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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONInstrument Of The Immortals
JAKE GASKINS teaches English and directs the writing center at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau.
Play Chopin only on an excellent piano.
— André Gide
I understand that later you come to an age of hope, or at least resignation. I suspect it takes a long time to get there.
— Jane Smiley
IT’S A STEINWAY VERTICAL, the “professional” model, taller, with longer strings than a spinet, and three pedals, like a grand. It has a satin finish, each of its five coats of black lacquer applied and then rubbed in turn with fine steel wool, producing a sheen rather than a hard shine, the elegance of a top hat. It’s an aristocrat, born with a patina and a name. It bears, in fact, the autograph of John Steinway — now seventy-two, great-grandson of the founder — on the rear right-hand corner under the lid, in magic marker.
I hadn’t played for years when I went shopping for it, so I was shy about trying it out in the store. I played a few notes as quietly as I could, felt the touch, heard the tone. I couldn’t find anything to criticize, but I knew I hadn’t given the keyboard a real workout. When I heard someone playing one of the grands in another part of the store — which was a warehouse, pianos lined up like desks in an insurance company, row upon row, grands in one section, uprights in another — I asked the salesman to ask the performer to play something on the piano I’d selected. The performer, the manager, was glad to comply. But first he shook my hand and congratulated me on my purchase. “Is this your first Steinway?” (Is this your first child? Your first Oscar?) A man about my age, forty-four, dressed conservatively in a dark blue suit, the manager sat and began playing Chopin’s Waltz in F Minor, op. 70, no. 2. That’s when I felt my upper lip tremble, and I held my hand over my mouth. I was a fool, but I thought I had never heard anything so beautiful.
MISS EVA HODGES, my piano teacher for eight years, now deceased, would be gratified to learn that I bought the Steinway. She’d be proud of me. She used to shout down from the window of her studio, between the Ionic columns above the front steps of the high school where I went twice a week for lessons, “Hold your head up!”
She looked like George Washington on the dollar bill: the same Roman nose, same thin lips, same chin. She had frizzy red hair and a redhead’s pale complexion, pale blue eyes behind thick, rimless spectacles. She was tall and slender. She wore sensible shoes with low, thick heels; in summer she wore printed organdy dresses. She never married. She rented out the upstairs of her house; once, the tenants let the tub run over, and water seeped through the ceiling and damaged her Baldwin grand below. She drove a ‘52 Chevy that her brother, an orthopedic surgeon, had given her. She was the organist at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. And she taught piano to talentless and recalcitrant children.
At first she glued stars in my assignment book each week, gold if I’d practiced well, silver and blue for B and C. But she soon stopped that, because I was too smart for her. I knew that stars weren’t real grades, and music (I took “music,” not piano, lessons) didn’t really matter. I was going to be a doctor. I didn’t have a lot of time to practice, anyway. And I had never been much of a sight reader. I could play better by ear. I didn’t practice scales or Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, although Miss Hodges assigned them. I’d play the show tunes and popular ballads I liked: “Old Man River,” “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “But Not for Me” — all in the key of C, but with feeling. I played for fun. I stopped the lessons altogether when I was sixteen because I knew I would never be really good.
She kept in touch over the years. One night when I was still in high school, she phoned to let me know that there would be an all-Gershwin program on the Bell Telephone Hour. When I graduated and was heading off to Johns Hopkins, my brilliant career as a physician assured, she gave me a plaid canvas suitcase. Every Christmas, I received a card from Miss Hodges. The summer of my sophomore year, she invited me and another young man who’d taken lessons from her to lunch. She served chicken salad (I mistakenly complimented her on the tuna fish) and said she was proud of us both. The other young man attended Yale and was majoring in physics. I had switched from pre-med to English, having failed chemistry and managed only a C in cell biology. But she was proud of me.
I told her I’d developed a taste for Brahms. We all loved Chopin, of course. But I couldn’t understand Beethoven, I admitted. I said he seemed so noisy, all those kettledrums, all that pounding. Miss Hodges had taught me only a couple of pieces by Beethoven: the Turkish March and, later, the slow movement of the Funeral March Sonata, which is comparatively easy. But Beethoven in general was what I didn’t “get,” I said. I was hoping Miss Hodges would leap to Beethoven’s defense and justify his reputation. But she didn’t. Maybe she thought that attempting to explain Beethoven to a twenty-year-old would be pointless. Or maybe she didn’t know herself why Beethoven was so great. Unlike me, Miss Hodges lacked all pretension. I doubt that she was bothered by the thought that she was not a great artist herself, that she didn’t compose, that she was even something of a type: a spinster with a rigid expression, tight-lipped, frizzy-haired, bespectacled, smelling of bath powder.
The only thing she did that went against type was to join a fundamentalist congregation out in the country after she was diagnosed with liver cancer in her seventies. She started attending revivals, apparently convinced that she would be healed. She wasn’t.
I’VE HAD THE PIANO for six months now, and I play every day, probably more than I have time for, more than I should. I’ll play while I’m waiting for French toast to heat in the microwave (two and a half minutes) in the morning. I’ll play between the time I finish the breakfast dishes and the time I head out for class. (I’m a teacher, not a physician.) I’ll play after supper, before I start grading papers, and I’ll play before going to bed, from 10:30 on, until I’m scared the neighbors will call the police. If there is something desperate about my playing, it’s only natural; there’s something desperate about my having bought the piano in the first place — the result of a typical midlife realization that I am not going to live forever. Some men have affairs at this age.
In six months I’ve learned two waltzes, four mazurkas, and a nocturne by Chopin. I’ve learned two “easy” (that’s a laugh) sonatas by Beethoven, the nineteenth and twentieth, and the (relatively) slow movement of the eighteenth. I am wrestling with the other movements of that sonata. I’ve mastered two impromptus by Schubert, nos. 3 and 4 of op. 90. And I’ve learned Gershwin’s Second Prelude, which I couldn’t play as a teenager because of the wide intervals.
I used to struggle just to read the notes. For each new piece I attempted, Miss Hodges would have me read the left- and right-hand parts separately, then put them together later. She would assign a few measures each week, marking them off with her number-two pencil and dating them. Now I forge ahead on my own, playing both hands at once. I am reading music faster than I can memorize it. Amazing what the fear of death will do for one’s concentration.
I am not, however, a real musician. Sometimes I’ll be tired, and the fourth finger of my right hand, which seems longer than it ought to be, gets in the way. I’ll be negotiating a rapid scale, and that finger will trip me up. It’ll scrape the edge of a key, and that minor mishap will be enough to transform my Steinway, this “instrument of the immortals,” into a mere contraption, a row of wooden blocks, a box of Tinkertoys, fuzzy hammers striking tinny steel, wound wire. It doesn’t sing. It plinks and plunks, twangs and buzzes. I think, What for? I know I’ll never be any good.
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