ANNA GOLDSWORTHY is an award-winning pianist who travels and performs internationally as a soloist and chamber musician. Her debut solo CD, "Come With Us," was recently released by ABC Classics. Her writing has appeared in The Monthly and Best Australian Essays, among others.
Piano Lessons: A Memoir
Audio CD
(Unabridged)
- ISBN-13: 9781489020246
- Publisher: Bolinda Audio
- Publication date: 12/29/2015
- Edition description: Unabridged
- Product dimensions: 6.60(w) x 5.40(h) x 0.70(d)
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Anna Goldsworthy was nine years old when she met Eleanora Sivan, the charismatic Russian émigré and world-class pianist who became her piano teacher. Piano Lessons is the story of what Mrs. Sivan brought to Anna's lessons: a love of music, a respect for life, a generous spirit, and the courage to embrace a musical life.
Beautifully written and strikingly honest, Piano Lessons takes the reader on a journey into the heart and meaning of music. As Anna discovers passion and ambition, confronts doubt and disappointment, and learns about much more than tone and technique, Mrs. Sivan's wisdom guides her:
"We are not teaching piano playing. We are teaching philosophy and life and music digested." "What is intuition? Knowledge that has come inside."
"My darling, we must sit and work."
Piano Lessons reminds us all how an extraordinary teacher can change a life completely. A work that will appeal to all music lovers and anyone who has ever taken a music lesson, Piano Lessons will also touch the heart of anyone who has ever loved a teacher.
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“Deeply felt and elegantly written-like a melody by Mozart: joyous and heartbreaking in a single exquisite line. Anna Goldsworthy has written a loving, generous homage, not only to music, but far more to the magical, inexhaustible arts of teaching and learning. She allows us into the intimate, demanding relationship between teacher and student, and shows how skill and insight pass invisibly from one to the other, becoming understanding, freedom, and finally wisdom. Goldsworthy conveys the process of development, from beginner to artist, with a light touch, beautifully capturing her schoolgirl's doubts and dreams. But at the heart of the story is always Mrs. Sivan, her teacher, speaking broken English, giving herself uncompromisingly to the belief that music is a way of living, of breathing, of acceptance. In her passionate, poignant portrait of Mrs. Sivan, Goldsworthy demonstrates how fully she has learned those lessons. It is a book of great warmth, sensitivity, and love. ” Glenn Kurtz, author of Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music
“Anna Goldsworthy has let us in on her arduous journey to become a concert pianist with flair and refreshing honesty. The other star in this book, her piano teacher Eleanora Sivan, is a woman who despite her fractured English (or perhaps because of it?) is somehow able to express the deepest truths about music and musicians. I found Piano Lessons hard to put down.” Arnold Steinhardt, author of Violin Dreams and first violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet
“A remarkably clear-sighted account of how music changes everything and nothing. Mrs. Sivan's piano lessons are invaluable and unsentimental lessons in life.” Lavinia Greenlaw, author of The Importance of Music to Girls
“The wise words connect with anyone who can remember the pangs of adolescence, and the joy of being taken under the wing of a generous mentor.” John Terauds, The Toronto Star
A privileged Australian classical pianist chronicles her love of music and the delicate student-teacher dynamic that honed her craft.
Growing up in Adelaide in the 1970s, Goldsworthy began studying piano at age six, taking lessons from a jazz musician. Three years later, her grandfather enlisted the assistance of Eleonora Sivan, a distinguished Russian instructor formerly with the Leningrad Conservatorium of Music. Initially perceiving piano pieces as "obstacle courses for fingers, in which the object was getting through to the end, largely unscathed," the author found Sivan's demand that she practice two hours per day a daunting task. Goldsworthy's first dream was to be a singer, but Sivan proved to be a pedagogue whose intensive musical knowledge and sage (often overbearing) instruction, imparted via broken English, successfully nurtured and matured her. Being receptive to the intellectual depth of Bach as well as to Mozart's simplicity, the author's burgeoning musical talent developed swiftly from intensive lessons and musical theory to adjudicatory examinations at conservatoriums, while her parents, both prominent doctors, beamed with pride. As an adolescent, the author admits to becoming flummoxed by the life choices presented to her—e.g., would peers consider her a "square" for being smart and playing piano?—and eschewed boys in favor of music ("Boyfriends. Who needed such trifles? I had the piano as my lover"). Awards, recitals and an air of self-congratulatory bliss dominate the third section of the memoir as she, at age 18, glows in the company of awestruck professional musicians. Consistently guided by Sivan's tutelage, the author ascended further still, though car accidents and a melodic misfire or two threatened to derail her fame. Goldsworthy often takes time out of her own story to mention her father and his accomplishments as a published author and doctor. However, the author's overabundance of self-love and melodrama often stifles the narrative, as when, after a performance blunder at the Sydney Opera House she "climbed the steps to the top of the opera house, where I assumed a tragic, windswept pose."
More silver spoon than strife in this indulgent memoir.