I am learning the Toccata from Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin. I have been learning it for six months. It is not an easy piece. Played to speed it lasts for three minutes 59 seconds. I myself am not playing it to speed. What my speed is I have yet to discover, as I have not yet played through all nine pages without a stop. But if I did, I suspect my speed would lag some way behind that of Fran?ois-Joel Thiollier's recording. Even if I took twice as long as Thiollier, there would still be a marked disparity between my investment of around 300 hours practice and my dividend of eight minutes' performance. Next month I shall be playing the Toccata at a piano class, and as things stand at the moment I would as soon be tight-rope walking over Niagara and pausing midway to cook ham and eggs.
Why am I doing this to myself? It is because I know I am an excellent pianist. The only snag is that I don't play very well. The answer is to practise every day, and velocity will come, pulse will become as steady as breathing, and my abilities will be manifest to others. I'm not 70 yet. Once I've salvaged the wreck of my adolescent technique I may yet find employment at a white baby grand in a piano bar.
In the 1950s I was a piano student at one of the London colleges and getting nowhere. I had gone right off music. What I needed, I told myself, was for someone to lock me up every day until I'd written 500 words. My prayer was answered. I became a theatre reviewer, grinding out the words every night for 40 years until the shows I'd started with had become distant legends. Then it came to a stop, and I zipped back to my 1950s self. I didn't care if I never set foot in a theatre again. Sometimes I don't like music either. But I have to practise the piano-if I don't, I get moody and start tearing the skin off my hands.
Being a 65 year-old piano student makes you feel like a freak. People would ask me what I was doing, and then go quiet when I told them. So, in search of fellow freaks, I signed up for a piano summer school and joined a mixed party of 18 year-old keyboard lions and arthritic enthusiasts on an old farm near Cahors in France. The place was picturesque and falling apart, with one working lavatory for about 30 people and pianos scattered through the cowsheds and piggeries. This meant we got on. You can't be an aloof outsider when you're queuing up the stairs for a slash, or joining the stampede to book an hour's practice. Classes were split between "advanced" and (delicately labelled) "intermediate." But the main difference between us was not that some were scorching round the track with Liszt and others hobbling through Mozart andantes. It was that some were used to playing in public and others were not.
As a boy I'd have walked on to any platform and obliged with my current party piece. Trying the same thing now, I found my memory blanking out and the energy draining out of the soles of my feet. I then watched the same thing happening to everybody else. A bouncy Glaswegian banker, a Yorkshire hospital manager, a man from Hong Kong who came with his own notation system-one by one they all fell to pieces before they'd got through six bars. It was like some humiliating party game. You spend countless hours on preparation. Then your moment comes and the friendly keyboard turns into a lunar desert; your foot starts trembling on the pedal; and your hands turn into a pair of dead fish-"I see," comes the voice of your teacher, "you can't really play it at all, can you?" After this the air becomes thick with good advice. Anybody can make a nice sound and get a piece 95 per cent right. Real playing starts when you go the last 5 per cent and make sure nothing can go wrong. If you don't dig the foundations deep enough, whatever you do is going to collapse; pity, because it's often quite an attractive building. Tape-record yourself; it's a nasty experience but it'll do you good. If you're playing in public, build up to it by having a half hour jog before every run-through. If you get used to playing when you're feeling knackered, it won't be so bad when you've got an audience.
I wrote all this advice down, because it came from people who knew what they were talking about. But none of them had the same impact on me as Maria. Maria was one of the students that I didn't like much. With the others I felt like Rip van Winkle-awakening after a 40-year slumber to find them still hammering away at the repertory I had left behind. This was a point of contact, especially when it emerged that several promising players shared my boredom with Debussy's Reflets dans l'eau. It was no good trying to chat to Maria, though. She lay out on the terrace reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness in the original, repelling conversational approaches with a disdainful stare. She seemed never to go near a piano. Then came her spot in the farewell concert, and she launched into what I later discovered to be the fifth of Scriabin's Op 42 etudes. The hairs started crawling up my back. The piece was an anguished song which kept on failing to resolve; and with each frustrated cadence it would start building from a higher level of harmonic density until the voice was drowned out as if by thunderously tolling bells. An act of torture, ending in a requiem. Maria didn't seem to be putting any effort into it or even using her hands. It looked more like riding a horse than playing the piano. She seemed to be playing from her bottom, with the energy running up her spine and down her arms and merely shaping the melodic line, while leaving the intricate figuration to look after itself. Only when she'd finished did I realise that I'd stopped breathing.
Not if I'd started practising in the womb could I ever have learnt to play like that. But I came away knowing what I wanted and what I didn't want. What I did not want was to play Mozart neatly. I wanted playing which made something positive of the qualities I'd been suppressing all my life-violence, hysteria, arrogance, despair. (According to Cyril Scott, it was having a piano in the house that kept Victorian married women sane.) Likewise the other ageing members of the group. Most of them, like me, only wanted to play stuff that was too hard for them. Because it is only when music breaks through a certain technical barrier that it becomes specifically piano music; at which point the player achieves the sensation of flying. What does "too hard" mean, anyway? Louis Kentner said there is no such thing as a difficult piece. A piece is either easy or impossible; the bridge between the two is practice.
One comforting thing about the Cahors class was that it outlawed the concept of impossibility. Everything was scaled down to a "problem" for which a solution could be found. This doctrine, I know, has been around since Timothy Gallwey published The Inner Game of Tennis, giving countless under-achievers the hope that they had only to switch off the habit of self-criticism to realise their full creative potential. Pianistically, the theory's star exponent is Ernest Hall, the property millionaire, who returned to the keyboard at the age of 65 with a recording of the three Bartok concertos. OK, it worked for him. For others (me, for instance) it may only be a consoling life-lie: a thought that comes to me every time I hear the resident busker in the South Kensington underpass. His violin case lies open, inscribed: "The Smallest Concert Hall in the World"; and he plays with accurate intonation and rapt emotional commitment. He knows he is an artist. It means nothing to him that he has no rhythmic sense, and that his playing is a meaningless jumble of notes to the passers-by who seldom drop a coin in the case.
Perhaps my playing is even worse than his. What is the difference between him and me? He is unaware that he's hopeless. I, conversely, have insight into my failings: which, as in this article, I demonstrate by adopting a tone of facetious self-dismissal: suggesting that the activity to which I am devoting my remaining years is a waste of time. From this comparison he emerges as the clear winner. Added to which he has conquered his fear of the audience.
So I am coming around to the idea that it is a mistake to escape into failure, and that improvement is possible. After more than two years at the Cahors summer school I was still being introduced to newcomers as "one of our moderate successes." So, where should I go instead? I found an incomparable teacher, Philip Fowke, who teaches not only how to play but how to practise-besides allowing me to impale myself on the works of my choice. It's a truism that virtuosi despise virtuosity. But if you've never managed to play fast it becomes an obsession. Rightly so; dazzling speed and huge dynamic contrasts are the genius of this instrument, and the reason why so many outwardly undazzling people have longed to play it. "I should like," announced one ageing summer school volunteer, "to play you an extremely difficult piece by Balakirev called Islamey. But as that's out of the question, here's a Beethoven sonatina." Over my desk for years I've had an ink drawing by Michael Ayrton of an 18th-century virtuoso. It shows a grotesque figure with a hydrocephalic cranium and a skeletally wasted body, attacking a clavichord with hands the size of meat-cleavers (based on the hands of my boyhood teacher).
Some equally fantastic pictures turned up from the cowsheds and pigsties of Cahors, thanks to a resident artist with an uncanny knack for detecting how people reveal themselves at the keyboard. One starved looking girl was drawn with the arms of a weight-lifter and hands easily spanning a 12th. Then there was David, a stammeringly unconfident lab assistant, whose only interest in the job was the amount of practice time it allowed him, and who had left his wife because she "said that music was a noise." As Stephanie painted him, he came out as a keyboard Batman: a black and crimson superhero with phosphorescent arms zapping double-octaves.
As someone who had sacrificed every other human impulse for the sake of private satisfaction at a keyboard, David was an extreme instance of piano mania. But there's something inherently isolating in the relationship this instrument demands. It doesn't easily fit in with marriage, being both solitary and loud. If you have a grand piano, there stands the elegant black figure, flashing its teeth at you, saying: "Come and spend a little time with me"; a mistress who has moved in and occupies a lot of space.
You do it for many reasons; but one of them is that for as long as you immerse yourself in the laws of music you are living in the present tense, and so escaping the tyranny of tomorrow and the apprehension of death. It has the appeal of a drug. Urgent tasks pile up-unpaid bills, unplanned holidays-while you sneak away and depress the first note with the delicious sensation that there's no need to return to this planet until you close the lid. That's a flowery way of putting it. With more thought, I could have put it better. But I need to go over the Ravel again.
