Since I wrote this, I’ve done more thinking about the strange case of
Hamelin. The thinking was completely speculative and perhaps a little
intuitive and goes like this:
I imagine Hamelin as a youngster, sometime before adolescence has set
in. He’s been recognized as gifted at the piano. He’s got a teacher
who is just a bit of a secret sociopath, and possibly the strongest
personality he’s ever experienced. She’s the kind that, most likely out
of some kind of bitter frustration in her life, or worse (and, yes, it’s
going to be a woman in this story), does some significant shaping of the
malleable psyches that come into her orbit. She’s the kind of music
teacher that sees music as a primarily a decorative art, as an element
of social training, really. She belongs to the old profession of
finishing school entrepreneurs, spiritually. In this regard, her
objective is to instill the values of precise execution and a certain
niceness in her charges, because she believes strongly that’s what is
most admirable in playing the piano. “No, Marc, you musn’t hit the keys
so hard, it’s not a nice sound.” A missed note causes a frown, a sigh,
a sharp look. Now, little Marc, at an age where he only wants to please
this authority figure, because she is the controlling force managing his
access to learning more about the music he loves more than about
anything else, works ever harder to do the right thing. Because he is
really quite gifted, she realizes she must control him more completely
than most, because it matters more. Very occasionally, he’s allowed to
release his high spirits in some light-weight music, but mostly he’s
urged towards more control of his capabilities.
Somewhere early on there are some little altercations when Marc tries to
assert his spirit musically and Marc loses, of course, and what is left
of his spirit goes mostly underground, to come out later in an unusual
way. Eventually he is totally brainwashed by this teacher into adopting
her values, with one important exception. The one thing she really
failed to instill in him was that he should stick only to the mainstream
composers. (Or, she may have, in fact, recognized that he could make
the most impact with relatively obscure, difficult to play, music. And
that was important.)
Over time, his spirit discovered the only channel it could find, which
is a nearly demonic focus on conquering the technical aspects of the
most demanding scores. But, somehow they never are really satisfying to
him, and there are always more to learn and perform.
And, not surprisingly, some listeners hear a man playing with the
expressive level of a talented and sensitive pre-adolescent who is
forever worried about displeasing his teacher by a show of temperament,
by doing something that might touch the heart and soul of a teacher who
had locked hers up very tightly indeed, long before he came into her
life.
A maudlin story maybe, but somehow plausible.
wr
