Chapter Twelve
posted in Novel |
Another Chapter is ready for posting — Chapter Twelve of Lost and Found.
I don’t have any personal goodies to pass along that I can think of right now other than how much different this autumn seems to me from previous falls. I haven’t been in Ohio that long, so I don’t have a lot to compare, but the colors this year seemed so much more brilliant than they were in past years.
With this chapter, we’re getting into my early piano time. I hope you enjoy it. And, do tell your friends about this. Also, don’t forget to ask people you refer to use the “New Chapter Notice” over there on the right –>
Using it will make it easier for me to notify you when I post a new chapter. The FaceBook notification doesn’t seem to work properly. Thanks for reading.
Be well — be in peace,
Ron Rink
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This time in my life was getting to be interesting because of the piano studies. I began taking piano lessons when I was six, although when I was even younger than that, I was able to pick out the notes of music I would hear on the radio by plinking them out with my small fingers. At first, my mother was trying to teach me, but she soon became frustrated because, unknown to either of us, I had an unusual skill with the piano, a skill that went quickly beyond her ability to teach effectively. She was primarily an organist and knew very little about the techniques needed for piano.
She hired a new teacher, Mrs. Wolpert, a very strict teacher who recently came to the United States from Germany. Mrs. Wolpert spoke with a strong German accent which I found hard to understand most of the time. She was also the teacher of my next-door neighbor, Charlie Saunders, who was just a year older than me. She came to teach both Charlie and me on Wednesday each week.
She was an imposing woman, tall in stature and built in a rather masculine way, with broad shoulders, strong wrists and large, but graceful hands. She was probably in her early thirties and had one of the sternest faces I had ever seen, which was contrasted by her amazing blue eyes that seemed to pierce right through you when she looked at you. Everything about her mannerisms was brusque and officious.
The realization that I, perhaps, had a special talent came during a lesson just a short time after Mrs. Wolpert became my teacher. I was in either the third or fourth grade John Thompson lesson book at the time. She had assigned me three of the lessons to practice before she came the following week. Since my mother insisted that I practice for two hours every day, I had easily finished those lessons in the first couple of days, and was going on to the next few lessons in the book and finishing those as well.
When Mrs. Wolpert arrived at our house, she would give a very loud knock at the front door. We did have a doorbell but she would never ring it for some reason. She would just bang, bang, bang on the door. When I would open the door, she would be standing on the front porch perfectly straight and tall.
She would look down across her nose at me and say in an extremely brisk way, “Roland, I am here, let’s get to work. We don’t want to waste my time!” Of course, it would actually come out as, “Roland, I am here, let’s get to vork. Ve don’t vant to vaste my time!” Later on, as the weather turned cooler, she would add in, … “und take my coat und scarf” as part of her opening phrase. This entry routine of hers never varied, it was always exactly the same.
Relationship building with her students was never one of Mrs. Wolpert’s strong suits.
On piano lesson days, the straight chair would already be at the piano for her to sit on. She would tromp over to her chair as I sat on the piano stool and instruct me to play some of the Hanon or Czerny exercises she had assigned. These were some of the most brutal finger and piano technique exercises in existence, and even though they were quite boring, I did relish the challenge of conquering them. I would play them with vigor as she would count the beat at the tempo she wanted, which was generally at a lively clip. “Vun—Two—T’ree – Four,” she would count as I played, her foot tapping on the floor while her hand would rap the rhythm on the piano itself. “Curved fingers – raise your fingers higher — wrists up” she would scold periodically as I sweated my way through these exercises, my hands getting more and more tired as we continued. When she felt she had “tortured” me sufficiently, we would go on to the lessons she had assigned.
Since I had a tendency to be a bit of a smart-alec anyway, I thought I’d be cute and play the lessons she assigned to me without looking at the book, since I had not only learned them, but had memorized them as well. After I had finished playing the lessons she had assigned, I went right ahead and played the next three “by heart.” She never said a word — no “whoopee” or “hooray” — not even a “vunderbar”.
Without a smile or any expression on her face, she opened the Thompson Book and turned to the next lesson after the last one I played for her and said in a very tight voice while looking at me with those piercing blue eyes, “Now. You vill play this one, yah?”
I did — and apparently quite well, because she then reached into a cloth bag she always carried with her and pulled out another book. She flipped through the pages and selected a short piece written by Mozart. I don’t recall exactly which piece it was, but it was considerably more difficult than those in the Thompson books. She put the music on the music stand and with those amazing blue eyes boring right through me, said, “Now. You vill play this one also, yah?”
I was able to read it and did get through it, although with a bit of a struggle. Mrs. Wolpert took the John Thompson book off the music stand, tossed it onto the floor beside the piano, and pronounced in a voice totally devoid of any emotion, “With this we are done—no more of this for you!”
She called my mother into the room and asked, “Mrs. Van Buren, you can buy this book? It is one dollar and fifty cents.”
My mother nodded affirmatively. The book was 52 Studies For The Piano. I remember feeling excited about this because I was getting bored with how easy the Thompson books were for me. She assigned three pieces from it for my next weekly lesson and also started me working with more scales and more difficult Czerny and Hanon exercises.
Even though my parents had imposed the extra hour of practice as a punishment, I loved every minute of it and often did more than the two hours. My progress moved along quite rapidly from this point on.
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