The Piano Student
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Explosively passionate, this story of forbidden love and unmet potential is ... for anyone who’s ever felt the ineffable power of music."
—Aja Gabel, author of The Ensemble
The Piano Student is a novel about regret, secrecy, and music, involving an affair between one of the 20th century’s most celebrated pianists, Vladimir Horowitz, and his young male student, Nico Kaufmann, in the late 1930s. As Europe hurtles toward political catastrophe and Horowitz ascends to the pinnacle of artistic achievement, the great pianist hides his illicit passion from his wife Wanda, daughter of the renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini. Based on unpublished letters by Horowitz to Kaufmann that author Lea Singer discovered in Switzerland, this is a riveting and sensitive tale of musical perfection, love, and longing denied, with multiple historical layers and insights into artistic creativity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Based on correspondence between virtuoso pianist Vladimir Horowitz and a young Swiss student, Nico Kaufmann, Singer's astute, elegiac English-language debut reconstructs the pair's amorous liaison in the lead-up to WWII. The story begins with a rather contrived framing device: in 1986, suicidal Swiss diplomat Reto Donati walks into a Zurich piano bar and asks to hear Schumann's brief, wistful "Traumerei," a piece he had heard Horowitz play 30 years earlier. Kaufmann, working as the bar's piano player, fulfills the request, then tells Donati of his long-ago affair with Horowitz, who was languishing in a marriage of convenience to the domineering daughter of maestro Arturo Toscanini. Under the guise of a piano tutorship, Horowitz and Kaufmann had clandestine trysts across Europe, Kaufmann becoming an "acrobat" in accommodating the cagy, closeted Horowitz and enacting "diplomatic solutions, peaceable evasions, and sleights of hand that made life easier for everyone." Their secrecy contrasts with what Kaufmann calls the "emotional truth" of Horowitz's art, which Horowitz valued far beyond any personal or political entanglements. After Kaufmann recounts how Horowitz broke off their relationship and correspondence, emotionally immersive scenes give way to less gripping, clipped biographical passages. Still, Singer effectively conveys Horowitz's genius at achieving a "miracle of tone." At its best, this nostalgic tale of repressed desire is as affecting as Schumann's haunting tune.
