Crescendo

What happened in Santiago, the matter that began my great downfall, the rupture in my previously hallowed existence, was this: I played the concert of my lifetime.

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A statement that might sound foolish, grandiose, ridiculous, I know, but consider this. To be the best you could be, the best anyone could be, to reach that height – well, what’s left after that, but a fall?

Since then, I have tried to understand what it was about that performance, what perfect combination of piano, orchestra, audience and mood might have been responsible. But I have come up empty to explain. It can’t be explained, the brutal magic of such a thing.

Did anyone else there on the night know it was my greatest ever performance? It did not matter to me, for I knew, I knew it in my bones, in my heart. (Oh, yes, I have a heart, Natasha, though you once told me I didn’t, that I was a man without a soul, without a conscience, without feeling.)

When I looked at myself in the mirror backstage afterwards in Santiago, after the roars of applause and the flowers and the kisses and the glory, my face looked ghostly and scared. I swiped at the sweat, dashed it away with cold water and dipped my hands and wrists in the water too, hanging my head over the sink.

So what if that was the best I had ever played? I would simply play that level again, I told myself, I would recreate that brilliance, be the best every night. Instead of a narrow peak there would be an endless plain of excellence.

But I didn’t believe it. I walked out of that concert hall like I was walking to the gallows. It was as if I had both been spooked by my skill and reminded of my frailty at once.

Then, during my next concert, in Sao Paulo, I started to think about my hands in a way I never had before. The tendons, the muscles, the skin, the bone, where joint met joint, where fingertip met ivory. I thought about everything they did without my ever consciously urging them to do so. I thought about the fact that my hands were human, fallible, where the piano, a perfectly calibrated instrument, was not. I thought about the future, my future, endless decades of performances in which I would know that I had played the best I ever could and never would again.

And then I hesitated. And then my hands fumbled. And then I lost my way on stage in front of hundreds, sitting at a piano that for the first time in my life turned strange to me, unwelcoming, cold.

They say that much of the adrenalin surging through the blood of any performer and their audience is about the possibility of a mistake, about the tightrope tension of live performance. The body is a fallible thing, after all, and the mind…But mine had never been so. The tightrope was a flat road to me, the drop was never there.

As a child, you could play me a piece once and I would play it back just the same. A neat trick, a parlour game. Except when you’re speaking of repeating a sonata, a requiem, some piece of music of such complex construction an adult learner might never come to know it fully – then it isn’t a trick or a parlour game, it’s prodigal, superhuman, it’s the ticket to wealth and fame.

Of course, simply repeating a piece will not get you beyond the first year of notoriety and novelty as a child musician. There has to be feeling there, emotion, interpretation; there has to be something more.

But where did it come from, this capacity for feeling, the confidence that I, a boy of seven or eight or twelve, had something to say that no one else had, a private privileged communion with these great composers?

I would like to blame my mother, for she was the one who brayed the loudest about my talents, who sat me on her lap at two to reach the keys, but it wasn’t her, it was me, a voice inside of me, a quiet warmth, a certainty, a flame burning at the heart of me.

Some people call that God, don’t they?

So does that mean that it was God who abandoned me that night in Sao Paulo?

I don’t believe in God. I admit that I have prayed to him, once or twice – what person hasn’t on the very darkest of days, in a moment of crisis when everything you knew or wanted or had was gone from you, when you were truly alone – but I wasn’t alone then in 1957 and I hadn’t reached a moment of crisis, I had simply fumbled in a single performance.

And what was concerning about that?

One mistake doesn’t mean anything for a musician, even a prodigy such as myself.

But two? Three?

Well, now.

*

As I lay awake that second night in Sao Paolo, two fumbled performances down, I decided that what I needed was a break.

Simple, easy, nothing to be much concerned about.

I just needed some time away from the stage to get my head straight, to fix whatever nonsense was going on.

This wasn’t something I could perform my way out of, since touring, with its attendant anxieties and stresses, would not help.

(This is a lie even as I write it, it wasn’t touring that was ever the problem, for I had you to smooth my way, didn’t I, Natasha, and the orchestra managers and the local agents and hotel workers and donors. It was my pride, that monumental beast of a thing, that would brook no more performances where I, prodigy that I was, made minor mistakes. If I was indeed human, fallible, I didn’t want anyone else to know, to witness it.)

Perhaps a brief spell under a tutor would help me, I thought, not for my artistry but for my…nerves. Prodigies in some countries are pushed into long study in music conservatories, not allowed to perform extensively until they have paid their dues. It is a criticism I faced from the beginning, the fact that once I began performing, I never stopped in one place long enough to study for six months or more under a great master of the piano, instead condensing those lessons into stops of a month or so, learning from a range of different teachers rather than being tethered to one. But how else should I have found my own voice? I had no interest in doggedly following one person’s path; nor in curtailing all the lessons I learned from performing and playing with the best. The tutor I had in mind now wasn’t a great master anyway, but someone who another pianist had once confessed had helped him ‘get out of my head’, a woman by the name of Clementine Thoreau who lived in Paris. She would suffice, the rest from performing would help calm my jitters, and after a few months away from the stage, I would return to concert halls, to touring, to that pinnacle I had glimpsed in Santiago, I told myself firmly.

How naïve I was, how foolish! But the world had offered itself to me like an oyster since I was a child; my path through it had been blessed, easy, and here another charmed handshake from fate, I thought, when the comte found me in the empty ballroom at the Hotel Esplanada early the next morning as I practised.

I thought it was you at first, but the polite enquiry from the door behind my left shoulder was in a low, French voice.

‘Am I interrupting you?’ he said as I turned my head.

‘No, you’re not,’ I said, his accent tickling at my brain. Paris, I thought. ‘I wanted a chance to play before the long journey tomorrow.’

He walked closer, adjacent to the piano keys, a hand in his pocket, a fine leather briefcase dangling from the other. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. I hadn’t paused in my practicing when he entered but had transitioned smoothly from disjointed racing arpeggios to Tchaikovsky’s pleasing ‘Song of the Lark’.

‘To Paris,’ I said. ‘Well, that’s the plan.’

‘Paris?’ he said curiously, tilting his head. ‘I return there tomorrow myself.’ His eyes – now on my hands, now on my face – were hungry. Two performances hadn’t been enough for him, he wanted more. I could use that.

‘I thought you were touring South America for some time still,’ he said. ‘Am I to get my wish to see you play again in my hometown already?’ Such a notion did not seem a great surprise to him, I thought, noting his smile. He was a man who was used to receiving unexpected blessings.

‘I don’t have any performances scheduled, I’m afraid, but there has been a change of plans. I’m taking a summer sabbatical in Paris to study with a teacher who specialises in the Russians,’ I said, presenting the situation as something natural. I had telephoned Madame Thoreau earlier, while Natasha had been in the bathroom. All I needed now was somewhere to stay. ‘She had a last-minute availability.’

‘She must be some teacher, to draw you across the world,’ he said shrewdly. He was closer now, as if my playing had lured him towards me.

‘It’s also that it’s time for me to take a break from touring,’ I said. ‘A musician needs to supplement their performances with study, with a private exploration of the pieces, to deepen his craft.’ Such bullshit.

‘If it’s last minute then have you found satisfactory lodgings for your sister and yourself?’

I was pleased he knew we were a set pair, it made things easier. ‘I’m still searching for lodgings,’ I said, putting on my bravest face, ‘but I’m sure we’ll find somewhere suitable—’

A hand on my shoulder surprised me. Rarely was I ever touched when at the piano, especially by a patron. Yet the momentary surprise was not enough to affect a single note of my playing, a fact which pleased me. You see, I thought to myself, you’re still as good as ever.

‘You can stay with me at my mansion,’ the comte said kindly with a soft squeeze of his fingers over my flexing muscles before he let me go. ‘Please, it would be my pleasure to host you. I have several excellent pianos and the house is large enough to give you the run of it.’

‘I wouldn’t want to impose.’

‘It would be no imposition,’ he said, wide-eyed with amused astonishment at the thought. ‘It would be an honour, Max,’ he insisted. ‘I’m a patron of the arts; I think there is nothing grander in this life than supporting artists and musicians. Our daily existence would be very dull without them.’

I slid my fingers from the keys, folded them in my lap. ‘How fortunate that we crossed paths then.’ I smiled my most charming boyish smile.

My polite humbleness had worked wonders. I had saved Natasha the trouble of finding lodgings, and myself the cost. She liked to proclaim that I was totally socially inept, but I tell you, when I wanted to, when it was needed, I could charm with the best of them. I had been interacting with donors and orchestras and sceptical adults since I was a small child, after all. And, at its most cynical, isn’t the emotion I could engender from the stage a kind of pure manipulation?

The comte would make a good host for my sister in Paris too, I decided. He would no doubt introduce her to his set and have good ideas for pleasant cultural diversions; he would help distract her from prying into just why I had abruptly abandoned my tour.

(Why didn’t I want you to know of my fears, of my feelings about my fumbles, Natasha? Because it was nothing, a blip, a momentary hiccup; it would do no good to tell you and watch you frown, watch you conjure up some overdramatic solution involving God knows what. You might even blame yourself as if you had anything to do with it, or get Mother involved and she would turn the whole thing melodramatic. No, this didn’t concern you, I thought. This was a matter of my hands on the keys, of the piano and myself.)

‘I will inform my concierge of your imminent arrival,’ the comte said. ‘And you must give my secretary your teacher’s details too,’ he added, with a meaningful look. He would pay her fees, then. This was more than I had expected, how fortunate.

Natasha would argue against letting the comte pay for my lessons too, because she disliked having to manage the demands, small and large, of any donors and patrons, saying it just made things complicated. A week’s visit and a few performances for their friends, fine, but any longer and they started thinking they could deign to make me perform anywhere and anyhow they wished, she would say.

But I wanted this sabbatical to cost the least it could so that I could forget it once it was past and be a fait accompli so Natasha could not argue with me.

‘How generous, you have my greatest thanks,’ I told the comte.

‘It’s my pleasure,’ he replied.

Agreements like this were done without contracts or signatures, though he offered me a cigarette from his silver case in the same manner as if we had just concluded a business deal. I shook my head; I couldn’t smoke and play the piano, though jazz musicians always did that so well.

I continued to play, feeling for a moment the weight of his patronage strangely, as if I was on the block at some countryside market. He had one arm crossed over the other as he watched me, rapt, the smoke unfurling around him before he remembered to ash it.

‘I’m afraid I won’t be able to perform at any private gatherings, though,’ I said carefully when he had crossed the room to search for an ashtray. ‘I really am taking a true sabbatical. I wouldn’t want to undo the work of my lessons by hurrying into playing before an audience.’

‘But you wouldn’t mind if I listened to you – watched you – practise, sometimes, would you? Like this?’ he asked, motioning between us.

‘Of course not.’

Just like that, I would be replacing an anonymous audience of hundreds with a single man. But he wouldn’t be hard to please, I was sure of it, remembering the solemn way he had intoned undoubtedly yesterday at breakfast.

‘I shall feel quite honoured then,’ he said with a smile.

In but a few hours I had neatly arranged my next few months, for free. And if my lessons went as smoothly as this, why, I would soon be skipping back to the stage, I thought, as the comte politely took his leave.

What a fool I was.

I should never have gone to Paris.

But then, I didn’t have much choice, did I? Fate played its hand, and it was a better player than me, more skilful on the keys, clever, wilier, a composer-performer who knew the whole fucking composition while I floundered about without a score.

Was I the keys then, and God the hands playing upon me?

Or was I the strings and fate the screws?

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From Crescendo by Jane Healey. Used with permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury. Copyright © 2026 by Jane Healey.