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Oh, My Bach!
By Elizabeth Station
When I’m dead and buried, they can carve whatever they want on my tombstone: Loving Wife and Mother. Writer. Card-Carrying Member of the ACLU. But the epitaph that would probably make me happiest is Pretty Good Piano Player.
I’m working on it more and more these days. And if I get there, I’ll owe it to an interesting parade of piano teachers that have put up with me since childhood.
My piano studies started at age nine, with a neighborhood lady named Mrs. Weinlader. My brothers, sister and I were all required to take lessons with her at one time or another. Everything they hated about Mrs. W, I loved—the silence of her house, broken only by the Germanic precision of the metronome, the predictability of weekly assignments written in neat script with color-coded pens.
We had a different scale and set of key signatures to memorize each week. For me this was bliss and proof of the orderliness of the universe. My siblings wanted to lose themselves in rock and roll but like Schroeder in Peanuts, I grooved on Beethoven’s Für Elise and Bach’s Minuet in G.
The reverie ended abruptly around age 14 when, to my mother’s dismay, I traded music studies for the lure of a cheerleading career. I didn’t take up the piano again until college.
My teacher was a cute geek named Henry. The only thing I remember about him was his advice for playing the left hand of Chopin’s “Raindrop” Prelude in D-flat: “Give it a light touch—like little puffs of smoke from George Sand’s cigar.”
Some time later, with children who were very small and a husband who was struggling through graduate school, I bought a used piano in an act of desperation, to somehow assert a space of creativity and independence. Every time I sat down and played a note, the kids would hear it as a call for them to toddle in from another room, clamor up on my lap and pound gleefully on the battered keyboard. I wept, and sold the piano in a fit of post-partum despair.
Years afterward I was in a car accident where the other driver was completely at fault. In the settlement, I got a check for $3,000. Wildly, I bought a gleaming -new upright Kawai. The sound was solid and the timing was right. The kids left me alone while I played and ever since, that piano has been my salvation. It also brought me into contact with a whole new cast of teaching characters.
The first was Katerina, a gifted concert pianist from the Republic of Georgia who had come to our local university to study and tour with a well-known Prokofiev whiz. Each week she would shuffle across the gray campus in her shabby fur coat, crush out an unfinished cigarette on the steps of the music building, and, with a sigh, unlock the door to our tiny practice room. She compared the Indiana winters unfavorably to her Soviet homeland, with a Borat-like drawl: “Et least in Siberia is dry cold.”
Mine was the first in a long day of back-to-back lessons for Katerina. The most glorious moments we had were when she played, not I. She assigned me easy pieces half-heartedly, insinuating that although I was a hopeless case, she was willing to show up and listen to me bang out a Clementi Sonatina. “Left hend wery bad. I don’t like,” she once told me. And another time, in a more generous mood: “Thet was wery pretty.”
I soon fled Katerina and ran into the arms of Babette, an intense, enthusiastic African American pianist who had honed her classical musical chops at Spelman College. Kind and talented, she introduced me to the magnificent spirituals of Harry T. Burleigh and helped me soldier through my first Mozart sonatas. She was encouraging, but also a perfectionist.
Whenever I played, she would stop me every few measures to remind me to “RRRRRRRRRRROLL” my wrist. The musical scores we worked on are still peppered with her “Rs.” And my left hand, I fear, is still not wery good.
Babette moved to Texas and, possessed by temporary insanity, I thought I’d try jazz piano. I had a handful of lessons with a lanky local bluesman. His teaching method consisted of his banging out a boogie-woogie on the Steinway for a few minutes, and then turning to me to say, “OK, now you try it.” I am fairly certain that he could not read music, and once he even made fun of Mozart. Things were over between us pretty quickly.
Now I have lessons with Bev, a gentle, matter-of-fact woman who has developed both talent and patience in her years as a choir accompanist. Musically, she is helping me to break bad habits and enjoy my playing for what it is and what it can be. Inspired by The Pianist, I’ve come back to Chopin—after all, if that punk Hollywood actor Adrian Brody can knock out a nocturne, so can I. Who cares if I’ll never be Arthur Rubinstein?
When my daughter hears me playing the piano now, she comes into the room with her oboe. Together, we’ve mastered Schubert’s Waltz in B-flat (which is the only musical key we have in common). Working on a Bach two-part invention, I feel order in the universe and a tremendous sense of accomplishment.
The joy of playing Bach is that it's like conquering a Rubik's cube—you make progress bit by bit, piece by piece, until the whole comes together and you are able to stand back and admire its perfect design.
Over the years, I’ve heard enough real piano geniuses unleash their power in a concert hall—people like Oscar Peterson, Diana Krall, Daniel Barenboim, Kristian Zimerman, and Ivo Pogorelich—to know I’ll never, ever play like that. Like the lowly duck on the ground, I can only marvel watching the eagle soar. I’m not giving up, though. Even though my friends and family would prefer that I stick to Christmas carols at the annual neighborhood party, I plan to keep on massacring the classics in my own special way.
