Two months after the death in a 1953 air crash of the great New York pianist William Kappell, the equally brilliant Australian keyboard artist Noel Mewton-Wood drained a tumbler of prussic acid — cyanide – in the front room of this London house. He threw the empty glass at a wall in which police later found shards. Many suicide notes were scattered around the room.
Why does a musician already world-renowned kill himself? The narrator of my debut novel The Hands of Pianists tries to answer this and other questions provoked by the peculiar demands of playing an instrument at elite levels. Spurred by guilt over his role in his pianist sister’s death, he is on a quest, in fact, to verify that pianos kill elite pianists. In particular, he investigates the lives (and deaths) of three fine musicians who all met violent ends at 31 — Kapell, Mewton-Wood, and New Zealander Richard Farrell.
The great Liszt pianist Leslie Howard calls Hands a ‘rich and remarkable book, full of wisdom, doubt, intense curiosity, myriad detail, and an abundance of pictorial skill’. W. G. Sebald academic Dr Deane Blackler says my book is ‘destabilising’ and ‘disruptive’, a narrative that takes readers on a journey that has ‘a great deal to admire, and perhaps a little to fear’.
The narrator of Hands is intrigued by newspaper reports of the coronial inquest into Mewton-Wood’s demise. Quoting from the London Evening News, he writes:
Police-Sergt John Prynn said the pianist was crouching on the floor, his head resting on his right arm. He was dressed in khaki shorts, a red plaid open-necked shirt, and white plimsolls, the sergeant reported, probably adding, Your Worship. […] Dr. Trevor Roper (sic) told the court that he saw a broken tumbler, which looked as if it had been thrown against the wall, probably as Mewton-Wood collapsed, and on the wall there was a stain and some crystals where the glass had shattered.
The Hands of Pianists (Fomite Press, Vermont, USA) is out on 4 March in print and ebook formats through major online booksellers. The paperback costs $A25.95 and ebook $8.95. Prices in other currencies will be similar.
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