Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [87]
“A prodigy,” Frau Holzer wrote in her recommendation to Herr Puchel. “Memorizes instantly; staggering technique and maturity of expression; receptive to hard work, instruction, challenge.” Regarding what Frau Holzer chose to call the child’s “unique anatomy,” Puchel was matter-of-fact to the point of brusqueness, devising technical drills suited to Anna’s conformation but otherwise focusing, for the present, on the traditional repertoire. Herr Puchel—stout, bushy-bearded, with a huge strawberry of a nose and endearingly tiny feet—had concluded after forty years of teaching that his students would never be truly happy unless coaxed and cudgeled to that peak of performance in which nervous breakdown is a constant risk. Students, by definition, could not reach Parnassus alone; they were too weak of will, too dreamy and easily distracted, they had to be cultivated into that taut, tension-filled state without which pure and lasting art is impossible. Thus it was that visitors to Herr Puchel’s studio could hear “Falsch!” regularly screamed from the teaching room. “Falsch!” der Meister would shriek at the first missed note, “Start over!”—his screams punctuated in summer by the swack of the flyswatter with which he defended his territory against Vienna’s plague of flies. In moments of extreme aesthetic crisis he would push aside his student and sit at the piano, hike up his legs and pound the keyboard with his dainty feet, legs churning like a beetle stuck on its back. “You sound like this!” he would howl at the offender, though his gruff tenderness could be equally effective. “Don’t be afraid to stick your neck out,” he is said to have told one student after a risky, rubato-laced Polonaise. “You might find that it gets stroked instead of chopped off.”
A dangerous man, yet prodigious in his results, and apparently Anna responded to this sort of treatment. By all accounts she was a preternaturally serious little girl, self-assured, disposed to silence but precise in speech, with an aura of unapproachability that discouraged all but the very determined or very frivolous. A photographic portrait made at the time shows a girl as slender and graceful as a tulip stem, with long, ringletted masses of black hair, deep-set dark eyes, high Slavic cheekbones, and skin as pale as January snow. At this age she seems unconscious of her unique right hand, or perhaps trusting is a better word; she has allowed herself to be posed with her fingers draped to full effect across the back of a Roentgen chair.
“A perfect breeze of a girl,” is how the Salonblatt, Vienna’s snob- society newspaper, described the young Anna. “A perfect breeze who turns into an exquisite storm when seated before the 88 black and white keys.” Puchel believed that the loftiest musical heights could be reached only through the ordeal of performance; he wanted Anna to start playing in public immediately, and arranged through court connections her society debut at a soirée of the princess Montenuovo. Salonblatt rhapsodized over the playing of this “mystical” child whose arpeggios “flashed and shimmered like champagne,” while the baroness Flotow left an account in her diary of a charmingly poised little girl who devastated the company with Chopin’s nocturnes, ate cakes and drank Turkish coffee with the ladies, and complained about the quality of the piano.
She continued awing the impressionable aristocracy for several years, until Puchel judged that she was seasoned enough for her concert debut. In October 1895, the Berlin Philharmonic was scheduled to perform in Vienna; when Julius Epstein, the featured pianist, fell ill, Puchel arranged for Anna to take his place, and after the monumental program of Beethoven’s C major Concerto, a set of Rameau variations, the Weber-Liszt Pollacca, and a Chopin group consisting of the Berceuse, the E-flat Nocturne, and the E minor Waltz, the girl prodigy left Vienna gasping for air. Brahms toasted her in absentia that night, at a banquet intended to honor the suddenly forgotten Epstein. Mahler enthused over her