My Mother Played Liszt
My mother played Liszt. Not the transposed for modern players Liszt but the original bastardâs manuscripts that he didnât want women to play, or anyone else for that matter, so betoken was he to his own musical genius. She was taken, my mother, I think, by his obsession with making the piano, the instrument that she devoted her life to, the life force of the musical world. She tackled Dante and Faust as Liszt might have done. Stubborn old cow (if youâre allowed to call your mother an âold cowâ).
ââDamn you Lisztââ, she would swear at the old composer, for to her he wasnât dead, he was peering over her shoulder telling her she could never play his Ătude d’exĂŠcution transcendante d’après Paganini the way he did. But play it she did, and the Etudes, the Symhonies, the Preludes, the Concertos â the whole damn lot. Damn you Liszt indeed, for I suffered it all â waking at midnight to hear her bang the piano and push the old man out of the way, to go back to being dead so that she could master him.
This would go on, night after night, and I needed my sleep. I was a school boy, a child, enthralled by her skill and without excuse the next morning when time it was to rise for school. What the other mothers were engaging I had no idea, not in this sort of behaviour I knew that much. None of it, they were asleep, comatose in their own tea cosies and magazines probably. Other mothers were normal. As far as I could tell I had the only bloody minded mother in the known universe. Iâd given up the idea of being part of a normal family, where the mother would bake bread, or cake, for when the child came home from school. Not us, weâd have to make ourselves scarce, while my mother taught her charges. ââI wonât be finished teaching till seven oâclock, so grab yourself something from the kitchen and find yourself something to do till then. But donât bother me.ââ So off I went.
So Liszt, damn you, you obstinate, passionate, brilliant old bastard. I suffered because of you, learned to ride a bike, dirt track slides, the lot, most of it. Having said that, all of that, I did get a kick out of it, knowing my red headed mother could play like that, whilst the best Reggie Bowenâs mother could do was drive the school bus.
I havenât mentioned my father, the one who lay in bed while his wife consorted with her lover, reading a book because there was no point fighting the woman. ââYou coming to bed?â âShortly, yes, when Iâve done some practice.ââ He knew he wouldnât see her till morning.
People who fought the woman came off second best. ââShouldnât you try something easier?ââ from those who had some understanding of the dead geniusâs works or ââIs there something youâre trying to prove?ââ from those whose musical knowledge extended just slightly beyond a Gershwin tune. A humph was followed by an angled turn of the head in a none too subtle display of disdain.
Which brings me to the point of the school hall. Or more to the point, the grand opening of the new school hall, the purchase of the grand piano to augment its false grandeur and the playing of the aforementioned piano by the schoolâs salaried hack music teacher at the aforementioned grand opening. My mother detested all school music teachers, perhaps because they failed in their duty to provide her with the education her abilities and intellect deserved. She regarded most teachers, but more particularly music teachers, as dilettantes.
She considered that the teachers college, where they obtained an all too easy qualification, arranged so that enough of them could be loosed on children who she assumed had no interest in music other than to fill in the time prior to lunch, gave them rather a too fundamental understanding of the gift that was music, to impart it to children. She particularly despised our schoolâs senior music teachers ability to play the piano, considered her a journeyman. It wasnât that she despised her as an individual, it was that she despised her calling herself a musician, a pianist, when what she was was a second rate musicologist who could play the odd tune.
So when it came time for the opening ceremony, and the playing of the piano, the journeyman school music teacher couldnât bring herself to even front and play something perfunctory, a prelude, Chopsticks, anything. The music teacher clearly thought long and hard about playing, doing her duty, applying herself to the task of repaying the taxpayer, because she notified the organiser, or the school Principal, we donât know who, we never found out, on the morning of the concert itself.
The Principal was left in a bind, he had rung around to see whether anyone else on staff might be capable of faking a Beethoven prelude, there were no takers – ââsheâs the only one I know who can play anything decentââ cried one from the corridor. ââI can ask if any of the music students can play for us,â âthatâs rather embarrassing isnât itââ asked another. ââWe can sell it as promoting our students.ââ Then one of those self same students suggested my mother, one who had previously been tutored by her – ââyou could ask Mrs Nââ.ââ
And so my mother picked up the phone shortly after 9am on the morning of the opening ceremony of the new school hall.
âIs that Mrs Nââ?â
âWho is this?ââ
âItâs Clara Pullman from the high school. Iâm the secretary to the Principal.â
âYes?â
âI have been asked by the Principal if you are available to play the piano at the school.â
âWhat is the occasion?â My mother was a direct woman.
âThe opening of the new school auditorium.â
âI see. When?â
âToday.â Clara Pullman was at this point taking deep breaths, ones designed to lower ones heart rate.
Again, âI see.â
âI know itâs short notice.â
âHow perceptive of you. Short notice is not what I would call it. Rude and presumptuous is what I would call it.â
âIâm sorry Mrs Nââ but itâs rather a case of getting us out of a bind you see.â
âWhat type of bind would that be then?â Knowing precisely the bind they were in, she wanted them to work for it. She didnât have anything against Clara Pullman necessarily but she did despise the idea that she was a backup plan. That was my mother, mess with her, play games with her and take your pain. Yet the self same woman would bake me a cake because I took the blame for Charlie Elks kicking the football through the louvers at the back of the house. She knew Charlie had kicked the ball because I was so quick to take the rap, while Charlie stood there with his supercilious grin figuring he could pull off this type of ruse for the rest of his life. He might have argued that I should have saved it but Gordon Banks wouldnât have got to this ball. It was wide.
âWell, you see the music teacherâŚâ
âGiselle Radowski.â
âYes, Giselle Radowski. Well, she has had to pull out you see, something wrong with her wrist. She canât play.â
âYouâre right, she canât play.â
âYes, well uhm, can you help us?â
âOh yes I can certainly help you.â Imagine Claraâs sense of relief, shoulders rising from the stoop, teeth becoming visible, being able to tell the Principal (who is provided a title here for the purposes of continuity only) that she had found a solution, a pat on the back a least, perhaps extra responsibilities. âThe question is not one of whether I can help you, the question is one of whether I am prepared to help you.â
âI guess Mrs Nââ you have us over a barrel,â continued Clara Pullman, âitâs important to the school because we have purchased a new grand piano. Everyone is expecting a recital, of sorts.â
âIt kind of begs the question as to why you firstly didnât realise that Giselle Radowski would never be able to play any sort of decent piano recital and secondly, why you didnât have the courtesy of asking me to bail you out just a little earlier. When is this recital?â
âEleven oâclock.â And silence in the gallery, Clara held her breath, the student sat on her hands studying Bartok, or Bach, I canât remember what grades she had on Thursdays, while she waited for my mother to get off the phone. âIâm sorry Mrs Nââ.â
âI still have students.â
âI will need to let the Principal know.â
âTell your inept Principal that I will bail him out.â She didnât, not for one moment, consider that her son, me, would bear the consequences if Clara squealed. Things would, I later conclude, go badly for me, Iâd be a target.
âThank you Mrs Nââ, thank you.â And Clara Pullman would go on giving thanks for the next hour, as if she had supped with royalty, or celebrity. She would, Clara Pullman, discover, when she sat in the audience with the students, with the teachers, with the performers, with the dignitaries, that she had been talking to royalty, musical royalty, Liszt type royalty.
âHands Fiona, lift the hands, youâre punching the pedals, caress them, caress them. Youâre playing by ear again, yourâe not sight reading. If you want to be great you first much learn to sight read. You should want to be great. If you want to be great you first must learn to sight read, even the most ambitious works, Mozart, Beethoven, Bartok, even Liszt.â
âEven Liszt?â
âEspecially Liszt.â
She would turn her attention to the school auditorium once she had finished with Fiona, ten year old Fiona, who would surely be great if firstly, her mother had anything to do with it but particularly if my mother had anything to do with it. Fiona finished her lesson, half an hour, my mother relented, on account of the phone call from Clara, let Fiona off early so that she could put in the twenty five years worth of practice required to play in front of a thousand people and hold their attention for any longer than the short introduction.
Turning her attention to the opening of the school auditorium meant rummaging through her sheet music, of Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Bach (perhaps not Bach today), Chopin and of course the bastard, tucking them under her arm and making her way to the school so that she could at least familiarise herself with the surroundings, the instrument, the chair she would sit on.
So she tucked them, the papers, those manuscripts that the greats had wept over, under her arm and strode as majestically as any forty odd year old woman, piano teacher, mother of three, wife of a husband who would not care whether she played, for whom she played, for how long she played or under whose commission, and show them, the teachers, the Principal (again, for identification purposes only), the students, but especially Giselle Radowski, what a real pianist does.
Given fifteen minutes, she played for those glorious minutes, a Brahms Prelude to start, then Beethovenâs Fifth. She paused during a Chopin Etude, looking up into the audience, smiled a smile that eliminated all intransigent thoughts, and moved into her work, next with Liszt, the Hungarian Rhapsody to be precise, toying with the melody, the left hand flourishing like a maestro would with his orchestra and the right hand dancing like a reinvigorated Nureyev. Beethovenâs Piano Sonata No. 14 in C# Minor – âMoonlight Sonata – Adagio Sostenutoâ brought solemnity and weight, she followed it with the Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor. She then pulled out the third and final movement of Tchaikovskyâs Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Flat Minor Opus 23, thought to be unplayable by many in the musical establishment. It was a piece sheâd go to when she was agitated, or was needing to release an energy only a gifted artist would ever understand. The piece muscled itâs way around the fringes of the new auditorium and enveloped the centre of it. The full effect of the concerto required a bank of violins and a convoy of woodwind but on this day she didnât need them, she would use the keys beneath her fingers alone to impart itâs power. The movement finished with her playing the violin part from the piano, a feat of power and intensity no student, teacher or special guest would ever be witness to again. She played for another fifteen minutes, playing Beethovenâs Eighth Sonata, sight reading everything and if the Principal (who retained the title against the odds) didnât like it then sheâd let her transfixed audience have some more. The students stood and applauded while Ms Radowski stood at the edge of the auditorium bamboozled by what she had just witnessed.
Shortly after that momentous occasion I was squatting on the floor in the hallway at home, late one night, listening to her play Brahms for fun. It helped me sleep when schoolboys were not meant to lose sleep. She would play his waltzes when she wanted to unwind. She was playing Opus 39 No 15 and then she cried out, she had collapsed. I sprang up from the floor and cried out, âMum, are you alright.â I made it into the music room before anyone else and found her lying on the floor. My father came running moments later yelling âwhatâs wrong, whatâs wrong.â He bent down to pick her up, she was limp, frothing at the mouth, my father started crying while giving her mouth to mouth resuscitation but to no effect. He yelled at me to go and get some towels, for all the good they were going to do, then he yelled at me to call for an ambulance before he decided that heâd call one himself. She stayed limp, we were unable to move her, my father, despite being a veterinary surgeon with more than a passing knowledge of medical procedure, didnât know what to do. He was crying, like any decent husband would do, the ambulance was on the way. He rang Aldo, our family doctor, who said heâd come over straight away. He arrived just as the ambulance officers were loading her into the ambulance. âI think sheâs had a stroke Aldo.â
â
Let me have a look at her.â
My mother had had more than a stroke, sheâd had an aneurysm, a major bleed into the brain and for the next few days my father talked to me about how weâd have to each take care of each other while the doctors took care of my mother.
âYour mother always said youâd be able to look after things,â my father told me one day as we were on the way to the hospital. I didnât really know what he meant by that, only that all of us had grown up too quickly, that the music room was empty and that there was no music in the house.
She was then transferred to our major city hospital, to the intensive care unit, where the doctors could keep an eye on her. She had a tube as thick as your arm down her throat, about as uncomfortable as you could make it although I have no idea whether she was able to feel it.
She was in a coma, so Iâm assuming that she couldnât feel anything. Dad and I would fly down every weekend to see her, often staying an extra few days in town, in a place where we knew no one, a busy, bustling city with no soul that I could see and with people who had vacant looks on their faces, although for different reasons than the vacant looks we had as we walked towards the hospital.
We waited for my mother to come out of her coma and listened to doctors and nurses tell us that, whilst she was in the coma it was possible that she could come out of it at any time, even though she was in bed number six of six, beds five and six reserved for those whom they didnât think would make it. Bed number five had a young lady who was smashed up as a result of not wearing a seat belt in a motor vehicle accident. She didnât make it, my father tried to comfort her parents but they understood my fatherâs pain and were gracious towards him.
One morning, it was a Sunday, I went into the intensive care unit to see my mother, I had taken leave from school for the rest of the year, she opened her eyes and looked at me. She had come out of the coma, she couldnât speak because of the tube down her throat, but she could look at me and try a smile. I said âhello Mum, itâs nice to see you open your eyes.â Itâs all I could say, I stroked her face, I told her Dad was nearby and that heâd be in at any moment. It didnât last long, she closed her eyes and went back to sleep. She was back in her coma, her own world of freedom from pain.
I rushed to find my father, to tell him that my mother had come out of the coma and that I talked to her. An immense veil of guilt came over him, that he was not there to see her, I tried to reassure him but it came to no effect.
âI was just around the corner.â
âYou werenât to know, you werenât to know.â
My mothers hands, her beautiful piano playing hands, had gone into entropy, they had curled up to the point where it would have been impossible to play anything even had she snapped out of the coma and been lucid straight away. It became obvious to us that she was not likely to do that any time soon, her comatose state was something we were quickly getting used to.
We were then visited by a neurosurgeon, who told us that he would attempt to operate on her, to try and alleviate the pressure on the brain. Mr Rushworth, he used the title Mister rather than Doctor, presented himself in his suit, carried a brief case like it held the secrets to a thousand summers and talked down the bridge of his nose through his bifocals, eyes slanted upward and with a seriousness that left us in no doubt as to how he felt about things. Dad nodded at him and asked about my motherâs chances. Mr Rushworth conveyed his measured pessimism but said that it had to be attempted, this procedure, as he put it, to try and bring my mother back from a lingering death.
âWhat are her chances?â asked my father.
âI will attempt to tie off the bleed and repair the artery but her chances, as you ask, are about fifty per cent of surviving the operation, after that I cannot say.â
âBloody hell,â I thought, heâs only giving her half a chance of surviving an operation, let alone coming out of the coma.
âWe might go for some lunch and then go and buy a video camera,â said my father. âWe should be optimistic, we were planning to go to Europe and film some places, so we should go and buy a video camera.â We found a pub for some lunch, neither of us ate anything, while we waited for Mr Rushworth to finish his work, and walked to a shop to look at video cameras. My father wasn’t interested, all he could think about was his wife laying on an operating table having her skull removed and being poked and prodded by a surgeon who had seen enough of these things to know that my mother’s chances were not great.
He phoned the hospital about three hours later to see how the operation was going, they were finished, she was being wheeled back into intensive care. What was thought would be a five or seven hour operation has taken only three. My father took this as bad news. âTheyâve sown her back up, thereâs nothing they can do,â were his exact words to me.
We got back to the hospital, we went straight to her room, she was bandaged like a soldier whoâd been hit, it was hard to take. My father, full of hope but fearing the worst, asked the nurse how the operation went. There was an âIntensivistâ, a doctor who specialises in intensive care patients. He came over to my father and said that the operation went well but that there was not much Mr Rushworth could do. He managed to tie the artery but there were no guarantees she wouldn’t bleed again, the area is weak, he said. Dad slumped in a chair, we hadnât bought a video camera.
My mother looked the same, she offered no response, she was still deep in a coma, fast asleep, bereft of life. Only now there would be recovery time from the surgery. A few days before she had taken a whole school on a musical tour de force and now she was a lifeless mass.
âWe should go,â said my father. âThereâs nothing we can do here.â He had been in a deep discussion with the Intensivist. He made the joke that he was at a disadvantage because his patients couldn’t talk to him, they were animals, and the Intensivist replied that his patients couldnât either. It brought a brief smile to my fatherâs face. He had booked a motel for us stay in, I hadnât even thought about school and for my father, who has always been academically inclined, he didnât think about it either. As far as he was concerned, my school year was a write off, Iâd start again next year, no matter what happened.
When we got back to the hotel my father told me he was going down to the bar for a drink, that I should watch television, that he wouldnât be long. He was gone all night, while I watched M.A.S.H reruns. He staggered back into our room just before midnight smelling of whisky.
He had tried to drink himself into oblivion.
A week went by, my father, myself and the whole family had reached a point of resignation, or acceptance, my mother wasnât getting better, I came up with the idea that weâd play music to her while she was in this coma.
âWhat about we play Mozart and Beethoven to her.â
âItâs a good idea.â
âIâll organise it.â I bought a ghetto blaster, as the latest technology was known at the time, and put some of her favourite music on it. I asked the nurses to make sure they played the music, day and night, I wanted it to be on constantly so that my mother would hear it and maybe respond to it. I optimistically thought it might wake her up. I cried late at night when I thought Iâd break down completely. I missed, not only her piano playing but her cooking, her baked dinners, the way she defended her children when she felt they were threatened. I was playing football one day and got tackled, almost breaking my leg. She ran onto the field and threatened to take the boy who tackled me out. I was later embarrassed by the whole affair but now, with her now not moving, having just had her brain operated on, I wasnât embarrassed at all. I was proud.
I missed the way she rubbed my head when I headed off to school.
So moving and poignant