music, piano teacher, etc.

[This might be part of a longer essay. I wrote it while trying to finish "Poetry and the Forgiveness of Everyone," but don't think it matches that essay, so we'll see what happens to it. I'm very unsure about whether I should be writing like this about real people. Maybe I shouldn't post it? hmm.]

My high school piano teacher used to tell stories about her husband, who was also a pianist, and died from a brain tumor while still young. “In winter his hands got so dry, his fingers would crack open when he played too loud,” she told me. “During one concert,” she giggled like a teenager, “he had use a handkerchief to wipe the blood off the piano keys.” She gave me a cassette tape of him playing a concerto with an orchestra, and listening to it I could only wonder if someone in the audience had passed out at the sight of blood, if it hurt his hands to play the cadenza, and if he knew while playing this concert he was going to die.

In what I’m sure was a scandal at the time, they started dating while he was her teacher in college. He was a recent MA graduate, and she was a optimistic and energetic young star at piano, which she practiced constantly, undoubtedly for more reasons than simply liking Liszt. Every so often, she told me stories about their playing duets together, touring Europe, and spending their savings on a grand piano. When I got behind on memorizing my pieces for a competition, she never failed to tell again how her husband wouldn’t work on a piece until two weeks before a performance, and how for those weeks he’d stop practicing only to sleep a few hours and eat.

She gave up grad school and whatever life she could have had as a performing artist to be with him, and forty years later, music was the part of him still living that she could love. I knew I had nothing to do with the way she cried when I played a Beethoven sonata with the dynamics he had marked in a score I borrowed. Ars longa, vita brevis, “Art is long, life is short,” was how she signed her emails, and for her it more than a pithy saying, it was something she took hope in and depended on.

Music can provide a sort of eternal life, a way to commune with the living and the dead through something that is bigger than any of us, and in which we can participate. Visual art does this for some people, religion, poetry, or fiction for others. None of these things can love a person, only remind us of it, give us a common language. For my piano teacher it was music that could shake her, and music specifically because it was bound to a real life experience.