Friends and Rivals by Brenda Niall

Author:Brenda Niall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2020-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

The competitiveness of the tennis court was less overtly expressed in Ettie’s musical studies. At first all went well. Her talents were recognised; she was a star in the Harmony class; and the staying power of her ‘lean and spindly fingers’ improved.14 She worked hard but not obsessively; there was so much to tempt her outside into a lively, sociable world of picnics and dances and skating parties. She and Lil felt most at home with the easy-going Americans but they both had other friends and admirers in the international community of students. For the observant Ettie, the intermingling of young men and women, their gossip and love affairs, was an education in itself.

Surprisingly, Ettie did not fall passionately in love during her three years in Leipzig. Instead, she formed a steady friendship with a silent young man from Glasgow, with ‘pleasant blue eyes behind spectacles, and legs so long that they were hard to dispose of’.15 This was John George Robertson, an ambitious, hardworking student of German language and literature, with no money and no immediate prospects. He and Ettie became inseparable in a tranquil relationship that was quite unlike her early infatuations with male and female beauty. Robertson took Ettie to concerts; they saw Wagner’s Ring together; they went skating, walked in the woods, and talked about books and music. There was gossip about them, enough to worry Mary Richardson. The penniless George Robertson had no place in her plan to take Ettie home in triumph as a concert pianist. But, as always, Ettie’s will was too strong for her mother, who generously welcomed George into her family and made it known to friends that she had agreed to an unofficial engagement.

The engagement must have made a difference to Ettie’s preparation for her final exams. If she married—and George had still to graduate and find an academic post—she would not be expected to persist in a career. Her teachers would be angry and disappointed at the waste of their efforts. But at some level it would have been a release for Ettie who was finding it an ordeal to perform in public at the bi-weekly student concerts. It was not just having to face an audience of critical and competitive fellow students. ‘No, what did for me, and utterly, were the eyes, the thousands of eyes, all fixed like gimlets on my miserable self…’16 She knew then that she did not have the temperament of a concert pianist; she could not bear to be stared at.

It seems likely that Ettie felt a gradual dwindling of confidence, due not so much to the ‘psychological kink’ that she described but to her realisation that she was not after all a first-class talent. The student concerts would have made her aware of limitations that her final testing by a public concert performance in March 1892 would confirm. Panicking under the ‘hostile gaze’ may have been the result of self-knowledge, not the ruin of a natural gift. After her mother’s high hopes, and her own, it would have been a miserable comedown to teach music in a girls’ school.

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