ZKV 118 (Mrs Thorndike)

 

ZKV 118

 

Mrs Thorndike was a local piano teacher – I almost passed her house on the way to school. She lived in a small semi-detached, and used the hall as a waiting room for the next pupil, while the teaching itself took place in a very small side room where the furniture was draped to keep it clean and everything smelt of mothballs. There was an upright piano complete with two candle sticks but no candles, a piano stool the height of which could be adjusted by energetic screwing of a knob on the side, and a chair just to the right of it, pointing diagonally at the centre of the piano, the music being readable and editable from where Mrs Thorndike was sitting. She was a dumpy, kindly soul and had strict views on how the piano should be mastered. Scales were of the essence, first the right hand, then the left, then the two put together. You started with two octaves and could progress to three. Further variations were to start on a given note with both thumbs and work outwards and subsequently return. Or, trickier still, to start from a major third position and do chromatic scales up and down, or outwards and inwards.

Pieces were studied first with the right hand only, with the desired fingering being added by Mrs T. in pencil. Then the left hand took the bass clef and it too was assigned the correct fingering. The was a tacit assumption that the left hand was not for tunes but for supporting them, and that this was fortunate, since most people were obviously less dextrous with that hand. That suited me fine. I found my left hand tended to straggle when playing scales and was rarely called on to show prowess except for a few bars in the pieces that Mrs T. assigned to me.

 

This imbalance has followed me through life and probably become even more marked. Bach’s music was often difficult to play since he ‘cheated’ – he wrote music which required three or four voices to interact horizontally at the same time. And this meant my poor left hand had to collaborate with the right in the middle of the keyboard. An uneasy partnership.

 

I loved Bach from the word go, which was a two-part invention in A minor. I envied those on the recordings I bought for the apparent ease with which they could play the left-hand part. They seemed happy to be ambidextrous.

 

But some pianists are more than that. They seem able to make their brains multitask with joy and abandon. And two days ago, as I listened to a new recording of the English Suites by Jonathan Ferrucci, I could hardly believe there was only one person playing. It sounded like a collaboration between old friends improvising with each other.

 

There is consolation though. I am multilingual and a poetry translator. I can choose a poem, dismantle it, let my mind float, carry it over into my own language and reassemble it. But only one way round, into English. For English is the right hand for me, according to Mrs Thorndike.