1.

When I was thirteen I learned to play Chopin on Arthur Rubinstein. My third piano teacher, Miss Jeong, had an unwavering, single-minded adoration for the legendary Polish-American soloist. She always had us listen to his live recordings before starting a piece. ‘Rubinstein’s left hand,’ she used to muse, ‘is the proof that God favoured men.’ In Korean the word ‘men’ alone can’t represent the entirety of humankind as it sometimes does in English. Her connotation was clear enough, but Miss Jeong didn’t hesitate to enunciate her belief in a certain divine advantage to being a male virtuoso; a favour not granted to the other sex, to her sex. ‘Listen to this male precision,’ she would say, as Rubinstein’s notes filled her piano studio. ‘It’s indomitable. The masculine control in his fingers. He doesn’t allow a single note to drag on, but still lets the music flow. No unnecessary emotion, but full of decision. Every note is equal. Valid.’ There was fever in her words, mesmerised and breathless. Envy.

I had been introduced to Miss Jeong through my old piano teacher. When I first met the two appeared identical, closer to sisters than friends. The same age, with the same smooth, dark hair pulled tightly back into a bun, not a single hair going awry. The same loose-fitting, silky outfits in dark navy or grey scale, never quite black. Good, healthy skin. Frugal with their use of smiles, which made me assume the same of their tears.

‘If we’re to try for music academies for your high school, we can’t waste a day,’ Miss Jeong said during our first meeting. ‘Sejin had you enter a couple of regional competitions, which is okay, but you’re way behind on recitals and concertos. None, in fact. We need to get you at least one of each by the end of this year.’

Miss Jeong’s piano studio was divided into a salon and eight practice rooms, each a cubicle with its own piano (some more in tune than others), a metronome, and a small alarm clock. In the plum-walled salon sat one Steinway & Sons grand piano. This was the first time I saw a Steinway. Rarely did I see, let alone play on, a foreign-made instrument. Most pianos I had practiced on, as well as the one I had at home, were Youngchangs, a Korean brand. Occasionally a Yamaha. Every day I entered the studio, the liquid black Steinway looked like it might have been freshly forged that morning. At different times of the day it wore a different shade of black: cosmic at noon, fatherly at dusk. The piano was Miss Jeong’s, and it was reserved for her; only when we were drawing near to a recital were we allowed to use the grand piano, strictly under her supervision. I was glad. I thought something as banal as open access would tarnish the magic of the piano, the breathtaking, somber joy that struck me upon entering the studio and seeing the Steinway at its centre each day: same, different, and then same again.

Miss Jeong assigned me Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 in B-Flat Minor for the recital. I stared at the music sheets with dread and fascination; this was by far the longest and the most complicated piece I had encountered.

‘It’s the easiest of Chopin’s Scherzos,’ Miss Jeong said, slipping the Rubinstein CD into the player. ‘Just try to play like this.’

I had listened to three Scherzos before, from the Chopin compilation album mom had on her CD shelf. She had been a member of a local classical music circle and each month they chose an album, made copies, and distributed them. From the stack of recordings that mom had collected, the Chopin was my favourite. She used to play it on Sunday mornings while she washed the dishes.

The Scherzos were the last three tracks on the record: No. 1 in B Minor, No. 2 in B-Flat Minor, and No. 3 in C-Sharp Minor. I couldn’t love them the way I loved the Nocturnes, the precious, luminous compositions that I associated with my mother and water. I wasn’t exactly moved by them either, the way I was moved by the Polonaises and Mazurkas, the robust, prideful pieces that had a resilient heart beating in them. Scherzos, they scared me. They seemed to have been composed out of a malicious intent to test the virtuosic capacity of the pianist: not just her technical dexterity and musical expressiveness, her virtue. They were Homeric ordeals that she had to endure and overcome to prove herself worthy. The notes snarled, fought against the player; they wanted to play, not be played. We won’t let you fool around. We won’t let you catch a breath, they seemed to say. They were fast, furious; by far the most difficult pieces I’d ever heard. The idea of one day playing a piece like them, one day saying Yes, I’m working on a Scherzo, was dizzying. Intimidating and exciting. A dream.

This is why Rubinstein was disappointing.

‘He sounds… Different,’ I said to Miss Jeong as the last note of Scherzo No. 2 dissipated in a faraway concert hall.

‘From what?’ she said, pausing the audio, without looking at me.

‘From the CD my mom has at home.’

‘Who plays it?’

‘I don’t know. Anonymous. It’s a compilation.’

‘Some amateur,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t sound different. He sounds better.’

I wanted to say that in Rubinstein’s version there was none of the excitement I had felt when I first listened to the Scherzo by the anonymous soloist. The glass-shattering hysteria at the opening, soothed by the arpeggiated chords full of love and contempt, slowly giving in to the schizophrenic ascension in the cadenza, to the inevitable fall, cascading brilliantly like rain on a sunny day, unexpected, magnificent; then the landing, a return to the opening but expanded, finally letting go, resolving, satisfying: a circular evolution. None of this seemed present in Rubinstein’s rendition. It was there, but not really there. The emotion, the emotions in their violent plurality. Gone. I could hear Rubinstein had big hands. I could hear them travel across the keys, full of weight, ease. With them he stroked the notes down, tamed them. They turned out docile. Lost the spell, the glory; what made them a Scherzo. Rubinstein played perfectly. No one note hurried or dragged. Every note was given the right proprietary breadth, breath. In this perfection the piece became paced. Normal. The strenuous fight that had frightened and exhilarated me disappeared.

‘Get on, start practicing,’ Miss Jeong said, before I could voice my objections. ‘Set the alarm clock for 45 minutes. Come out for a water break then.’

That night she sent me home with a copy of the Rubinstein CD, telling me to listen at least twice a day, once before I began practicing, once after.

It didn’t go well. The piece was too difficult. Rubinstein was no help. No doubt his performance was flawless, every single one of his notes clear and pure no matter where it was placed, even its shadow correct and shapely. ‘Exactly how Chopin himself would’ve wanted it,’ Miss Jeong said. ‘The original intention. You get it?’

I didn’t. I didn’t get the Scherzo, I didn’t get Chopin, but most of all I didn’t get Rubinstein. His perfection didn’t inspire awe; it inspired frustration. I didn’t resent how difficult the piece was; I resented how easy Rubinstein made it seem. Not only did he make my struggle seem laughable, a product of mediocrity, he also completely mutilated the piece, extracted the venom and the honey both, leaving it toothless, neutered.

‘You’re rushing again!’ Miss Jeong’s frustration grew with mine. ‘Don’t you see how Rubinstein paces himself?’ She had a stiff little plastic ruler she used to slap the back of my hands. When it hit my knuckles it made a short, dull noise disproportionate to the pain. ‘You’re right-handed, which means your left hand is naturally weaker, needs more training. When you rush it lags. Suffocates all your root notes.’

Merely being able to play the piece from beginning to end at the required tempo took me three months. When I finally played the entire piece for the first time without stopping, it was late at night. I was the last one at the studio. The practice room had become mine, along with the navy Youngchang piano whose highest C-Sharp key had half sunken with humidity. I liked this room because its window looked out to the street, not the courtyard. No resident audience would be tortured by my unripe notes for hours on end, the repeated mistakes and the incurable hesitation. Only the irrelevant passersby might be obliged to listen.

There was no ecstasy at having reached the first mark. Miss Jeong had said I needed to play a piece at least 10,000 times before I could play it in front of a crowd. 10,000; 만. A symbolic number in Korea. In a Buddhist table of karma points, the act of making 10,000 bows to the ground at a temple is equal to the positive karma of having saved a human life. Playing the Scherzo 10,000 times, then, would it equal the karma of saving a life, creating a new one? The Scherzo lasted roughly ten minutes, so just playing it, top-to-bottom, 10,000 times, would require more than 1,500 hours of practice. With my average rate of practice at four hours a day, which really seemed like the humanely possible limit, it would take me more than a year just to fill the quota. Not taking into account the fact that there would be parts to be worked on individually; slaved over, perfected—so that my notes would bear a passable resemblance to Rubinstein’s.

It was nearing midnight and I still had to walk home. I slammed the keyboard cover shut, shoved my music into my backpack and left the practice room. As I was about to turn off the lights in the salon I saw the Steinway. Miss Jeong’s Steinway. Rubinstein probably played on a Steinway too. No way he would have reached his level of perfection with a damp-affected Youngchang whose sostenuto pedal didn’t hold for longer than five seconds. Chopin, too, must have composed on a Steinway. How long had Steinways been around? A hundred years? Ten thousand? As long as Chopin for sure, as long as pianos and pianists I imagined; as long as music itself.

I sat in front of the Steinway and lifted up the lid. It was heavy. Then, with my right index finger, I pressed down the middle C, the centre of the keyboard, the perfect note: the median, the medium, the average of all sounds. I let it linger. It rang clean and calm. No anxiety there, nothing to worry about. I took out my music and placed it in front of me. I began playing.

I started coming in later every day so I could play on the Steinway by myself. At the end of each full-length play I took a second to compose myself, got up slowly with a shy smile, and did a careful curtsy to an imaginary audience. My spine bent, I heard a standing ovation. This rushed time along. When I was done I wiped the keys and the glassy body with the red suedette key cover to undo the evidence of my visit, my touch. The aftermath tidying required attention but I didn’t mind. I took my time. It felt like a natural duty, a proud responsibility following an act of love. Before leaving I would glance back at the Steinway, seemingly untouched, no visible signs that would tell tales, but forever altered in my mind, intimated, bearing an indelible fingerprint. The mark, the claim, the secret: this is what I saw every time I saw the Steinway. It made me smile. It made me warm.

I stopped listening to Rubinstein. I found the anonymous CD, the amateur rendition at home, and started bringing it with me to the studio instead. The familiar anxiety, the sometimes smudged notes, the chords sustained too long, the beats out of balance: all that might have fallen short of genius, rang abundantly genuine. The deliberate relinquishment of control, the identifiable imperfection; its humanness.

‘Stay with the tempo,’ Miss Jeong would implore during lessons. ‘What’s gotten into you? You’re rushing. You’re playing like you’re being chased by death. Your left hand can’t keep up. I told you, your left hand’s your roots. Your right hand, your flowers. Right now you sound invertebrate. And your flowers are wilting.’

While she was within earshot I pretended to pay heed, slowing down awkwardly, resisting my natural urge. But after she left, after everyone left, when it was just me and my Steinway, I played it however I wanted it: rushing, not rushing, as impetuous and virtuosic as the anonymous pianist, reaching the end, not reaching the end, starting from the beginning, from the middle, but always finishing breathless, exalted.

‘Bravo.’

Cold wind swept across my face. Miss Jeong stood at the door, clapping slowly, slanting on the doorframe. I glanced at the clock: just past midnight.

‘Did you know,’ she said. ‘That there are different phrases of praise for female and male virtuosos?’

I remained silent. She continued. ‘Bravo for a man, brava for a woman, bravi for a group. I was wondering.’ She straightened herself. ‘Whether I should say bravo or brava, while you were having a little…’ She gestured to my direction. ‘… concert there.’

‘Certainly not bravi, because you’re obviously not more than one person. But brava? Or bravo?’

I watched my fingerprint dissipate on the porcelain white key: the mark, the claim, the secret.

‘It’s an Italian word, did you know that? Means good, well done. But also: bold. Daring. I think you’ve earned it in that sense, no doubt. The question is, should it be bravo, or brava? There ought to be a different word. Seeing as you’re not a fully grown man or woman, hmm? But then it’s not really an option. Such a word doesn’t exist. You know why?’

10,000 bows to the ground equals saving a human being. Even the meaningless, repetitive, solitary act of physical persistence, if done in earnest, accumulated in ritual fervour, can amount to a goodness; the sheer intensity of its kinetic devotion enough to metabolise something good in the real world, enough to save others, to save yourself. 10,000 Scherzos, then, 1,500 hours of mimicking what had been created through another person’s genius, perfected through other people’s zeal, 1,500 hours of repetition of a 150-year-old song, when completed, when done, would it save me from the fate of being a permanent follower, a mimicker, an anonymous, average, middle C re-teller of a story countless times told? Would it really cancel out my mediocrity and elevate me to the level of a virtuoso, worthy of bravos and bravas and bravis?

‘Because there’s no such thing as a child virtuoso. A child just doesn’t have the insight, nor the discipline. Is that what you think you are? A child virtuoso? A little Rubinstein in the making?’

She walked over to me and the Steinway, her Steinway; removed my music and shut the cover, packed my music as I watched, frozen.

‘Take the bravo for today. You won’t be hearing it for a while.’

I didn’t go back to the studio; not the next day, nor the day after. I was mortified, having been caught. Miss Jeong’s quiet anger, the unmistakable mockery, scared me. It haunted me for days. But most of all I felt spent. I had started playing piano when I was four. As soon as I learned to read I learned to read music. Nothing came easier, no human bond more natural. Now, with the Scherzo, everything changed. The endless, mindless training seemed unnatural, impossible to enjoy. I wasn’t creating anything. I wasn’t saving anything. I was only filling the quota. 10,000 Scherzos. What then?

The first week I missed lessons I told Mom that I was feeling ill. Then Miss Jeong called, then my excuse of a made-up illness became hard to sustain, then I had to confess that I had no intention of going back.

To my surprise, Mom seemed sympathetic. ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,’ she said. She would cancel the recital and the spring would come and the next year I would go to a normal school instead of a music academy. I would find other passions, other talents. I knew: all would be well. But when she suggested I go say goodbye to Miss Jeong, I couldn't. I wouldn’t be able to look at her. Not because of fear, although it was definitely a factor, but because of shame. Shame for giving up, for the disgraceful way in which I was giving up. I wouldn’t be able to look at the Steinway; the short, full hours I had spent with it, the noble body with an oceanic sheen that seemed to reflect its own light; the bravos and bravas and bravis I was leaving behind.

2.

The next time I played the Scherzo was in Paris.

In 2009 I left Korea to attend a university in Ohio. I studied English Literature and French. In the second semester of my junior year I was accepted for a study abroad programme at the Sorbonne. The administration recommended that I apply for a homestay rather than seeking a private accommodation, a recommendation which I followed. In the homestay application I was asked to list my hobbies, passions other than my major area of study. I wrote: music (piano).

In the emails that followed I was notified that I’d been assigned a room in the household of Monsieur and Madame Maillard. Madame Joelle was a retired high school literature teacher. Monsieur Raymond was a cellist retired from the Paris Philharmonic. You will find your accommodation suitable, the email read.

I arrived in Paris in January. It was a cold winter. Edith Piaf was playing at the airport and I was a bit numb. In the taxi, an elegant male driver with Vietnamese features quietly addressed me as Mademoiselle. Bach played on his radio. The car drove on a grey highway that looked like any highway in the world and then as it entered Rivoli everything suddenly became old, lit, beautiful: Paris. The Maillards’ apartment was on Rue de Copenhague, a small street off of Rue de Rome.

‘Welcome! Welcome!’

Raymond was a small, bald, smiling man with delicate frame and fussy gestures. Joelle was a tall woman with short grey hair who looked stern at first, but when she smiled kindness coloured her entire person. Their apartment was long and large: a narrow, dark corridor connecting kitchen, dining room, and salon to four rooms, two of which were occupied by lodgers, myself and another American student, Liz. The master bedroom tucked away in the back, three washrooms and toilets hidden in unexpected places. All housed, slightly crammed, in a traditional Haussmannian building. Many phrases of welcome and introduction were uttered in imperfect English and French, then I was led to my room. Yellow walls, wooden furniture, a small fireplace, a big mirror, and a piano.

‘We heard you are a pianist!’ Raymond said. ‘Practice any time you want!’

I slept well that night.

Classes were held in different colleges all over Paris. For music we could enroll for lessons at La Schola Cantorum. I hadn’t been playing piano regularly since I quit, aside from playing for the jazz band in college; in my mind to understand jazz was to understand America. But jazz was an entirely different kind of effort, requiring spark of the mind rather than its austerity. Without strict notations and directions I found myself stuttering on the keyboard. On top of that, we had rehearsals, not lessons. My conductor would occasionally meet with me individually, but his counsel expanded on what to feel, not on how to play. It felt like learning a whole new instrument. Then, as I declared my major, it got harder to squeeze in time for gigs and rehearsals. I quit at the end of my sophomore year. My identity as a piano player had been fading slowly; Scherzo and Chopin, Rubinstein and Steinway all becoming names of foreign territory from which I was wilfully navigating away.

Perhaps that was why Raymond’s declaration moved me, delighted me. You’re a pianist! I had moved to a new city, to a new country, and in the anonymity granted to a newcomer I had been reverted to my old identity, the one I had renounced with startling haste. I signed up for lessons first thing.

Paris then was a hard city to love. It was one of the places I had dreamed of seeing since childhood. But in reality, as the excitement of the first few days wore off, I felt I had come unprepared and was unwelcome. I had moved to the States when I was even younger, but adapting to a small college town where the Midwestern hospitality abounded had little in common with finding my footing in a big, old European capital. In Paris I always felt hungry and ugly. The Maillards ate dinner around nine, which was absurdly late for me. Lunch was not included in the room and board, and everything seemed expensive. I hadn’t learned how to spend money; I hadn’t known it was a skill to be learned. Every penny I spent in Paris seemed to go straight to a pile of insurmountable debt I was accumulating, owed not just to my parents who were my direct sponsors, but also to the city itself, the city I had not been invited to live in, the city that prospered on hosting the foolish illusions of outsiders.

Those days all I saw in Paris were pastries. I had never before seen such glamorous things. There were so many of them, everywhere, anytime. Mont Blancs, Madeleines, Macarons and Mille-feuilles, all mouthwatering names, dressed in a silky layer of powdered sugar, smelling of browned butter, hinting at the immediate blood rush they would cause once on your tongue. Everywhere, anytime. So many that at a point it started to seem like I saw nothing else, not the people, not the buildings, but those pastries with their own names like ladies of the court, caged in decadent cake shops, waiting to be rescued by well-dressed, fit-framed Parisians. And when I woke from the sugary reveries my own reflections against the spotless patisserie windows looked so despondent that I often laughed.  

The Schola became my refuge. The art institute was founded in 1895 as an antithesis to Paris Conservatoire and its emphasis on Opera. It taught dance and performance arts, but mostly classical music. Erik Satie and Cole Porter had been its students, Isaac Albéniz and Albert Roussel among its teachers. On my first day it took me a while to find the school hidden in a quiet corner in the Latin Quarter. It looked more like a convent than a school: the white stoned building with small square windows, surrounded by a humble garden.

Madame Grée was my instructor. She was middle-aged, slouchy, hair silver and sparse against her pink scalp; nothing like any of my former piano teachers. She spoke with a lisp because of a cleft-palette, which made her speak more slowly, precisely. As a result she was the first person in Paris whose French I could understand perfectly.

She had been born and raised in Paris, she said; studied, played, and taught piano and violin at the Conservatoire all her life. During our first meeting she asked me which piece I had worked on last. Scherzo No. 2, I said. We decided to resume work on the piece rather than picking up another. Then, instead of having me play, she played the whole piece for me. I realised this was the first time I had listened to the Scherzo in its entirety played live. Miss Jeong had only played bits; she had never been in the habit of performing in front of her pupils. This is how it sounds, I thought. This is how the notes vibrate against the air, the real air, simultaneous to my own breaths. This is how the fingers move against a real piano, not an anonymous Steinway on a fanciful world-class stage. Madame Grée played plainly, not perfectly nor excitingly, but totally. In watching her play I watched the Scherzo become a reality; not a dream, not a fever, not a karmic promise.

I spent most of my free time practicing on the little brown piano in my room. As long as I kept my hours decent no one minded. Raymond held private lessons in the house, often practiced by himself in the salon. Sunday mornings I would wake up to the smoky, wise melodies of his cello. The other host student in the house, Liz, played violin.

‘We must have our own concert some day!’ Raymond said over one particularly belated, and thus appreciated, dinner. Joelle nodded. ‘Yes, good idea! Just with us and friends. Perhaps you can talk to your instructrice about it.’

Madame Grée consented, said she usually held a little recital with her pupils at the end of the semester anyway. The date was set in May for the end of my semester in Paris.

*

Going back to the Scherzo was more than just playing. For the first time I felt that memory was physical, not just cerebral. My fingers remembered. There was an instant gratitude to their loyalty, the nerves and the muscles for not having forgotten, for resisting regression, despite my leaving, my betrayal. Then there was time travel. The Scherzo was my madeleine; with each note I was transported back to the times I had last played it. First the musky, soapy scent that descended upon me whenever Miss Jeong bent over me. Then the always damp, wallpaper-peeling air of the practice room, whose window let in the bright noises of the world. The cold newness of the Steinway keys when I first dared to play it, the hot joy that came over me after I had claimed it. Then the years I spent away from the piece, from piano, from the dreams of virtuoso, the long, unmetered years; and there it was, still the secret, still the virtue, same, different, then same again.

The challenge still stood tall; the difficulty of the piece hadn’t lessened, while the fluency of my fingers had. But I was no longer chilled under the indomitable shadow of 10,000 Scherzos because excellence was not what I was after. Neither was glory. Piano was comfort. Scherzo my refuge. In the rest of Paris I was a stranger whose combination of foreignness and youth was so obvious in my appearance, so integral to my identity, I felt constantly segregated. La petite Asiatique, service staff often called me, speaking to their peers. I buy you everything here, a man old enough to be my grandfather told me as he followed me around in a clothing store, If you come home with me. He was the first of several of his kind during my time in Paris. If my Asian features invited patronising, colonial attention, then my American manners earned me derision, an instant equation to levity, theatrical insincerity, to pitiful rootlessness. Only in front of the piano did I feel truly accepted, unquestioned; wordless and whole.

‘Did you know,’ Raymond asked over dinner. ‘That the original structure of our building was erected in 1831, the year Chopin moved to Paris? Then it was demolished and rebuilt by the housing project under Napoleon and Haussmann.’

Raymond loved telling stories based on history and facts. He knew so many, and when he spoke he sparkled with erudition. The cornerstone in the courtyard proved him right. Year 1831, two decades before Napoleon III’s modern reformations took place, Paris was suffering from overpopulation, the common cold turning into an epidemic, sweeping through the city’s medieval structure. Chopin arrived in Paris a foreigner, a Polish immigrant. I found this immensely comforting: both that Chopin was an outsider from an ‘Eastern’ country subject to prejudices of poverty and unsophistication, and that this city had not always been so beautiful, had not even been hygienic, but was once provincial, aspiring rather than established.

Walking down Rue de Rome, passing by the Conservatoire and a row of small music stores that had stood even before Chopin’s time, I traced the steps of the young Pole. Leaving Warsaw as a pianist of exceptional talent, Chopin first settled in Vienna where he found scarcely any recognition or money. Dejected, he took off once again, further from home, to Paris, by then slowly becoming the artistic centre of Europe thanks to its cheap cost of living in the turbulent aftermath of the Revolution and the Bourbon Restoration, and its proximity to Britain and the continent. The Romantic Era as we now know it thus ensued, and everyone was here: Liszt, Berlioz, Bellini, Schumann, Paganini, Mendelssohn. Writers, painters, musicians; artists, dilettantes, immigrants and emigrants. In Paris, Chopin had his first success; exploded into continuous and well-deserved fame. The first apartment he purchased under his name in Chausée d’Antin was just down the street from Rue de Rome. Passing his old house, surrounded now by some of the biggest shopping districts in the city, passing the Opéra Garnier, built after his death, I imagined him taking the same stroll as me, relishing a different Paris, a city rather crude and unruly, but throbbing with great metropolitan promise; feeling immeasurable excitement at its potential, for being its potential, along with his fashionable companions like George Sand and Eugène Delacroix. Here he found a home.

And here he died. His fragile health deteriorated after extensive tours, and nearing his end he suffered from poor finances. He died in an apartment in Chaillot in 1849, never having returned to his homeland since leaving. His funeral was held in the Madeleine, a public affair, the first time Mozart’s Requiem was played for a funeral since Napoleon I’s. His body was buried in Père Lachaise, save for his heart, which was transported back to Poland by his sister as per, legend has it, his wish.

I visited his grave in March just after the long and grey winter had drawn to an end and one day the city awakened to vernal colours and light. Paris was not always beautiful but when it was it was always sudden. Overnight the landscapers had planted flowers all over the city. The air was still cold. The cemetery was massive. Within it there were wide avenues shaded by tall trees, already green. Elaborate tombstones of imposing scale, some as big as houses with their own gardens, marked the burial sites of famed people sent off in a particular way, departed all the same. From the entrance I picked up a map that showed the locations of famous graves. I found Chopin’s easily. To my relief it wasn’t big or gaudy. Auguste Clésinger, the sculptor who married George Sand’s daughter, had dedicated a discreet marble statue of Euterpe, muse of music, weeping over a lyre. The simple white tombstone was surrounded by lively bouquets. Some tourists took pictures. I had nothing but my heart to offer, that and my music; just like Chopin when he first arrived in this strange, cacophonous city. What I had I gave in full. When I came home I practiced again.

As May approached Paris became easier to love. Beauty was everywhere, and I was glad especially since my mom decided to come visit me. I wanted her to see the best of Paris.

‘Do you listen to recordings of other pianists?’ Raymond asked over dinner, a few days before mom’s arrival. ‘Do you find it helpful or disruptive?’

I nodded ambiguously, the inimitable Rubinstein stirring something uncomfortable in my stomach. ‘Both.’

‘I find it helpful, rather. With the right performer, of course.’

He got up abruptly, in his usual sparkling, on-his-feet manner, disappeared into the corridor for a minute. We laughed. When he returned, he handed me a CD.

‘This is my favourite interpretation of Chopin’s Scherzos.’

The cover showed a dark-haired woman staring into space, furrowing her brows.

‘Martha Argerich. She is very good.’ Tapping the plastic cover he repeated: ‘Very good. Very moving.’

Under the oblique light it was hard to tell if she was overjoyed or distraught. I took it to my room but didn’t listen to it.

Exams were over and mom arrived. Her flight landed in the evening and she found the long summer sun most impressive; indeed it was bright past nine now.

The Maillards prepared a dinner for us, a four-course affair that started on time for once, and leaned unreservedly into a long, gentle night. The following afternoon we would have the recital as scheduled, at a small church near Parc Monceau. Four other pupils of Madame Grée would perform, as well as Raymond and Liz. I was second to last.

‘Is this...’ Mom said, picking up the CD Raymond had given me. She had been cleaning my room, helping me pack. ‘Martha Argerich?’

‘Yes. You know her?’

‘Do I know her? You grew up on her.’

She opened the case and took out the disc. ‘Yep, it’s her. Hers was the only Chopin I had at home. A copy, I think, but regardless. You listened to it a lot, too.’

The amateur rendition. The lesser virtuoso.

‘You must have listened to it,’ she said, ‘at least 10,000 times.’

The smudged notes. The familiar anxiety. My accomplice, secret teacher, Martha Argerich: one of the most supreme Chopin interpreters of all time, male or female.

I listened to her recording, no longer anonymous, the night before the recital.

That morning it rained despite the sun. Mom and I were the first ones to get to the church. On the podium stood a matte brown Pleyel grand piano. We waited. The church filled about half-way. Raymond opened the recital with a Bach suite. Madame Grée’s pupils were of varying ages and levels; one blond woman with a long last name played Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu brilliantly. Then it was my turn. I walked up to the piano and briefly looked at the crowd: my mom’s small, bright face, and the rest of familiar ones that made a home for me in this foreign city. Then one by one they disappeared. Against the lustreless, woody front of the piano my obtuse shadow looked neither beautiful nor ugly. I was not hungry. I felt open. As I put my fingers on the keys I felt the silent pulsing of eighty-eight notes: my bravo, my brava, my bravi.