The Influence
By seven-thirteen in the morning, I had played the same six measures twenty-four times. I knew because I had started counting after the twelfth attempt, which was probably the first sign that I should have stopped. By twenty-four, my left hand had apparently decided the passage belonged to it now and I was merely there to witness whatever interpretation it had chosen.
I lifted my hands from the keys and let the final chord fade into the practice room. The walls were designed to absorb sound, but nothing could completely kill the resonance of a grand piano. It lingered beneath the silence for another second or two, vibrating somewhere inside the instrument before disappearing. Outside the narrow window in the door, someone hurried past carrying a cello case almost as large as she was. A trumpet sounded somewhere down the hall, followed by three clipped notes and a curse muffled by several inches of wall.
The building had been awake long before I arrived. It always was. That was the thing nobody told you before you got into a conservatory. You imagined marble staircases, concert halls, polished instruments and students discussing Mahler over coffee. Nobody mentioned that at seven in the morning, it mostly sounded like three hundred people independently losing arguments with their instruments.
I flexed my fingers beneath the fallboard and looked back at the score. The passage wasn’t impossible. That was what made it irritating. If it had been impossible, I could have respected it. Instead, it was only inconvenient enough to make me angry.
I played it again. The first two measures were clean. The third almost was. My fourth finger landed slightly late in the fifth measure, and by the sixth I had compensated badly enough that the phrase lost its shape entirely. I stopped without finishing and reached for the pencil balanced above the keys.
“Twenty-five,” I murmured as I drew a small circle around the fingering I had changed ten minutes earlier. Apparently the fingering had not appreciated my confidence in it.
Sophomore year had started four days ago, and I had already spent more time in this room than I had in my dorm. That was not technically unusual for me. Freshman year had taught me several important things. The coffee in the student center was only drinkable if you stopped thinking about what coffee was supposed to taste like. Laundry needed to be done before Sunday night unless you enjoyed competing for three machines with an entire floor of desperate eighteen-year-olds. And if I wanted a decent practice room before noon, I needed to arrive before most reasonable people had finished sleeping.
I had also learned that being very good at something could feel remarkably similar to being mediocre when everyone around you was very good at the same thing.
Before college, I had been the pianist. Teachers introduced me that way. Parents asked me to play at things. Other students complained that I made difficult pieces look easy, which was flattering mostly because it wasn’t true. I practiced until they looked easy. There was a difference.
Here, everybody had been the pianist somewhere else. The girl two rooms down had won an international competition at sixteen. A junior named Anton could play passages I still had to slow down without appearing to possess bones in his hands. One of the freshmen had performed with a professional orchestra before she was old enough to drive.
I had stopped being impressed by résumés somewhere around October of last year. If I hadn’t, I probably would have dropped out by Christmas.
I wasn’t the best pianist in the building. I knew that without having to torture myself over it. There were days when the knowledge bothered me more than others, but mostly I had learned to live beside it. I was good. Very good, according to people whose opinions mattered. I had a strong ear, good control, and enough technical discipline to know when something sounded wrong even if I couldn’t immediately make my hands fix it. I worked hard. I listened harder. There were worse foundations for a career.
I looked at the clock again and reluctantly closed the score. My first lesson of the semester started in twenty minutes, which meant I had exactly enough time to walk upstairs, refill my water bottle, and pretend I had not spent the morning being personally defeated by six measures of Rachmaninoff.
Before leaving, I glanced at the photograph taped inside the front cover of my score. It had been there for years.
Vivienne Moreau sat at a concert grand beneath the stage lights of a hall in Vienna, her face turned slightly away from the camera. The photograph was black and white, though I had seen enough recordings from that period to know the dress had been dark green. Her hands were suspended over the keys in the fraction of a second between phrases, and there was something about the stillness of the image that had always fascinated me.
Vivienne never looked like she was performing for anyone. Even with thousands of people sitting in front of her, she somehow appeared to be alone with the instrument.
I had been fourteen the first time I heard her play. My teacher at the time had assigned me a Debussy prelude and sent me home with three recordings to compare. I listened to the first two because I was obedient. I listened to Vivienne’s because I forgot to stop.
By the end of the week, I had found every recording of hers available online. By the end of the month, I knew where she had studied, when she had won her first major competition, which conductors she preferred working with, and that she had once walked out of an interview because a journalist asked whether women lacked the physical strength to play Liszt properly. I liked her immediately.
Eventually I learned everything the public knew about the rest of her life too. Vivienne Moreau had entered this conservatory at seventeen and graduated at twenty-one. She had not been considered the strongest pianist in her class when she arrived, a fact that had become one of my favorite pieces of her biography. Her early faculty evaluations described her as technically disciplined but overly controlled. One professor had written that she lacked spontaneity.
Three years later, she won one of the most prestigious piano competitions in Europe. By twenty-seven, she was internationally famous. By thirty-four, she was gone.
Her disappearance had produced decades of documentaries, articles, podcasts, and theories ranging from plausible to completely deranged. I knew most of those too, but they had never interested me as much as the recordings did. People loved the mystery of Vivienne Moreau. I loved the way she played Schumann. There was a difference.
I slipped the score into my bag and headed upstairs.
Professor Daniel Ward’s studio overlooked the courtyard on the third floor, though I had never seen him look out the window. The room was lined with shelves of scores and books, several of them leaning at angles suggesting they had been removed and replaced too many times to bother standing straight anymore. His Steinway occupied most of the remaining space.
He was already seated when I arrived, making notes on something in his lap. Professor Ward was in his late fifties and had perfected the ability to look disappointed before you had done anything wrong.
“Roth,” he said, glancing at the clock. “Early.”
“By forty-three seconds. I’m trying to turn things around this year.”
The corner of his mouth moved, which counted as laughter from him. He gestured toward the piano, and I set my bag beside the chair before taking my place on the bench.
Lessons with Professor Ward had stopped making me nervous sometime during the second semester of freshman year. They had not become easier. I had simply learned that he could hear insecurity almost as quickly as he could hear a missed note, and there was no point bringing extra problems into the room.
I began with Bach. He stopped me twice in the first page, the first time for voicing and the second because I had allowed the tempo to shift slightly in a sequence. The third time, he let me play to the end. When I finished, I rested my hands in my lap and waited. Professor Ward stared at the score for a few seconds before looking at me.
“You’ve improved.”
“I’m sensing a second half to that sentence.”
“There usually is.” He closed the score and leaned back slightly. “Your control is better. Your phrasing is better. You’re listening more carefully than you were last spring.”
All of that sounded encouraging, which meant I was about to be insulted.
He folded his arms. “You’re also still trying to sound like somebody else.”
There it was.
I looked down at the keys. “Anyone interesting?”
“You tell me.”
I didn’t need to. He had mentioned it before, although never quite this directly. My teacher before college had called Vivienne’s influence a strength. Professor Ward regarded influence the same way he regarded pedal: useful in moderation and unforgivable when abused.
“I don’t think I’m copying her.”
“I didn’t say copying.”
I glanced at him, and he leaned forward to tap the closed score with one finger. “Copying would be easier to fix. You know her recordings too well. You anticipate choices she made before you’ve decided whether they belong in your interpretation.”
That irritated me because it was probably true.
“There is nothing wrong with admiration, Lydia,” he continued. “Every musician in this building began by wanting to sound like somebody. Eventually, you have to decide what you sound like.”
“I’m twenty.”
“Excellent observation.”
I laughed. “I mean, shouldn’t I have a little time before developing a completely original artistic identity?”
“You have time. You do not have permission to postpone the question.”
I looked back at the piano. For years, Vivienne’s playing had been a kind of map. Not something I followed exactly, but proof that there was somewhere worth going. She had built a career on qualities I understood: control, detail, restraint, the ability to make a phrase devastating without turning it sentimental. The idea that those same qualities might be keeping me from sounding like myself felt unfair.
Professor Ward reopened the score. “Play the first page again.”
“Without Moreau.”
I stared at him. “That seems disrespectful.”
This time he actually smiled. “Play.”
I did, and it was worse. Not dramatically worse, but unfamiliar enough that I hated it immediately. I hesitated where I normally wouldn’t, overcorrected a phrase, and nearly lost the line in the final measures. When I finished, Professor Ward said nothing. I waited a few seconds before looking over at him.
“If silence is the feedback, I preferred criticism.”
“It sounded like you.”
“It sounded nervous.”
“You are nervous.”
“Wonderful. I’ve discovered my artistic identity.”
He shook his head, but he was smiling again. “Work on it.”
The lesson ended ten minutes later. By the time I stepped back into the hallway, the conservatory had become fully awake. Students moved around me carrying instrument cases, coffee cups, scores, backpacks, and the particular exhaustion that came from choosing a career where being finished practicing was largely theoretical.
I stood beside the stairwell for a moment and looked down at the notes Professor Ward had written in my score: develop your own voicing, trust the phrase, stop anticipating. The last one annoyed me most.
Maybe Professor Ward was right. Maybe I had spent too many years listening to Vivienne Moreau tell me what music was supposed to sound like. That didn’t mean I planned to stop listening. It only meant I needed to figure out what happened when I stopped following her. For the moment, six measures of Rachmaninoff were still waiting downstairs, and unlike artistic identity, they were a problem I knew how to solve.
