Music of the beautiful

When I was 47 I decided to learn to play the piano. I had already bought one for my son; a new instrument, black, shiny, solid and Japanese. He lost interest in it, but my enthusiasm waxed in proportion as his waned. After I had tapped out the first faltering notes, my confidence grew as well. The next stage was to find a teacher at our local music school, which is housed in the dusty corridors behind the municipal theatre.
Her name was Lucia Belloccia and she was a Sicilian from Palermo. Lucia is an elegant name, easily associated with the Florentine Renaissance master Donatello, whose sculptures are masterpieces of artistic refinement. In Italian 'Belloccia' means 'beautiful view', and I had to admit that she was exactly that, for she was young, well-proportioned and pretty. I never fell in love with Lucia Belloccia, but there was something quite enchanting about watching her perfectly proportioned hands, with their long, slim, expressive fingers caress voluptuous music out of the white keys. A beautiful woman who can make beautiful music is a rare and precious phenomenon.
Thinking about that I can't help recalling a soprano I had heard sing Handel at a concert in the high-baroque parish church of Dobbiaco, fresh in the cool of an Alpine summer evening. She was a girl from Venice with golden hair and the face of an angel--a very female angel. She had a voice of overpowering richness and accuracy. Very few people who sing can do so with perfect pitch, and this is quite acceptable to the vast majority of people who are quite unable to notice anything wrong. I have been blessed with the ability to tell the difference, and perfection in the female voice sends shivers down my spine. As in this case the sound came from such a beautiful face I staggered out into the brisk mountain air at the end of the concert with my head reeling and a lump in my throat. It was days before I returned to an even keel.
Lucia was an excellent teacher; patient, committed and systematic. For one hour a week she sat next to me in the small practice room and put me through my paces, as I struggled to master a few elementary compositions. At the beginning and end of the sessions, and in the brief pauses between different tasks, I came to learn a little about her. In her house in Florence she kept three pianos and five harpsichords. She was passionate about Classical music and enjoyed teaching it to children. Indeed, she seemed like a woman who would be very good with children (she was also teaching my son to play the piano, and doing it well). Some rather more reserved information came from a mutual acquaintance, a woman that Lucia had evidently confided in. She was recently married and had just discovered that she would never be able to have children. It was such a tragedy.
Lucia was a very well-brought-up lady; strict, formal, slightly prim, careful in her dress and manners, even in her demeanour. Indeed, she was stiffly middle-class, perhaps to a slightly ludicrous extent in this age of relaxed manners (yet the higher social orders of Palermo are like that). But sitting very close--indeed, extremely close--to her as I laboured over Mozart's so-called 'Sonata facile', I gradually realised I wanted her body. It seemed such a base, unworthy emotion. Within myself, I blushed furiously. Forlornly I struggled to control my heartbeat and blood pressure. Heaven knows what the consequences would be if she had found out! Trying to reason it out afterwards I told myself that if men like me were not biologically programmed in that manner, the human race would abruptly die out. Anyway, what was wrong with desiring a woman who, objectively, was beautiful, accomplished and intelligent? It was Nature's way of ensuring the spread of good genes. Reasoning like that didn't help in the slightest.
Talking to her I found that she was unfamiliar with the Australian composer Percy Grainger and the enigmatic Peter Warlock, about whose life a cinema film had just been made. I lent her some disks of their music and it formed the basis of yet more earnest conversation. I was booked for her last lesson every Tuesday, which ended at 2 p.m. The practice rooms in the music school are Spartan in their furnishing, but their very smallness lends them a certain intimacy. I found we were talking so intensely, with such concentration, that an extra half an hour passed before we even noticed.
It would be a fatal error to assume that she found me attractive. Why should I be conceited enough to assume anything of the sort? However, I suppose she found me good to talk to and she must have been somewhat starved of intelligent conversation. Yet in the soporific atmosphere of the early afternoon, together in that tiny space next to the piano, I had the impression that we were very slowly drawing closer to each other, like two ships that fail to alter their oblique, converging courses. It was a gloriously romantic sensation and I wonder if that is what she experienced too. If so, I wonder if she was aware of having such a feeling? In any case, there was something wistful about her, she radiated lack of fulfilment. Women are so hard to understand. At least in men there is a simple linear connection between what they see and what they feel.
Lucia Belloccia left the music school (and yes, I was heartbroken, if a little relieved). She was replaced by a woman of about the same age whose name was Gloria. Physically, I suppose Gloria was not unattractive, though she was not to my taste. But she was a dreadful teacher, one who was good at humiliating, rather than inspiring, her pupils. It was a bitter medicine after a year with Lucia.
For some years I have not touched the piano. It is now completely in discord and a piano tuner is very hard to find. But I like having it there in my living room and one day soon I will return to it. I will never be a good pianist, but when I go back to Mozart's 'Easy' Sonata and Anna-Magdalena Bach's book of simple keyboard exercises, I will think of Lucia Belloccia and how I struggled with my physical attraction as I sat next to her.
Music is indeed the food of love. I have seen Margaret Marshall sing Mozart arias with the Scottish National Orchestra and Iona Brown play Vaughan-Williams's 'The Lark Ascending' on the violin in front of the assembled musicians of the Academy of St Martin's-in-the-Fields. Two beautiful women in their long, voluptuous gowns, with bare shoulders, breathtaking cleavages; and both of them musicians of the highest calibre, stars of world renown. And each time the effect was electrifying: drama of the highest order. Yet my heroine is the Spanish pianist Dame Alicia De Larroccia, who when I saw her at New York's Lincoln Centre was well over seventy. This small, plump woman looked like a very lovable grandmother, yet although she plays with the accomplishment of a mature woman (and with genius), her music expresses all the ardour of a young girl. It is an extraordinary combination and it has inspired me like no other music has.