The Concerto

There was once a boy, whose existence was blessed and cursed in equal measures. He was a uniquely talented pianist but nature, being consumed by the laws of balance, required a payoff for the sanctioning of such grace and so the place in the heart of humankind reserved for love and empathy was vacant in his.

His mother and father were both respected concert pianists but his talent dwarfed theirs. Whispers of prodigy echoed through his house from a young age, the whirlpool of noise always at its loudest when his parents entertained the classical world. These expectations and wonderings were remote to him. He was apathetic to public opinion or to the opinion of his family, he played for himself. He did not feel the music he played, it did not impress further than the tips of his fingers. Each piece was a task to be achieved, a puzzle to be solved.

The boy turned into a man and travelled the world playing to large audiences, who listened in awe at his technical ability. Although he played the most difficult pieces ever written for the piano, there was one piece that he could not master and his inability to do so became his obsession. The harder he endeavoured the further away it crept. He opted for exile as he struggled with the piece but time was now his enemy as the poison of arthritis stole into the joints of his fingers.

His retirement brought sighs of disappointment but he was not concerned with his public life, only his personal defeat.

A woman, who was in wonder of his talent, married him. For him theirs was a marriage of convenience and he felt no emotional attachment to her. She soon realised that her initial warmth towards him was misplaced and based upon an assumption that his passion was pure and fuelled by love. She gave birth to a boy named Adam whose father was indifferent towards him. In the dawning years of the boy’s life his father was very rarely seen in his company. He seldom considered his existence until it became evident that the boy had inherited a similar ability.

The young Adam lived an insular and childless life. He was surrounded by adults from whom he craved love, but these were employees of his father and as such were cold to his advances. His mother attempted to offer love but depression hollowed her sanity and she lived a selfish life struggling to reach for happiness. As he grew older she spent more of her time away from the family home until she no longer seemed to return.

Adam played the piano differently from his father, with a darker more emotive tone. His life was consumed by the piano, his time spent alongside teachers whose license to educate would dissipate rapidly as he usurped their superior capabilities. With his mother gone he would await Sundays with the eagerness of a child on Christmas Eve. It was on Sunday that his father would sit with him on the piano stool and pass on his knowledge. For Adam this was his opportunity to impress, but regardless of effort his father would always tell him to try harder. His father would retreat for the remainder of the week and orchestrate his son upbringing from a distance.

Adam struggled with the puzzle of how to win his father’s love and affection and one Sunday decided to ask his father directly.

‘Father, what is love?’

‘Why do you ask Adam?’ responded his father showing no shock at the depth of the questioning.

‘I am just intrigued’ replied his son.

‘Well it is an interesting question’ His father responded and contemplated, whilst staring at the piano keys. After a few moments he continued.

‘These keys. White and black. Without each other they would be useless. They need each other’.

Adam looked at the left hand side of his father’s face as he stared unknowingly at the piano keys. They sat in silence.

‘Do you love me father?’

‘Of course Adam, I am your father’ Adam watched as the lightly bearded jaw moved up and down and then settled without moving.

Adam progressed under the tuition of his father and others and caused a stir of excitement in the classical world as news of a new child genius bled out of the mouths of the awaiting public. For Adam’s father the boy’s development was encouraging as he dreamt of the possibility that he could master the piece that had eluded him so spitefully in his heyday.

The father’ sense of per failure simmered over the years and condensed into an intense bitterness. He would dream the sounds at night; the dream would usually follow a similar course. He would be sitting on a piano stool affront a shiny black piano, the floor, ceiling and walls contrasted in brilliant white in a boxed room. He would commence playing the piece and would do so for hours, until he reached the final movement, at which point he found himself in a concert hall. At this point the pain would creep into his fingers as they stiffened and ceased to work. The completeness of the piece plied away from him slowly, like the tearing of a page from a book.

When the pain rang and crippled he would stop playing and stare at the keys, stand up and face the audience who all now stood and synchronised their judgement, shaking their heads from side to side robotically. He would look at the members of the audience and see hundreds of his own face, moving from side to side, hating and judging.

Adam grew into a young man and began his own career as a concert pianist. His father realised that he did not have much time left with Adam and one day approached him with a piece of music that he wanted him to play at his next concert. He explained that he must master this piece and withdraw from society until he had achieved perfection.

Adam did not like the piece, it was not to his taste but he recognised its importance to his father. He saw for the first time a degree of emotion in his father as he spoke and that excited him.

Adam locked himself in the attic of his father’s house and battled with the piece. He spent weeks in solace and slept on a mattress next to the piano. His meals were left at the door but he ate very little. He soon realised that he would never master the piece in such aesthetic isolation and left one morning to speak to a pianist who had taught him as a boy. Giorgio had been the only of his teachers that had given him any emotional attention and Adam had developed a relationship with him years after he left. Giorgio admired Adam and thought him likely to be the greatest pianist he had ever witnessed.

‘Giorgio I have never struggled as I have with this piece, it feels unachievable’

‘Well they say that it has never been played in public, so as far as we are aware no one has ever completed the piece. Maybe you are reaching for the unreachable.’ He said with a posing tone

‘Is that why my father wants me to play it? Does he believe I can do this?’ Adam felt a wave of warmth in the confidence his father placed in him.

‘Adam, you must understand. Your father was a great pianist, some said he was the greatest they had ever witnessed, but this piece he could not handle. He is obsessed; it is truly the only thing he cares about. You are a wonderful young man and your father is aware of your talent but this is his folly, he has been reckless and selfish to hand it over to you.’

Giorgio did not want to hurt Adam but he felt that to mature into an adult he must face the truth about his father’s true nature. Adam stared at his friend, who had revealed a painful truth that was neither revelation nor axiom. He had opened something up to Adam, which had seemed taboo before that night. He turned and walked out of the house in silence.

Soon after Adam sought his father one Sunday evening and told him that he was ready to perform the piece. His father raised his head, his usually black eyes sparkled to attention.

‘You mean to say that you are ready to play the entirety?’

‘Yes father I am ready, if you are ready to hear’

‘Yes Adam, play it now if you will’

Adam looked blankly at his father and felt powerful for the first time.

‘No father I will play it to an audience, if you don’t mind organising one’

His father recognised a shift in the balance of power between them and resented it.

‘Yes I will organise an audience, but you are sure you can play the piece in its entirety?’

Adam did not respond but turned and walked out of the room.

Adam’s father was quick to organise the recital and selected a group of thirty. The invitations were sent with a days’ notice of attendance, such was the intrigue all of the thirty accepted the invitations. Adam was sent a written message from his father to explain that the recital was scheduled for the following evening, he knew that he would have to rest as the piece lasted over six hours. He bathed his hands and retired to his room.

The evening of the recital hummed with anticipation. The story of the great pianist and the piece that eluded him was a folk tale of tragedy or idiocy, dependent on the orator, and now was to reach a conclusion. Fur and feathers and perfume and shiny black shoes, clipped on the marble floor, smoke and sweet rimmed glasses and red lipped glasses and rumour and reverence and spite and twitching eyes with creased snide lines, unkind and kind and expectant.

Adam’s father sat as close to the piano as convention would allow and soon the thirty stopped mingling and followed his lead as a man sounded Adam’s introduction. Adam entered the room with an open expression, smiled, sat on the stool and commenced. As he played, his father reflected on every note, desperate to hear the piece completed and perfected. Hours went by and page after page was turned and the eyes of the audience were draining but their ears were fixated. Adam’s father calculated.

There was a movement in the piece that legends said a pianist required twelve fingers to perfect and this was Adam’s father’s ruin. It was also his fear as Adam approached it with caution and swept into it as if being sucked into a perpetual wave. The emotion of the piece lifted the audience and Adam played with a manic passion that, some would remark when later recounting the story, was akin to possession.

Adam’s head jerked uncontrollably and the audience’s initial amazement turned to mutters of concern. His Father turned and muted the mumbles but Adam face was now turning violently red and his body was jerking, he stood and slammed the piano with his hands as he lost control of the piece and collapsed back sliding from the piano stool to the cold marble floor.

They said he’d had a fit of exhaustion due to the intensity and length of the piece. Other’s blamed the father who pushed his son too hard, particular outrage was afforded to his reaction at his son’s collapse. ‘He simply walked out of the room’ they said. ‘He mourned for the piece not his son’ other’s said. The event gained more controversy when Adam’s disappearance began to circulate. A year later when his father was sectioned many said it was because of the guilt he felt and that he could never redeem his relationship with his son.

What they did not know however was the events that followed the recital and the recital itself had all been orchestrated and that Adam had been the conductor and orchestra.

In his cell at night his father would hear the piece completed and this would take him back to the night following the recital, when he woke up to the echoing sound of a piano. His ears concentrated the sound and he realised that the piece was being played and more specifically the section that had eluded him was nearing its conclusion. He jumped out of bed and yanked at his bedroom door but the door was locked. He slammed his body against the door and wailed in frustration.

‘Let me out’ he cried. ‘I want to hear it’.

The music stopped. ‘No please continue’ He screamed ‘You were so close, Adam. I need to hear it completed’. Tears of frustration rolled down his face as he realised his defeat and he fell into the corner of his room. As dawn was breaking the lock to his door turned and in a dazed state he opened it and walked down the central staircase towards the piano. There on the music board sat a letter in Adam’s handwriting that read “You have twelve but I have eight”. He looked down and saw, in place of two removed black keys, two human fingers.