People don’t tend to write novels about music and musicians very often – why do you think this is and what motivated you to write this one?
I think it is very hard to write the consciousness of someone whose life is dominated by the piano literature and its adventures without being a pianist. For the pianist music is an omnipresent landscape. Works like Liszt’s B minor Sonata or Beethoven’s Hammerklavier loom like hazardous, beautiful mountains. These structures are a kind of habitat in which the performer’s highly trained, channelled energies become emotion. To write the life of a pianist without somehow recreating this topography, or at any rate, finding some verbal analogue for it, is to miss the point. Certainly, I was drawn by the challenge of all that. But, of course, a novel takes on a purpose of its own and the conditions of a pianist’s life became a foreground for more universal themes: love, loss, success, sexual regeneration, mortality. What fundamentally intrigued me was the way individuals regulate their emotional friability in order to cope, and how, in the life of an artist, striking a balance between creative emotionality and personal happiness is so difficult.
Were you brought up in a musical household?
Yes. We had Dad crouched around the semi-acoustic guitar, twanging out Sweet Georgia Brown as an anti-dote to office life. My mother and sister were decent pianists. My hatchet-jawed, bull-torsoed brother played the harp, of all things. I was a sullen recorder player and grudging pianist to the age of eleven, when lightning struck. I saw ‘A Song to Remember’ (a film about Chopin, starring Cornel Wilde) and was transfixed by the sound and spectacle of pianistic virtuosity. I started to practice, collect records, and buy sheet music. Soon my younger brother joined the fray, and at our house in those days you might have heard renditions of my opus 1 Study followed by Roddy’s amphetamised account of the Pathetique Sonata, followed by a salivally generated hiss of applause as we swung bows across the drawing room towards imagined ovations from Brandy of Napoleon-type females with plunging necklines.
You write brilliantly about the performing of music – to what extent is it based on your own experiences? Have you performed under pressure?
I am very much an amateur pianist without the technical security and finish of a Conservatoire graduate, but I have performed to small audiences over the years and find it pretty scary. Last year I entered the Yamaha/The Pianist Amateur Piano Competition and made it to the semis – along with my brother. I was determined not to be too nervous on the day. But no amount of Zen-like posing could stop my hands freezing over and covering with sweat ten minutes before going on stage. The only thing you can hold on to in that state is your love for the music; and the struggle to project that love through the heat of nerves and the searing self-consciousness of performance is emotionally overwhelming. Not to have to do this for a living is a huge relief: and so, yes, I know what pianists put themselves through and I’m immensely grateful, not just for their artistry and talent, but for their courage, too.
Philip’s existential crisis is overwhelming. Do you think artistic performers find mid-life more of a problem than us normal folk?
I don’t think artists have a monopoly on mid-life crises. The phrase ‘nervous breakdown’ has rather gone out of fashion, but when I was a teenager in a commuterish part of Surrey, everybody was having one. In those days a nervous breakdown seemed like a socially acceptable release from keeping up appearances. It was a kind of emotional correction, and the phrase enabled people to contain the idea without needing or wanting to know more. Philip’s crisis, which is not really a break-down, is generated by the need to feel more again after the cauterizing effects of grief. He needs in some odd way to come in contact with pain. So his existential funk is really the rhetoric of an agonising regeneration. I admit that it’s not a particularly ingratiating spectacle. The reader might appreciate, nonetheless, that to play the great composers at their own level takes a fantastic amount of emotional vitality, and one of the themes of the book is the cost of living life at that level.
Is Philip modelled on anyone particular? Is there any of you in him? And to what degree do you think that writers tend to write autobiographically?
There was a model for Philip, but Philip became his own man. He was a wonderful pianist and an impressive intellectual, but pretty inaccessible at the social level, a bit shy and dry, and therefore rather frustrating. But I loved his playing and sensed an affinity, and in a way the book is an exploration of that affinity through a fictional version of the type. What I have in common with Philip is really only my solicitude for the human being trapped inside the artist, if I can put it like that. Music communicates the most sensitive, noble part of a performer. If playing becomes impossible for some reason, a certain kind of performer can be marooned. In ‘The Concert Pianist’ Philip shuts down his career almost as a way of forcing himself into the open and into a different connection with life.
What are the major literary influences in your writing?
I think there are very few really profound literary influences in any one writer’s work, and these come early on. In my case the drivers were Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov, both of whom I read inside out. Recently I have found such books as The Corrections and Austerlitz and Disgrace, for example, utterly formidable and wonderful, but I don’t feel ‘influenced’ by them. The DNA is already set.
