The Magus - John Fowles [47]
is the cost of being born in the most beautiful and the most cruel country in the world. "My mother sang--and music was the most important thing in my life, from as far back as I can remember. I was something of a child prodigy. I gave my first concert at the age of nine, and people were very kind. But I was a bad pupil at all the other subjects at school. I was not stupid, but I was very lazy. I knew only one obligation: to play the piano well. Duty largely consists of pretending that the trivial is critical. And I was never accomplished at that. "I was fortunate, I had a very remarkable music teacher--Charles Victor Bruneau. He had many of the traditional faults of his kind. Vain of his methods and vain of his pupils. A sarcastic agony if one was not talented, and a painstaking angel if one was. But he was a very learned man musicologically. In those days that meant he was _rarissima avis_. Most executants then wanted only to express themselves. And so they developed accomplishments like enormous velocity and great skill at expressive rubato. No one today plays like that. Or could play like it, even if they wanted to. The Rosenthals and Godowskys are gone forever. But Bruneau was far in advance of his time and there are still many Haydn and Mozart sonatas I can hear only as he played them. "However, his most remarkable acquirement--I speak of before 1914--was the then almost unknown one of being as good a harpsichordist as a pianist. I first came under him at a period in his life when he was abandoning the piano. You know the harpsichord requires a very different finger technique from the piano. It is not easy to change. He dreamed of a school of harpsichord players who were trained as early as possible as pure harpsichordists. And not, as he used to say, _des pianistes en costume de bal masqu� "When I was fifteen, I had what we would call today a nervous breakdown. Bruneau had been driving me too hard. I never had the least interest in games. I was a day boy, I had permission to concentrate on music. I never made any real friends at school. Perhaps because I was taken for a Jew. But the doctor said that when I recovered I would have to practice less and go out more often. I made a face. My father came back one day with an expensive book on birds. I could hardly tell the commonest birds apart, had never thought of doing so. But my father's was an inspired guess. Lying in bed, looking at the stiff poses in the pictures, I began to want to see the living reality--and the only reality to begin with for me was the singing that I heard through my sickroom window. I came to birds through sound. Suddenly even the chirping of sparrows seemed mysterious. And the singing of birds I had heard a thousand times, thrushes, blackbirds in our garden, I heard as if I had never heard them before. Later in my life--_�sera pour un autre jour_--birds led me into a very unusual experience. "You see the child I was. Lazy, lonely, yes, very lonely. What is that word? A sissy. Talented in music, and in nothing else. And I was an only child, spoilt by my parents. As I entered my fourth luster, it became evident that I was not going to fulfil my early promise. Bruneau saw it first, and then I did. Though we tacitly agreed not to tell my parents, it was difficult for me to accept. Sixteen is a bad age at which to know one will never be a genius. But by then I was in love. "I first saw Lily when she was fourteen, and I was a year older, soon after my breakdown. We lived in St. John's Wood. In one of those small white mansions for successful merchants. You know them? A semi-circular drive. A portico. At the back was a long garden, at the end of it a little orchard, some six or seven overgrown apple and pear trees. Unkempt, but very green. _Ombreux_. I had a private 'house' under a lime tree. One day--June, a noble blue day, burning, clear, as they are here in Greece--I was reading a life of Chopin. I remember that exactly. You know at my age you recall the first twenty years far better than the second--or the third. I was reading and no doubt seeing