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No one has ever ripped a thrilling Mozart concerto from my keys. Or Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, or anything grand. I don't mind. I was intended from the start for amateurs to plunk out Yes, We Have No Bananas and Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning, in the small town of Gravenhurst, Ont., in the early 1920s.
Friends would gather round in the parlour, someone would tinkle out a few tunes; I was dusted and polished, adorned with doilies and ignored. Nothing too serious – life was good.
Then, one evening in 1965, in the only home I had ever known, there was a big discussion. "What shall we do with the piano now that Auntie Ethel has passed away and the house is being sold?"
Enter my second owner: A newly engaged favoured nephew.
And so began my odyssey – a move to an apartment in Toronto's Thorncliffe Park, a year in an Edmonton basement, then four more in a basement in Regina. Periodically, the nephew's wife would take lessons – a few months here and there. When the children came, she stopped.
By then, it was 1973, and I was nicely placed in the centre hall of a home in Scarborough, (the stairs to the basement were too narrow). And I like to think I added a note of distinction to the home, although I know in my heart of hearts that I'm a modest instrument, one of thousands of sturdy uprights churned out by the Bell Piano company in Guelph, Ont. And frankly, I felt a bit clunky in the company of the Deilcraft credenza and the balloon curtain valances.
Presto, it's 2017. The wife is coming to play more often now. She seems a bit obsessed, as if she has to make up for all the forgotten years before her fingers give in to arthritis or the new passion dims. So little time to conquer a skill that can take decades, even for the moderately talented. (And, having felt her fingers on my keys, I don't think she is.)
These days, I'm in a small, second-floor bedroom in a midtown Toronto house about my age – 100 years. I've had cosmetic surgery – been refurbished to become as pretty as an old clunker could hope. The wife assaults my chipped ivory keys. (She forbade their replacement). The massive soundboard reverberates. She has worked herself up from I'm a Little Teapot (Grade 1) to Sonatina in F major by Beethoven (Grade 5). A lot of banging in that piece.
It's getting furious now. Hours a day, because she has decided to take a Royal Conservatory exam. Yikes. I'm too old for this and, I suspect, so is she.
Then it stops. I am abandoned, left to brood and wonder. A week passes before she creeps back in, playing a few minutes at a time, maybe a half-hour. But only those same five pieces she had practised so hard. Again and again and again. Why?
It seems the exam didn't go so well. As soon as it began, she morphed into an intimidated seven-year-old. Her fingers became as deft as potato wedges and the first mistake led invariably to a crescendo of flubs as she lurched through Bach, Kabalevsky and Burgmuller. Twenty minutes seemed like an hour. I know all this because she mumbled it to me, half apologetically, as she returned to the comfort of my non-judgmental keys.
Perhaps the elegant, grand piano in the examination room was the problem, because she wasn't that bad when she played on me – okay, not great, but not that bad. Perhaps it was the pressure of the moment; all her flaws exposed to a steely-eared examiner. Perhaps it was because she had never played out of our room before, for anyone.
I wanted to tell her that maybe it was meant to be just the two of us, clanging about or noodling gently in peaceful solitude. Or that playing the piano isn't always a performance art, but simply a solitary way to feed some inner need. Isn't that good enough?
But I can tell she's in it all the way, and if she's committed, then I'm necessarily involved. Playing the piano well is an unfinished piece of business that she can't let go. Obsessions are like that. Her dream is to be able to yell "I can!" when someone in a piano bar calls out, "Can anyone play My Melancholy Baby or Light My Fire?" Her fingers will ripple over the keys, a little improvisation here, a rich chord progression there.
Meanwhile, about those five pieces. I was afraid she was going to play them until she could trust her fingers to release them perfectly, even in Koerner Hall or the Rex. Or forever, whichever comes first.
Then, last week, she pulled out sheet music for The Skye Boat Song and Don't Ever Squeeze a Weasel. It seems she is taking a new tack. The local elementary school needs an accompanist for the Grade 3 and 4 choir. Perfect. Now she will have an audience that is sweetly non-judgemental, even oblivious.
I'm hoping that the little kids will be her saving grace and not just because she'll get some practice performing for an audience. Watching them sing I'm a Little Leprechaun and Dance of the Willows may give her some of the joyous feeling I used to have decades ago when a merry group gathered round me playing Let me call you Sweetheart and Goodnight, Irene.
Isn't that what it's supposed to be all about? Especially for clunkers like us?
Angela Boyd lives in Toronto.