Instrumental (8 page)

TRACK EIGHT

Shostakovich, Piano Concerto No. 2, Second Movement

Elisabeth Leonskaja, Piano

In 1957 the titan of Russian music, Dmitri Shostakovich, wrote his second piano concerto for his son's birthday. Perhaps because of who it was written for, it proved something of a break from his usual sardonic, angry, oppressive style (listen to his fifth and greatest symphony for a definitive example of this).

Unlike almost all of his contemporaries, Shostakovich remained in Russia for his entire life, despite the turmoil and Stalinist madness that caused Prokofiev, Rachmaninov et al to leave. He stayed and fought through music, occasionally using his compositions to portray musical parodies of a fucked State.

He was driven, political, fearless and revolutionary, saying, rather beautifully, ‘A creative artist works on his next composition because he was not satisfied with his previous one.'

This slow movement, with echoes of Beethoven's ‘Emperor' Concerto, remains one of his most romantic and beautiful compositions, all the more so given the horrors that were occurring all around him while he was writing it.

ANNOUNCING PREGNANCY IS AN ALMOST
universal cause for celebration. Fatherhood has become a kind of sanitised paean to the miraculous. It comprises mental stock images of smiling fathers hoisting gurgling babies onto their shoulders and walking arm and arm with their wives through parks. We make light of the lack of sleep, the excruciating responsibility of creating life, the expense, mess, emotional strain of having children. Books are written with titles like ‘I fall asleep at red lights – the story of the man who had triplets'. There are countless guides to ‘effective parenting' whatever the fuck that means. The reality, for me at least, was something far more sinister.

My son was and is a miracle. There is nothing I will experience in my life that will ever match the incandescent atomic bomb of love that exploded in me when he was born. I did not understand the word ‘perfection' until I held him in my arms. Nor did I fully appreciate the concept of God. And if any fathers are reading this who claim not to believe in God then you are lying. Because I promise you, when you're waiting in the hospital, wife in labour, doctors and nurses bustling around, the smell of ammonia seeping into your nostrils, there is only one thought going through your mind – ‘please God let him be healthy. I don't care if he's not that smart, athletic, handsome, talented. Just give him ten fingers and ten toes'.

But for me there was a flip side to this. There had to be. Something that powerful has to have an equally intense opposite to counterbalance it. And for me it was terror. Pure, unadulterated, visceral terror. I had been handed the most precious thing in the world and in my core, I knew that I was fundamentally incapable of meeting that responsibility.

You can leave a marriage, quit a job, sell a home, justifiably walk away from your friends, family, exes, rehome a pet. But a child? A biological extension of your very soul? There is simply no escape from that.

Jack (a pseudonym, again at Jane's request) was the most extraordinary child. Every parent says that about their kids. And to you he was probably just another shitting, crying, moaning, kind of cute little thing. But to me he was, is, always will be shattering proof of all that is magical in this world. Despite my feelings about our marriage, he was conceived from a place of love and desire. He was wanted, desperately wanted, and from the get-go he was adored and admired and awesome and astounding and all the As there are.

And yet. There were so many messy things that had happened to me in my life that I had been too short-sighted, lazy or scared (take your pick) to clean up before he came along. And because of that he had an introduction to this world that was harder than most. A four-year-old having a father who spent nine months in psychiatric hospitals does not have a father in any real sense of the word. An infant having a father who had not even remotely conquered his particular brand of crazy does not have a father. Deciding to create life before being absolutely certain that I had the skills necessary to do that responsibly is an almost unforgivable transgression and yet that is exactly what I did.

I had a list of qualities I wanted to embody as a father. It included words like strong, available, ever-present, patient, secure, married, loving. And I fell far short on all of them save for that last one. Loving. And
such was the power of biology, the universe, genes, the heart, nature, loving my son was and is the easiest, most natural thing in the world to me. I struggle to do it for myself, my friends, girlfriends, even family. But with Jack? It is like breathing.

As I've started to battle some of my past demons, there are things that I'm able to offer him now, albeit a little behind schedule. He'll never have to worry about doing a job that ‘looks right'. He will only ever need to consider doing something that makes him laugh, jump up and down with excitement and want to tell the whole world about. And if he can't earn enough money from that to live comfortably I will happily pick up the slack and support him for as long as is necessary. The only thing that I want for him, much more than academic or financial success, is to be relentless in his pursuit of laughter and joy.

I want him to know the secret of happiness. It is so simple that it seems to have eluded many people. The trick is to do whatever you want to do that makes you happy, as long as you're not hurting those around you. Not to do what you think you should be doing. Nor what you think other people believe you should be doing. But simply to act in a way that brings you immense joy. To be able to say a gentle and kind ‘no' to things that don't please you, to walk away from situations that don't fulfil you, to move towards things that delight you. And there is nothing I will not do in order to help him achieve that.

I don't think I will ever be able to make my peace with the fact that the ripples of my past became tidal waves when he was born. It doesn't matter at all that I didn't have the luxury of choice when it came to losing my shit and breaking down. That I would have walked
through fire for eternity to spare him having a father who was absent, fucked, a disgrace, a shadow of what a father should be. Saying sorry to him is as empty and as hollow a gesture as I can think of. The one slim shot I have of making it sincere in his eyes is a constant, focused, urgent commitment to follow that apology with genuine and heartfelt change.

Whether he forgives me or not, I am now, finally, strong, available, present and open. I am now, later than I'd wanted, ready to be his father and I believe in him and his ability to set fire to the world in the best possible way. I am fiercely, unremittingly, devastatingly proud of him.

TRACK NINE

Bruckner Symphony No. 7, Second Movement

Herbert von Karajan, Conductor

On one of my first trips to Verona to study with an Italian piano teacher called Edo, he mentioned the composer Anton Bruckner.

‘Pile of shit,' I said. ‘Overlong pieces, wrote nothing for the piano, boring and not worth wasting time on.'

In truth, I'd never heard anything written by him.

Edo literally slapped me. He sat me down, said to me, ‘You do not move now', and put on a CD of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. All seventy minutes of it.

I didn't move. I couldn't move. It changed me irrevocably.

Bruckner was a deeply devout Christian (sample quote: ‘They want me to write differently Certainly I could, but I must not. God has chosen me from thousands and given me, of all people, this talent. It is to Him that I must give account. How then would I stand there before Almighty God, if I followed the others and not Him?') who was short, overweight, lacking social graces
and hopelessly romantic to the point where he proposed several times to hot young women but was always turned down. He never married, developed severe OCD that resulted in a crippling obsession with numbers, constantly reworked his compositions because he was so self-critical, and drank too much.

He also composed some of the greatest symphonies known to man. Giant, sixty-, seventy-minute and even longer orchestral universes that are the great mountains of musical history.

The Seventh Symphony has four movements, and each one of these epic musical landscapes deserves its own chapter in this book. But it will always be the huge, desperate, second movement that knocks me to the floor like a Tyson left hook.

WHEN I BECAME A FATHER
the echoes of my past became screams. There was a cold, insidious certainty growing like a cancer in my entire being that terrible things were going to happen to the most precious thing in my life. It was the single most terrifying thing that I had ever experienced. Everywhere I looked, I could only see danger.

I didn't know it was possible to feel so many powerful emotions at the same time – pure, unadulterated, instantaneous, fat love coupled with a terror so blinding and penetrating I could barely breathe. And there I was, handed this unutterably perfect thing. Those blissfully ignorant nurses might as well have given the keys to an Aston Martin to a four-year-old in Times Square and said, ‘Go crazy.'

I insisted on doing the middle-of-the-night feeds. I was up anyway. Anxious, over-thinking, running through all the myriad ways in which
he could die at any moment. Knowing at a primal level that something terrible was going to happen to him and that it was only a question of when, not if. Because that is what happens to children.

The plus side is that he and I bonded intensely. I mean, yeah, it's unhealthy, but I lived and breathed him in, twenty-four hours a day. I could not get enough of him. To this day, the happiest, most profoundly peaceful moments of my life have been holding him, fast asleep, a satisfying weight in my arms, feeding him as he slept. I didn't even know you could feed babies while they sleep. Knowing I was nourishing him, protecting him, that at this moment nothing could happen to him.

In the furious, ultra-competitive ‘school stakes' of middle-class London, we got him down for a bunch of primary schools, years ahead of schedule. And in every interview with the schools my questions didn't even touch on the facilities, syllabus, food etc.

We'd be sitting in the head teacher's office complete with appalling, frankly lazy children's paintings littering the walls, and she'd be telling us how:

‘Our school is an excellent feeder school into the more successful secondary schools in London, with many of our students then going on to the most renowned schools and universities in the country. We have a full and imaginative curriculum, superb facilities, regular field trips, consistently excellent Ofsted reports and a staff-to-student ratio of 1 to 5. We have a major focus not just on academic excellence but believe in meditation, pastoral care and self-development through teamwork and kindness', etc etc.

And I'd sit there, pale and alert, saying:

‘Do you hire any male teachers? How many? Are they ever alone with any of the children? What do your police checks entail? Do you have CCTV? In the toilets too? Who takes the children to the toilets? Are they alone? Are any areas of the school not covered by CCTV? How thorough are your background checks? Do you check references thoroughly? Do you monitor the children for symptoms of unhappiness and abuse? What's the school's official procedure if abuse is suspected? Is it written down? May I have a copy?'

I became more and more walking dead. I had to return to work in the City after a few weeks and would leave him at 7 a.m., sobbing in the car as I drove through the dark London streets. I knew what had happened to me just for being a child. It seemed inevitable that similar things would happen to him. That was what childhood was a war zone filled with danger, threat, terror and pain.

And, simply by bringing him into this world, I felt as if I had hurled him straight into that situation.

And what do you do with that level of guilt? How do you not just drown in it? More to the point, how do you not throw yourself willingly off the tallest building you can find, all the while sneering at what an inexorable heap of shit you are?

And so that's where my façade started to crumble. That moment – what should, could have been the single happiest moment of my life – was the starting point of my descent into a kind of madness I could never have imagined.

I am saying only this: I was raped as a child. Over the course of five years I had sex with a man three times my size and thirty to forty years older than me against my will, painfully, secretively, viciously,
dozens and dozens of times. I was turned into a thing to be used. And pain – physical, mental and spiritual – I could handle. But what they don't tell you is that those ripples reach out their cold toxic hands beyond the self. They install an unshakeable belief that all children suffer through childhood in the most abominable ways and that nothing and no one can protect them from it. Just by bringing Jack into this world I had now been complicit in whatever future pain he would surely suffer. The FUCK who did me had not only ruined me, but by proxy he was now going to steal my son's childhood away from him. And that was my fault. And that pain I could not handle. He took my childhood away from me. He took my child away from me. He took fatherhood away from me. And he laughed while he did it. And
that
, disregarding the privilege, the self-obsession, the poncey north London wankiness of my life, you should feel horrified by.

I started to withdraw more and more. The punishing, the passive-aggression, the shaming, mocking, wheedling, judging bullshit that formed almost everything that came out of my mouth descended on my marriage without respite. The fact that Jane stayed with me as long as she did is testament only to her vast reserves of patience and kindness. It does not matter that fundamentally I couldn't love her in ‘the right way'. We were a family unit. We had the tools necessary to build a strong, stable, supportive nest for our cub. And rather than wake up and grasp that with every fibre of my being, I pissed all over it.

The selfishness of the victim is the hardest thing to tolerate and treat with compassion. We are idiots. It is nigh on impossible to love us. We push and we push until finally we get what we want – more
victimhood. Sometimes my capacity for tolerating and desiring pain is infinite, a bottomless pit of self-hurt and a perverse thrill in seeking more and more.

I guess I could look at this a slightly different way. That my son being born was the beginning of the end of my old life and the start of a new, much more fulfilling life. And in hindsight, that makes perfect sense and would make Deepak Chopra fiercely proud. But spending so many years walking through quicksand, fighting imaginary fires, feeling a never-ending sense of dread and despair, takes its toll.

Things started to happen to me that baffled me because I hadn't experienced them for years and years; I'd cry for no reason, find sleep either impossible or the
only
possible thing I could do. The scariest thing would be losing time – just checking out, without being aware I was doing so, and come back a while later, be it minutes or hours, with no memory of what had happened. My childhood tics started coming back – squeaking, twitching, tapping, light-switch-clicking – and I lost my appetite for everything from food to sex to TV. The lights were going out and I had no clue why or how to stop it.

So I looked for distractions. I looked for a way out that didn't involve homicide or suicide. And all roads led to music. They always do. I couldn't be a musician, I knew that after ten years without playing a single note on the piano that was not an option, but perhaps I could become an agent. Anything that got me out of the City and even vaguely towards music had to be a step in the right direction. And so I did what an egocentric City-working cock would do – found the address for the agent who represented the greatest pianist in the world and set about forming a business partnership with him.

It wasn't hard. A case of Krug, a few emails, a meal or two and I was set. His name was Franco. He lived in Verona. He had looked after my hero, Grigory Sokolov, for twenty years. Grigory Sokolov – without question, the greatest living pianist. Arguably the greatest pianist of all time. A man who managed again and again and again to use the notes of a piano to reach into your soul, rip out whatever was in there, shake it about, polish it, take it for a ride and then put it back again in a way that just fit a bit better. This guy, this weird, autistic savant. This chubby, awkward, introverted statesman of the piano, had been my musical crack for a decade since I'd heard his first album. It was all Chopin. And live. Most live albums (my own included) are cobbled together from at least two performances; the producers and engineers take all the best bits and merge them together into one ‘live' album. If the label is feeling especially cheeky, they also go into the studio post-concert and cover any dodgy bits, a process known as patching, and make sure they don't mention it anywhere. It's a blatant misrepresentation, but we do it because we're needy and insecure and cannot bear the thought of offering something that is less than perfect. But not Sokolov. One concert, one take, some cold, coughing Russians in the audience and the most visceral, staggering performance of Chopin's Second Sonata and Op. 25 études I'd ever heard. It's on iTunes – don't just take my word for it.

There began a love affair, made even more tantalising given he has only released a tiny handful of albums. The rest were gathered online, child-porn style, via developmentally disabled pianophiles (it's a real word, I promise) and listened to in total awe.

So the thought of working with his agent, who had brought him over to the West from Russia as a young man and turned him into a phenomenon, performing to sold-out audiences all around the world, was overwhelmingly exciting.

With Jane's blessing, I quit my job, my excitement just about countering the slight feeling of nausea at walking away from such a reliable income, and Franco and I decided we'd both chuck in €30,000 and open a London office. But before doing that we agreed I should go to Verona for a couple of weeks and learn the ropes. Which I did. Eagerly.

Franco lives in the only high-rise building in Verona, towering above the city with the most extraordinary views, floor-to-ceiling windows, a €1,000 coffee machine and a Yamaha grand piano. That, right there, is all you need in this world. And after dinner on my first night he asked me if I played the piano. I mumbled something about not having played for years but that I used to play well enough for a teenager.

So he asked if I'd play him something. And I, being hungry for approval and attention and a bit high from the pasta and views and Italian-city smell, sat at the piano and somehow whacked out a piece by Chopin. It was, to my ears, messy and embarrassing. But I'd remembered all of it, got through it and, a little bit red in the face, turned around afterwards to see his reaction. He was sat there, jaw on the floor and totally silent. And after a minute he simply said to me:
‘James, I have been doing this for twenty-five years and I have never heard someone play the piano like that who was not a professional pianist. You are not going to become an agent. You will come every month here to Verona, stay with me, and study with my friend Edo
who is the best teacher in all of Italy. You may not become successful, but you have to try.'

And that was that.

He then spent the next few days dragging me round to all of his friends' houses (all of whom had pianos) and forcing me to play to them like some kind of newly trained puppy. And it was weird and wonderful and scarcely believable to me. After a decade of not playing and trying to make peace with the fact that I would never be able to do what I'd always dreamed of, Franco had thrown a hand grenade into the equation.

And one morning we ended up at Edo's house. And this was one of the guys who really changed my life forever. The most violent, aggressive, arrogant, dictatorial bastard I'd ever met. The perfect teacher for someone like me who was lazy, ill-disciplined, badly trained and overly enthusiastic. I had my first lesson with him that day. We walked together to the music shop and bought a Mozart sonata (the F major one, for those who care). Which was a shit start because (a) I hated Mozart (in much the same adolescent way I hated everything I didn't know or understand, because I was too small-minded and lazy to get to know him better), and (b) I thought we should start with a massive, showy Rachmaninov concerto.

And then we got to work. In a way I had never known existed. Slowly, carefully, with an almost inhuman attention to detail, intense concentration, a ton of pencilling. He showed me tricks that made everything possible, the most useful being his rhythm method; most tricky passages in piano-playing involve runs of fast notes. And he broke down those runs into groups of either four or three notes at a
time. And then further broke them down into different rhythms – ten in total, each one putting emphasis on a different one of that group either by accenting it, or dotting the note before (holding it down 50 per cent longer than marked). It was a bit like a long-distance runner breaking down each and every mechanical movement he's asking his body to do while running a marathon and then practising each micro-movement again and again one after the other until he starts to put them all together.