An Émigré Childhood. Opus 42. Southern England 1942.

          There was a time when skies made shadows of

          those great wings that cursed our house a midday dark,               where echoes hid a mute Heil Ludendorff!

          and La Vie Parisienne by Offenbach.

          Always the notes of Chopin’s Waltz impend. 

          Father playing, but never to the end. 

 

The dancer stumbles.

A minute later I lifted the lid to the keyboard and adjusted my piano stool.

            I have since read that seers believe that to dream of playing a piano is a favourable omen and means the discovery of something of great value in a surprising place; so I resolved to realise my dream of the night before.

            I experienced a feeling of equipoise I had not known since I last rode Dinah ... a balanced seat, hands-free, independent of the reins.

            In my opinion it is actually more difficult to run into bar 210 of Valse in A-flat Opus 42 where the waltz ‘stumbles’ than emerge from it – one runs the risk of sounding as if one has simply walked into a wall, rather than suspending the breath for a moment – hence, this artifice of ineptitude is not easy to achieve and, even though Chopin intended to simulate a clumsy dancer’s imbalance before her lost rhythm is regained, the player’s assumed clumsiness must be diligently practiced over and over again.

            So, creating this suspension requires exceptional finesse in timing and shades of dynamics and balance, which, to my way of thinking, is the more difficult task.

            In my father’s case, alas, the task was performed never with consummate success, as though the passage was a nagging regret and he had to return again and again to pick a sore.  (Father would tune his piano himself by feeding a reference note into an oscilloscope an army pal of his had once used for reading radar; he’d then retune the fifths until they were slightly flat. Those dancing waveforms on a monitor screen, as I told the doctors, I always associate with Chopin’s waltzes.)

            For my own part, my effortless arpeggiation on the evening I returned from Boy’s funeral, and my faultless span at bar 255 – which had once made such demands on the extensive stretch of my Father’s left hand – meant I rode the home-straight cooly through the flurry of that passionate coda, and reached the winning post at last, luckily without a fall ... until pent up grief all at once welled up and burst my heart.

Extract from Dispossession       

Part 11 of Sister Morphine (Salt 2008)       

 

 

For particularly recherché (even prophetic) examples of la poésie concrète likewise revealng my father’s ‘deep continent’ brand of polymathy, see The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K. and . . .
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2016/04/circo-perfuso-fato-sanguinis.html
 

The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K are exhibited at the Arts Council Poetry Collection website administered by the Poetry Library at Royal Festival Hall in London’s Southbank Centre . . .

http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/recordbfb6.html?id=9440 

The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K 

(1902-1939)

A Memoir of a Numeromaniacal Futurist