Shoot the Piano Player

It’s not worth talking about the fingering and the metronome marks.  It’s the music, pure and simple—or pure and simple in the ideal, but trashed and convoluted in the playing and surely in my hearing—that matters.  I don’t know when the piano player moved in, but I have never heard him before and I was here only a few months ago.  Perhaps the good weather these days in Paris encourages him to leave his windows open.  Perhaps the good weather encourages him to set fingers to keys.  Perhaps the good weather, which he obviously detests, makes him sit at home and bother the neighbors so they have to close their windows or run screaming down the street.  Impossible to know except this: he should not be allowed to play the piano on a narrow residential street with the windows to his apartment wide open.

His repertory is small, but not bad.  He loves Beethoven’s Für Elise though I doubt Elise has any use for him, not now, anyhow.  The piece opens in three-eight time with a series of arpeggios, dismantled chords played one at a time, but with dispatch.  He manages them one… at… a… time as if each note were an absolutely new discovery, a pure musical revelation which he must hunt for up and down among the eighty-eight possibilities the keyboard offers him.  One in eighty-eight odds are not good, and he loses many more bets than he wins—nearly all of them, I think.  He seems to understand this and usually gives up after, maybe, fifteen bars or so, not to catch his breath, to compose himself, to practice sight-reading, but to segué into something else.

His favorite else for the last few days has been An der schönen, blauen Donau or as the unwashed like me insist on calling it The Blue Danube Waltz.  It’s a jolly piece of music—Strauss, no fool, is said to have written it to raise Austrian spirits after the Prussians had pummeled them in the battle of Königgrätz the year before—but without a pause, a breath, or preferably an intermission, it should not follow Für Elise.  It does, without fail.  The two pieces are as comfortable together as an anchovy pizza and a glass of chocolate milk.

But his programming is not the real problem, the black heart of the matter: if he wants to spread Nutella on his terrine de canard that’s his business and digestion, not mine—and so much for music being the food of love.  But some things he makes my business: he cannot play—or he cannot play what he wants to play.  Striving is wonderful, inspiring even, but when Robert Browning wrote, “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” he was clearly not living across a narrow residential Parisian street from an inept pianist.  Of course, Browning went deaf comparatively young, I think.

Even for prodigies or the unfairly gifted, playing any instrument is hard daily work, but hard daily work growing out from a talent.  I cannot remember which great musician of this era made this observation, but the source does not matter, only the idea.  “If I don’t practice for a day, I know it the next time I play.  If I do not practice for two days, other musicians know it.  If I do not practice for three days, everyone knows it.”  My neighbor—a word I do not like to use for the piano player since it conjures a certain familiarity, even friendship or shared domain—is not really practicing.  If he were, of course, my life might be even worse.  Imagine hearing the first twelve or fifteen bars of Für Elise butchered for an hour or two every day.  We always should remember to thank God for even the smallest blessings or reprieves.  Yet the pianist does no such thing.  He just moves on to the next carcass and begins to carve it up with all the subtlety of an ax-murderer.

It can get worse, honestly it can.  Occasionally a woman bursts—or implodes—into song while he plays.  She seems to believe that any note as written is always better when sung sharp or, if that takes her farther up her five-note register, then flat will do.  To his credit, he appears to make her stop.  That is the extent of the credit side of the ledger.  Debits, however, are plentiful.

He has no sense of aim—at least twenty percent of the notes he hits are wrong, though he often compensates by playing three or four of them when one would do just fine, at least according to the composer.  He has no sense of tempo—the three-eight time of the Beethoven may mean to him that he only has to get three-eighths of the piece right, and any way four-four can be just as pleasing and so can times impossible to annotate, such as a note followed by a pause long enough to take a bite out of a ham sandwich (which falsely encourages me to believe that he has quit for the day).  He has no sense of shame—even if he likes to emmerder les voisins, you’d think he’s giving the pissed off neighbors ammunition to lob at him.  Well, me, anyway.

I have actually tried.  Despite being so shy that people in public can barely hear me, I have started shouting across the street, first in English, then in French.  Ah, I thought, I know why he is not getting the message.  What does he play?  Music by Germans or German speakers.  The most painful, come to think of it, was his attempt to play the rondo “a la turca” from Mozart’s eleventh piano sonata, a fast, busy, and clever piece, the various parts of which should not be bloodily visible on the black and white dissecting table of M. le pianiste-assassin.  On the bright side, if he played French music, Couperin or Rameau, I’d get sick—and the best news is that he has not tried a piano transcription of Ravel’s “Bolero” which starts slowly, just his speed, then acquires velocity and volume, but is simply the same piece over and over and over.  Imagine if he did that, playing the same musique à se branler—what?—a hundred times?  More?  No, it’s Germans—and maybe he’s one of them.

So after my hollering in French and English hasn’t worked, I try my pitiful German, with a lot of growling.  Nothing.  The only thing near the window on the balcony small but heavy enough to fling across the street and through his window to make a suitable impression turned out, one, not to belong to me and, two, to be valuable—apparently more valuable than my hearing and my general aesthetic.

There is a solution.  There is a heavy drainpipe that goes up to the balcony outside his open windows.  It’s not much more than fifteen or twenty metres up, and I think I can manage that, leaving my fear of heights out of the equation.  Getting a gun in Paris is not easy, but everything is possible.  I’m sure if I said the right thing to the right person—I want to shinny up the drainpipe and shoot the piano player—I’d score while everybody laughed and asked if it was Charles Aznavour I had in mind.  Well, Charles survived, though I think the girl did not.  Or maybe I’d have to club him with some cheap and ugly statue he is sure to have sitting on his piano, if not a Liberace candelabrum, or cut the strings on the piano, or simply scare him by showing up in the window.

But it does not matter, not any more.  Orwell believed that in the unhappy future, i.e., now, the thought and the deed would the same.  He was right.  So I can sit on the balcony now, in the unhappy present, with a glass of wine while he plays and make him and his music go away as I think to myself, perhaps mumble out aloud, “Shoot the piano player, yes, shoot the piano player.”  I have done it.  It is done.  He is done.  The rest is silence.

© Joseph Lestrange

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