Free Longing by J. D. Landis

lesson.
    He did not believe that pupils so young should have more than three lessons a week. But Clara was not young musically. So he gave her a lesson every day, without fail.
    But before he even put her at the piano for the first time, he took her to the table in the kitchen and, because the chair was low and could not be adjusted like the piano stool, sat her on his lap and placed her hands on the tabletop. Because she neither spoke nor heard words, he said nothing. He put his hands on top of hers and was prepared to cup and flex hers up into the proper position, when he felt the pressure of the back of her hands on his palms and realized that her hands were moving into position by themselves.
    With her dark, sweet hair in his face, and her thin legs wrapped around his as if she knew she was about to be appropriated by powers greater than herself, she made music on the table by moving each finger discretely up and down, learning how familial they were, born together but destined to play apart.
    Thus he began to train her physically. There was the hand, which encompassed for some pianists the wrist and the arm, though Wieck preferred the Clementi style of someone like Moscheles, on whose arm it was said one might successfully balance a full glass of water while he played the most strenuous piece. And there was the ear.
    For the former, she continued to practice upon the kitchen table, even when she became tall enough to sit there by herself, and at the piano to play scales, which she enjoyed more than he’d ever seen anyone enjoy them, so that he had to limit them, as was his custom, to fifteen minutes a day, in all keys, fast and slow, loud and soft, staccato and legato. He gave her various exercises so that she might master the eternal passing under of the thumb and in the end, as he called it, “dethumb” her hand and turn the demon of the thumb into an angel (albeit never as graceful as the others in its shape) of a finger. (As it was, she very early on could easily take tenths in both hands; a tiny, skinny girl with big hands was like a little man with a huge zubrick, disproportionately admired, inequitably skilled.) He also had her play the scales with separate hands, so that the hands, like the fingers on each, would be forced to become independent of one another and thus not attempt to hide, like twins, one another’s faults. “Hands alone,” he called this, and while later it would prove a fine technique for her early forays into J. S. Bach’s fugues, it was a phrase that always brought to her a feeling of loneliness, even estrangement—her hands from one another; her hands, together, from the rest of her being—and was also the first musical words that registered as words within her mind.
    Within the practice of scales came the flowering of technique. Fingers were to be held close to the keys. The keys were to be squeezed, never struck; the sound of the finger on the key should be no sound at all, neither of the exertion of muscle nor the application of skin nor the click of fingernail; the only sound to be heard should be musical sound.
    In other words, you draw music from the piano, you do not make music upon it. The music is in there; it is your job to find it.
    But technique went only so far. To try both to teach and amuse her, in case she might finally respond to speech, he made up a jingle:
    The first rule of the artist to defend
    Is “Technique’s no more than a means to an end.”
    When mere technique controls the day,
    Art will always waste away.
    He thought it brilliant himself, but to judge from Clara’s vacant expression at hearing it (if she could hear it at all), it was redundant. She seemed to know without having to be taught that she was training her hands to be able not simply to move them flawlessly upon the piano keys but to thrust them into the piano itself, without making a sound, and to hold the beating heart of that instrument within the