Even a sideways glance at great pianist Annie Fischer’s left hand tells you that she could throttle pigs with it. Plough fields. Dig trenches. Or murder Liszt’s most difficult piano music.
Taken decades ago by Jeno Szots for Jozsef Gat’s famous tome The Technique of Piano Playing, the snap demonstrates a key attribute of great ‘piano’ hands — long little fingers. Most great pianists have big, strong, peasant hands with long little fingers. For the most demanding music they help enormously.
But they didn’t help Willy Kapell, Noel Mewton-Wood, and Richard Farrell, who all died violently at 31. Great pianists all. What’s so spooky about piano-playing at elite levels? Why is it so dangerous? You’ve seen the movies, now read my debut novel The Hands of Pianists for answers. It’s out on 4 March.
Its neurotic narrator aims to prove that pianos can kill and maim. His quest takes him from Melbourne to Geelong and Sydney, the south of France, London, Sussex, and the Czech Republic. Decades earlier, he accidentally severed his sister’s fingers, ending her keyboard career. She committed suicide, and now he’s blame-shifting.
The great Liszt pianist Leslie Howard calls The Hands of Pianists a ‘rich and remarkable book, full of wisdom, doubt, instense curiosity, myriad detail and an abundance of pictorial skill’. Early in the story, the narrator goes to see JL, who has written about Kapell. Discussing their own limited experiences of piano-playing, JL says that he twice had an out-of-the-body experience while practising. He says:
I seemed to float in an armchair of nothingness a metre or so above the keyboard. Looking down upon my hands, I watched my fingers in wonder. I found it hard to believe that I was making the music; the perpetrator of the trick, yet had to own it. […] I was very close yet far away, enjoying my performance as if I were in the dress circle of a concert hall. I wonder [says the narrator, interrupting] if the best pianists stick to their work to enjoy rare moments such as those.
The Hands of Pianists is available in paperback and ebook from most major online booksellers. For more information, contact me at stephendownes616@gmail.com and @closemdownes.