Mortiphylactic crisis

(Leon the Hugeonot as near-vaniquished pianist)

Some of us totally avoid performing anything in public.  Others force themselves, despite great discomfort, to prove something: that they hate performing in public.

My first public performance, setting aside moments of incontinence at kindergarten, was at my piano teacher’s annual concert.  I may have played something by Mozart; nothing that Mozart himself would have recognized.  I can recall the total sense of unreality, the sweating, and the wobbly legs as I made my way up there.  I was performing without sheet music and could not recall, for a moment, what I was supposed to play.  Somehow I started it, one bar followed another, and, once finished, I returned to my seat in the audience to a wave of well-intentioned but insincere applause.  I don’t recall how I felt afterwards.  I suppressed the memory.  They say such experiences are character-building.

Paradoxically I was otherwise an outgoing, very confident, child.  All that changed, over a matter of hours, at age eleven, when my father died.  I was wrenched out of childhood into something for which I was totally unprepared – not adulthood but a grey, uncertain limbo.  I suddenly became self-aware in a way that I had not been before; this proceeded to painful shyness and introversion.

I ploughed on as everyone does and started at secondary school.  My English master asked the class to prepare a talk on any topic to present before the class.  I was a closet rebel and tried to think of the most ridiculous topic imaginable.  It says something for the breadth of my imagination at the time that I chose ‘The Flea’ as my topic; no musical reference there; just the common dog flea.  In researching the topic I assumed that encyclopaedias would treat the flea with the same disdain that I did; some little nuisance to be squeezed to death between the fingernails if you could.  I was astonished to find thousands of words written about the flea and I was incapable of making a coherent summary of what I read.

Just before my talk, one of the bright members of the class, an Adonis sans  pareil for whom everything came easily, gave a very classy talk on some esoteric topic, receiving smiles of appreciation and thoughtful nods from the master.  I don’t recall the content of his talk since I had switched into panic mode.  I knew my prepared talk would seem pathetic at any time; after his talk it would seem like that of a poorly-tutored turnip. 

My effort generated a rather different response in the master.  He shook his head, shielded his eyes from time to time, groaned, and sighed deeply.  The class itself sat in stupefied boredom punctuated by uncertain titters.  The master cut me short about halfway through since I was foundering.  I remember nothing more of that day; again my internal censor cut in and removed that experience.  These days I have the words to describe how I felt, unprintable though they might be; then I did not, and it made a difference.

Somehow I was resilient and bounced back.  I agreed to play the piano for morning chapel every day (except on those days when chapel occurred in The Chapel – a piano-free zone).  I had the idea repeated exposure to public performance would make it easier; it didn’t.  I recalled the technique used by the great 20^th century Belgian pianist, Lazare Levy, to cope with his life-long stage-fright: he pictured the front row of the audience as wearing only underpants.  Underpants in the front row didn’t work for me; I tried underpants for the entire congregation – no good; then I ditched the underpants.  Well, it was different.

I was an excellent sight-reader so never had to prepare hymns.  I just worked on other pieces to play before and after chapel; and I could choose anything I wanted apart from rock and blues.  I played Chopin, and Schumann – the latter because the deputy headmaster purported to be a direct descendant of Robert Schumann.  He never commented on the Schumann works I played; music of any kind seemed to leave him cold.  Schumann’s genes had been sadly diluted.

I had good times and bad times with chapel.  I felt a tremendous sense of power. I could make 600 people start singing whenever I liked; slow them down if I wanted; speed them up if I had a mind to do so.  I could put a thoughtful, meditative, pause between verses causing the congregation, ready to recommence, to turn blue.  I could choose an alternative tune for some hymns and the well-loved tune, which the audience would be waiting to bray out like a mob of asses, would be replaced by something they had never encountered.  Nobody could complain since the alternatives were clearly set out in ‘Hymns Ancient and Modern’.  But I was hardly capricious; sadly, I was mostly rather conservative; the cane was still an available punishment.  I had this problem with authority figures – particularly ones carrying canes. 

It was wonderful to be playing a great piano; even a person who would choose “The Flea” as a public speaking topic could recognize that.  Our new music master had arranged for a Bösendorfer to be purchased, a piano ranking with the Bechstein, Steinway, and, much later, Fazioli.  At the time there were less than 20,000 Bösendorfers in the world and they were still making them despite the bombing of their prized lumbar yard in 1944 (the source of their spruce soundboards), the shelling of their factory in 1945 and the obliteration of their offices and showrooms the same year.   The current equivalent of the school’s piano would set you back a cool $70,000 - $100,000.  And I, a little vegemite-mouthed, greasy-fingered schoolboy, was playing a Bösendorfer every day for chapel (except, of course, when chapel was in the Chapel).

A member of the Deller Consort, during one of the emsemble’s visits to the school in those far-off times, remarked to me he had not known there were any good pianos outside of England until he saw ours; a typical superior, imperialist comment of the type that made the English so endearing.  How he expected an Australian schoolboy to react to a combined compliment-putdown like that I don’t know; I was speechless. ‘Turd’ was not in my vocabulary then.

My ability to sight-read hymns without any preparation brought about my undoing.  One morning the school was visited by the Archbishop of Polynesia, an august and colourful figure.  The headmaster was his unctuous self - he carried unctuousness to an egregious level - and had assured himself that everything was just right to welcome this distinguished,  surprise visitor (up to that time none of us knew there was an Archbishop of Polynesia).  The only thing he had not considered, because it was so far beneath his headmasterly notice, was me.

The critical event occurred after the Archbishop finished his sermon.  The sermon must have been good because the Latin master, a man the image of Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes, did not snore once.   The ancient maths master, with the habit, when distracted, of moving his false teeth around and poking them out on the tip of his tongue, managed to keep his putrid prosthesis to himself.  There was an appreciative audience of assorted dignitaries; a couple of other robed bishops of wherever, a gaggle of invertebrate schoolmasters, and the headmaster in premier place, his unctuousness now having reached an actively oozing phase.

With perfect timing, after a respectful pause, I played halfway through the accompaniment of the assigned hymn and slowed to indicate I expected the throng to start their customary braying.  I felt that rush of power as I led 600 boys, an assortment of secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries, the schoolmaster gaggle, and the ingratiating, sycophantic, oleaginous headmaster in song.  I was confident; I was in control.  I could accelerate and decelerate as I strove to extract every gram of theological meaning from this work.

Things went very well and I came to a glorious end with just the right amount of ritenuto.  My final chords were defiant, yet hopeful.  Good would win out over evil.  I stopped, and there was silence.  I suddenly froze in horror.  The congregation wanted to go on singing!  The deputy head rushed over to me and said, in his characteristic nasal twang: “Why don’t you keep going?”  Can Schumann himself have had a voice like that?  No, his union with Clara could never have occurred.

I recommenced playing.  My brain was racing.  I was certain I had played through all six verses.  Yet, they wanted to go on singing.  Why, in heaven’s name?  Now it was a matter of what we would later term damage control.  The power relationships had changed.  The congregation was driving the pianist.

At the end of each repeat I had to stop, check the faces of those in the front row, and try to interpret whether their expressions meant they were having an asthma attack, needed to go to the boys’ room quickly, or intended to continue singing.  For a while I thought I was going mad and that this would go on forever.

I ceased counting how many times I banged out the dreary accompaniment.  Then, abruptly, after yet another repeat, I noticed a shift in the atmosphere.  The congregation had had a surfeit of braying and wanted to sit. 

As a precaution, I played a tentative chord to test the water.  Maybe I was wrong.  Perhaps they were just resting.  But I had no takers.  Their braying urges had been satisfied.  Just as inexplicably as they had continued singing they now, as one, no longer desired to sing.  I had time to blush, feel acutely embarrassed, and wish I were dead. 

I suddenly recognised the fundamental error I had made and cursed the bastard who would write a hymn requiring two melody repeats for each verse.  Schumann’s descendant gave me a dirty look, perhaps of the type his manic-depressive forebear would have bestowed late in his descent into insanity.  But I was the one wanting to jump off the bridge into the icy Rhine.  I knew I was in big trouble and was destined for the private school equivalent of death row.  In the event, no punishment followed.  They probably thought I had had punishment enough (I discovered, several decades later, that the lack of punishment probably had more to do with what befell the Archbishop a few minutes after the service; but that is another story).

A few weeks later I was allowed back on the Bösendorfer but things had changed forever.  I no longer feared the congregation and my mental embellishments on Lazare Levy were now superfluous (I retained them nonetheless for my own amusement).  I had been embarrassed as much as any human could be and had come out the other side. 

Later research demonstrated, of course, that, at the commencement of adolescence, we have our lifetime’s supply of the embarrassment-mediating substance, beta-mortorphin.  If this is released in one go, as in a mortiphylactic crisis, that’s it!  No more embarrassment.

I didn’t know that then.  I knew my attitude to my audience had gone from “They’ll bugger me!” to “Bugger them!”  I was back in control of a twelve cylinder, supercharged Bösendorfer and calling the shots.  My performance anxiety had vaporised.  Now it was the congregation’s turn to explore the outer realms of fear at the behest of a pianist who was indomitable, implacable, and a mite idiosyncratic.