Duet by Elise Broach

Author:Elise Broach [Broach, Elise and Chen, Ziyue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2022-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Practice

Day after day, this is what we do. Well, the lessons aren’t actually every day—but they’ve gone from three or four times a week to almost daily, in preparation for the competition. And you know what’s funny? When Michael practices the same piece over and over again, I never get bored. It doesn’t feel like he’s repeating something in endless succession. It feels like he’s creating something new each time.

And he is playing the last ballade! The hardest piece of all. It’s so exciting. Playing it on the Pleyel somehow showed him how the piece was meant to sound.

“I didn’t get it until now,” he tells Mr. Starek. “I thought I was playing it wrong. But now, on this piano, the whole piece makes sense to me. I can tell why Chopin wrote it this way.”

Mr. Starek beams at him. “I am so proud of you, Michael. Regardless of how you fare in the competition. You have taken the time and made the effort to truly understand the music. That is something I could never have taught you. Chopin used to tell his students, ‘Go your own way, do as you feel.’ That is how you make the music your own. And you’ve done it. You’ve truly done it.”

I’m proud of Michael, too. But the moments I still like best are the ones at the beginning of the lesson when we’re alone. I’m so excited to see what Michael will do with the music, and then what I will do in response. Our duets. Does he feel the same way? I think so. He looks for me eagerly when he arrives each day, and as soon as Mr. Starek disappears, closing the door, we dive in. Sometimes I sing so loudly I am astonished that Mr. Starek and Emily don’t hear me.

I think they do hear that something is different about Michael’s playing in those first few private minutes behind the closed door. One day, when we’ve been working hard on the “Winter Wind” étude, Mr. Starek says, “I must tell you, Michael, when I hear you warming up, there’s something very unusual about your playing. It’s almost like you have extra fingers on the keys.”

“Yes!” Emily agrees. “The sound is so rich and complicated.”

I swell with pride, because I know what they’re hearing is me.

“We want you to bring that to your performance,” Mr. Starek continues. “The way the music flows through you. A mistake I often see, even with the best pianists, is that they try to impose their own ego on the piece. They want to assert their own style. With you, it’s the opposite. You’re disappearing into the music, finding its emotional center. It gets you closer and closer to the real Chopin.”

“I don’t think it’s me,” Michael says.

I freeze. Surely he isn’t going to spill the beans, after all this time? I hop backward on the branch, hiding in the foliage. But then he explains. “It’s the piano.”

He’s right about the piano. It has changed

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