Free The Virtuoso by Sonia Orchard Page A

kept when my aunt proclaimed the parents were clearly out of their minds. Years later, when she told me that my piano teacher hadrecommended I study at the Academy, she smiled, shook her head and told me that if I was going to be a brilliant pianist, we’d surely all have known about it by now.
    It was my father who loved to listen to me play, and for whom I always performed. He’d sit in his armchair, reading the evening paper as I practised, and although I’d sometimes think he wasn’t taking any notice, he’d often dip the paper down below his eyes at the end of a piece and say, ‘The number three? A wonderful piece,’ before smiling and returning to his news. He’d sit there for hours if I kept playing, and I would, even when I’d grown sick of everything I’d practised. Those were the times I’d think I could play all through the night, when I knew how it surely must feel to be the greatest pianist in the world.
    Noël dropped over on his way to the Wigmore and handed me a ticket for his evening’s performance, a Beethoven recital. The seat was in the middle of the second row; I imagined he’d chosen it especially so that he could look down and see me from the stage.
    I was standing by the table, fiddling with a cigarette lighter, unsure if I ought to play a record or even offer him a chair and a cup of tea. He was leaning against the sofa, his suit in its cover draped over one arm, chatting away as if he were at a party.
    As he spoke I thought about his programme and ran through each sonata in my mind (the Pathetique , the Waldstein , the opus 110, the opus 31 no. 2), tens of thousands of notes to be played, to absolute perfection.
    I wanted to enquire if he was nervous, but didn’t want to jinx anything. I kept thinking about the last movement of the Waldstein sonata with its prestissimo runs of octaves, one hand galloping after the other. Only a month earlier we were at the piano and he’d confessed that the one thing he always had trouble with was glissando octaves. ‘Really?’ I had replied, dropping both hands onto the keys, octaves rippling up the keyboard. ‘I used to use Moiseiwitsch’s method,’ I said as I continued my display, ‘but now find it easier with the thumbs angled in.’ I turned to him; he wasn’t looking at my hands but glaring straight at me. His face lacked any expression except for a glimmer of something—hostility—in his eyes. I stopped mid-passage, dropped my hands into my lap and looked down at them, ashamed. When I glanced back at him again, he was joyfully animated once more.
    ‘I prefer Schnabel’s method,’ he said. ‘When a piece gets difficult, just make faces,’ and he launched into an horrendously demanding passage from the Busoni concerto, contorting his face from a manic grin to a choking grimace.
    As he stepped away from the sofa I asked him if he needed shoe polish, a comb or anything else at all. He told me that Nancy had shone his shoes for so long that morning that he was surprised he had any shoes left at all, then he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. A part of me wanted him to go, a relief from the tedious navigation through each second. But as soon as he’d left, the latch clicking shut behind him, I hungabout at the door, my ‘Break a leg’ and his sweet, dewy cologne clanging around the room like dying moths.
    I managed several hours of practice, but was too occupied with concerns about Noël’s performance to work very well at all. I also got thinking about Robert and Clara and the difficulties they faced, juggling the needs and commitments of two artistic careers. Robert was quite humiliated by his wife’s great popularity on stage while his compositions so often received lukewarm responses. Yet he’d become anxious if she toured alone—he’d fret so much he sometimes couldn’t compose at all. As for Clara, the moment their first child, Marie, was born, she realised it would be near impossible to successfully fulfil the dual