Pyrrhic Victory
I won. My mother tired of fighting with me. That July afternoon I saw her coming down the dirt road towards the stables at the fairgrounds in our black three-holed Buick. “I’m in for it,” I said to my best friend, Karen. We were in seventh grade, skeptical of boys and crazy about horses. My mother didn’t yell or scold. She told me to leave my bike and get in the car, it was time for my piano lesson, and no, I couldn’t go home to change clothes. Not until I was seated at the grand piano next to Mrs. Watts did I feel the dust on my shirt and smell the horse sweat on my jeans.
It’s curious that after more than half a century I remember the name, “Madame Schumann-Heink,” and that my piano teacher, Mrs. Watts, had been her accompanist. I recently googled Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936). According to Wikipedia, she had quite a career: operatic debut in Dresden as Azucena in Il trovatore and final performance at the Met in 1931, belting out Wagner at age seventy-one. Wiki notes, “In the movies of the 1930’s, many a buxom opera singer/instructor/matron was modeled on her.”
I have no idea how Marie Watts, her accompanist, ended up in our cow town in the l950’s, married to Mr. Watts, a building contractor. Their house, modern for the time and for Elko, Nevada, was built on a hillside, a series of three flat roofs. The piano studio rested on the bottom floor, cool and dark in the summer.
Mrs. Watts started me with two instruction books, one of scales, boring and intimidating. The other, “First Lessons in Bach,” might as well have been “First Lessons in Greek.” My encounter with an exceptional pianist lasted six months and I never advanced more than halfway through the beginner’s book. I was in one recital, playing a piece called, “The Bells,” which seemed to be pressing with feeling on the g key with the fourth finger of my right hand. What little practicing I did was fear-based. I hated the thought of sitting at the piano bench, refined and patient Mrs. Watts by my side, and me, a terrible student. My mother was not one to threaten or cajole me into practicing. She bought a metronome and sometimes I didn’t mind sitting at the piano with that steady tock, tock as I played scales. I think that my mother let me quit because she was tired of dragging a truculent, dusty young girl to a piano lesson.
Other girls my age started taking piano lessons about the same time, but they went to Mrs. Clark, a flamboyant little lady who taught girls to play sentimental popular tunes on sheet music and watered-down classics. By high school, my friend Gail, who stayed with Mrs. Clark, could play the “Moonlight Sonata,” at a high school assembly. The boys were impressed by her athletic prowess, stretched fingers pounding chords up and down the keyboard, crossing the left hand over the right and back. Another friend, oldest daughter of the town’s favorite doctor, could play Bach or Beethoven on the violin, an incredible social liability. The brazen boys would put their fingers in their ears and make pained faces.
I know there is no point in dwelling on missed opportunities., but I wish I hadn’t won. I remember a quote from a character in The American by Henry James: “I have the instincts—have them deeply—if I haven’t the forms of a high old civilization.” I did, eventually, want to become a cultured person, well-read, educated, and familiar with the arts.
In a few months I will be seventy years old. Lately, I have been listening to a cd of Wanda Landowska playing Bach on the harpsichord, “The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book One.” On the internet I found the name of my piano book with the ochre cover and serious lettering: “Beginning Bach,” from Schirmer’s Library of Musical Classics, listed as a “collectible” on Amazon.com.
I’m having trouble figuring out what to do with the rest of my life. Thinking about Madame Schumann-Heink and Mrs. Watts and twelve-year-old me, I have had a strong urge to buy a digital piano. I would order “Beginning Bach,” books one and two. I would practice every day. I could find a piano teacher at the local community college. By the time I’m eighty, I could be quite accomplished. Is it too late?
