Prelude: From a Tree in the Forest | p. 1 |
Epiphany | p. 7 |
A Lesson with Mozart | p. 16 |
Piano Lessons | p. 21 |
The Piano Party | p. 30 |
The Search Begins | p. 39 |
Piano World | p. 50 |
Piano Row | p. 66 |
Meeting Marlene | p. 78 |
The Sale | p. 86 |
Delivery | p. 94 |
The Inspection | p. 107 |
The Voicer | p. 115 |
A Piano Education | p. 129 |
Beethoven's Warehouse | p. 156 |
The Piano Crawl | p. 185 |
Tom | p. 201 |
Hammers | p. 211 |
The Voicers | p. 225 |
The Grotrians | p. 245 |
Szott's Secret | p. 253 |
The Anthroposophist | p. 265 |
Revelation | p. 271 |
Physics and Metaphysics | p. 284 |
Braunschweig | p. 299 |
Austria | p. 323 |
Mittenwald | p. 332 |
Healing Marlene | p. 340 |
Marc's Return | p. 349 |
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In the autumn of my forty-third year, I remembered, quite unexpectedly, that I was meant to be a pianist.
I was alone in my car, on my way to spend a weekend with friends. I fumbled through a box of cassette tapes I kept on the front passenger seat and found one my brother gave me: pianist Arthur Rubinstein performing Chopin waltzes. This might make a good soundtrack for the trip, I thought, and I pushed the cassette into the tape deck.
From the opening notes of Opus 18 -- quick, percussive repetitions of B-flat -- the car seemed to rock in sympathy to the driving three-quarter-time beat, taken at a wildly joyous tempo. Rubinstein's complete freedom within the music astonished me, and his abandonment to it was contagious -- the music seemed to enter my pulse and carbonate my blood.
Meanwhile, through the windshield, Montana's luminous Indian summer performed a fitting accompaniment: a sapphire sky hung behind the Elkhorn Mountains, where tawny grasses gleamed in the lowering sun. Quaking aspen lined the banks of the Boulder River; their burnished leaves turned up their bellies to the wind and trembled in unison, a ribbon of gold threading its way up the valley.
I found myself gripping the steering wheel, as if I were hanging on for the ride, gripped myself by a piano-induced rapture that was as sweet as it was searing.
This is all that I want to do with my life.These words arose as if from nowhere in my mind, astonishing me.This is all that I want to do with my life.They hit with the force of an inner directive that cannot be questioned. They arose again and again, as if rising on the swells of the music itself.
The beauty of the day intensified the heartbreak: I felt as if I'd missed an urgent and critical appointment that could never be rescheduled. I had reached my own autumn, and the leaves would soon fall. How then could I devote my life to the piano?Copyright © 2008 by Perri Knize
Excerpted from Grand Obsession: A Piano Odyssey by Perri Knize
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.