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The Romance of the Piano
Why the piano?
This is like asking mountaineers, “why moun-
tains?” “Because they’re there” is the standard evasion, but Victorians climbed because the world was undiscovered, exotic, unnamed, and the darkest jungles, the highest peaks were a way of seeing strange lands through children’s eyes. (Only later would we begin seeing the world through the eyes of the people who had actually been there all along.)
We love mountains because the sidewalk outside our apartment doesn’t have séracs, arrêtes, couloirs, nunataks, Brocken spectres. Houses don’t have hallucinations. The street where we live doesn’t
have yetis. We crave places with no vocabularies. Where we have to make the names up. In a word, the Romantic. The Temple of Doom. The Mountains of the Moon.
A mountain isn’t just a stairway to heaven. Rope bridges along the way lead to eroding trails cut into sheer cliffs: all the way to heaven is heaven. It’s the terror, the righteousness of self-deprivation, the complete freedom of adventure: no office,
no calls, no family, no debts (no immediate debts, anyway). Man in his Element. (Usually women are
sensibly distant.) Possibly bloodthirsty savages await. Possibly you are the bloodthirsty savage. Your country calls. Edmund Hillary summited Everest
on the Queen’s Coronation. Germans climbed the Eiger for the Kaiser. This romance with abnormal topography, with inaccessible geography, is why H. Rider Haggard’s She and King Solomon’s Mines have proved so enduring—as have C. S. Forester’s African Queen or James Hilton’s Lost Horizon—anything with monkeys, temples, and questionable cults.
In the same way, pianos aren’t just accordions on legs. Or organs without bellows. They are the death dance of Liszt and Saint-Saëns. They are Faustian deals with the devil, with strings attached. They are coffeehous- es in Berlin and Vienna, the twilight of a lazy European afternoon. Beethoven’s widening gyres in Bonn and then Vienna, where he heard the future as he became deaf to the present. They are Schumann’s overtures and Brahms’s regrets to the same amazing woman, Clara Wieck. They are Chopin’s anthems to the idea of Polish freedom, even though he left Poland be- cause of its limitations. They are Glenn Gould’s idea of North. Even though he never went farther north than an hour from where he lived in Toronto. But he understood the idea.
304 The Team at Tippet Rise