprimanded me

once. ‘What comes after translation? Interpretation. First you

must translate composer’s wishes exactly, and then you’re free

to do interpretation, otherwise you automatically restricted.’

As she offered me this, I snuck a glance at the clock. Soon

I would be back in the car with my father, tracing those dark

streets back home to Nailsworth, where my mother would be

preparing dinner. Then I could settle in to watching Diff’rent

Strokes, and it would be another six days before my next

lesson.

The dress rehearsal for A Spectrum of Piano Music was held on

a Thursday afternoon in Elder Hall. It was a sunny spring day,

but there was a hushed twilight in the imposing hall, with its

dark wood and red plush seats. Mrs Sivan’s high-school students

were scattered around the auditorium, exuding adolescent

cool. I walked in holding my mother’s hand, and

immediately regretted my lolly-pink overalls.

When it was my turn to play, I climbed up on the stage,

grimaced at my mother’s enthusiastic applause and began a

Bach sinfonia. I had rehearsed the opening many times with

Mrs Sivan, until the small bells of its moto perpetuo had become

second nature, and my hearing automatically expanded to

accommodate its three voices. But as I progressed to the second

line, a worry intruded: What does the left hand do next?

Imagine if I had a memory lapse in front of all these high-school

students! The individual parts lost their focus, and the three

dimensions of sound contracted back into one.

‘Not hearing!’ Mrs Sivan called from the audience.

I stopped and started again.

‘Not!’ She called out an instruction which I couldn’t hear,

so I kept playing.

‘Never just playing but hearing inside!’ she exclaimed, but

my grandparents had said my sinfonia was excellent when I

played it at Sunday lunch, so I continued.

‘We will work!’ she called out, and climbed up from the

audience onto the stage. As she started talking to me again

about depths, or about not sitting, or about breathing spaces,

or about all the other things I was not doing, I felt overwhelmed

and started to cry.

‘My darling, what is this?’ She wrapped her arm around

me. ‘Always can be better, always growing. You must not cry,

except for good tears, when you are so moved by the music.’

Against my will, my bad tears continued. I was so humiliated

to be crying in front of high-school students that I

started heaving with sobs. My mother stepped up to the

stage.

‘I think I might take her outside for some fresh air.’

‘Of course,’ said Mrs Sivan. ‘Enjoy beautiful day, and then

we will continue.’

My mother took my hand and walked me down the aisle,

past the staring high-school students, into the spring day outside.

‘I don’t understand,’ I wailed, my shameful secret now

public.

She held me to her and rocked me in her arms. ‘Don’t be a

goofy goat,’ she said, as the afternoon sun beat down on us,

and my pink overalls dug into my crotch, and the oblivious

adult world continued around us.

When we returned to the hall, Mrs Sivan put her arm around

me and led me back to the stage and pulled up a chair so that

we could work.

‘My darling, life in music always learning, always growing.

What is the difference between good and great musician?’

I knew the answer by now, even if I did not yet understand

it.

‘Little bits,’ I said.

‘Exactly!’ she replied, delighted. ‘Little bit more hearing,

little bit more freedom.’

She had to tell me everything. She had to fit out this alternative

universe for me, item by item, word by word, sound by

sound. It is never enough to tell a student something once:

teaching is constant repetition, constant correction. She repeated

her lessons and anecdotes as a musician performs repertoire:

each time reinterpreted, and so made new.

On the stage of Elder Hall she again took me through the

breathing spaces and conducting lines of this sinfonia. I played

with a heavy-handed punctuation, inking every musical sentence

with an emphatic full-stop. ‘Do not sit,’ she reminded

me. ‘Bach never stops.’ In Bach, every ending is also a beginning.

Over time I came to understand the quiet that lies at the

heart of his moto perpetuo.

She held a lot back in those early years, but gave the maximum

I could take, and a little more. This was the basis of her

teaching, and there was an unimaginable generosity at its core.

She flung an excess of knowledge at me; much of it bounced off

my sides, but small bits stuck. Little bits. Gradually, I came to

know more of her ideas by heart. By the time I properly understood

them, they were absorbed into my body, and I could no

longer tell where her ideas began and mine left off.

‘This is good,’ she said to me later, ‘this means this knowledge

has come to you. It is intuition.’ She grinned at this sparkling

new word. ‘In-tuition. It means tuition that has come

inside.’

On Friday night at the concert, there were three chairs lined

up in the green room. One of Mrs Sivan’s adult students,

Debra Andreacchio, supervised the performers backstage,

ushering us from one chair to the next, each time closer to the

stage. Sitting in the third chair, I imagined what it would feel

like to be sitting in the first chair, and then I was in it, and now

I was onstage, trying to remember to smile at my friends and

bow and enjoy sharing my music – and then it was over. It

was easier than the rehearsal, and nobody had stopped me.

Through the transformative ritual of a performance, Elder

Hall had become somewhere warm, somewhere victorious.

At interval, Mrs Sivan gave me a fragrant embrace, and I

joined my parents and grandparents in the audience for the

second half. As the last performer left the stage, my grandfather

leant forward in his chair.

‘It would appear that nobody has prepared a speech,’ he

observed, and strode purposefully down to the front.

‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. On one of my

inspections of the Woodville High Special Music Centre, I

was fortunate to hear Mrs Sivan’s remarkable teaching, and

I drew the conclusion immediately that she was an out-ofthe-

ordinary teacher of the piano. I feel that after tonight’s

wonderful treat these initial impressions have been truly

vindicated.’

My father winked at my mother; my own triumph burnt

quietly inside me. The rhythm of my adult life had begun. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Piano Lessons is a memoir about growing up, following your passion, teaching and learning, music, ambition, family and much, much more. Is there one central theme or idea that captures the essence of this story?
2. What is the greatest lesson that Mrs Sivan taught Anna?
3. What was it that drew Anna to the piano as a vocation?
4. Can you draw any parallels between Mrs Sivan's lessons about making music, and the techniques Anna has used to write this book?

Weblinks

»	Official web site for Piano Lessons
»	Author Anna Goldsworthy's bio
»	Author Anna Goldsworthy's web site

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