Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) by Oliver Sacks

Author:Oliver Sacks
Format: epub
Published: 2001-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

As a child, it seemed to me that the house was full of music. There were two Bechsteins, an upright and a grand, and sometimes both were being played simultaneously, to say nothing of David’s flute and Marcus’s clarinet. At such times the house was a veritable aquarium of sound, and I would become aware of one instrument and then another as I walked about (the different instruments did not seem to clash, curiously; my ear, my attention, would always select one or another).

My mother was not as musical as the rest of us, but very fond, nonetheless, of Brahms and Schubert lieder; she would sing these, sometimes, with my father accompanying her at the piano. She was especially fond of Schubert’s ‘Nachtgesang,’ his Song of the Night, which she would sing in a soft, slightly off-key voice. This is one of my earliest memories (I never knew what the words meant, but the song affected me strangely). I cannot hear this now without recalling with almost unbearable vividness our drawing room as it was before the war, and my mother’s figure and voice as she leaned over the piano and sang.

My father was very musical, and would come back from concerts and play much of the program by ear, transposing fragments into different keys, playing with them in different ways. He had an omnivorous love of music, and enjoyed music halls as much as chamber concerts, Gilbert and Sullivan as much as Monteverdi. He was particularly fond of songs from the Great War, and would sing these in a resounding bass. He had a large library of miniature scores, and always seemed to have one or two of these in his pockets (and indeed he usually went to bed with one of them, or the dictionary of musical themes that I gave him later for one of his birthdays).

Though he had studied with a noted pianist, and was always darting to the keyboard of one or the other of the pianos, my father’s fingers were so broad and stubby that they could never fit quite comfortably on the keys, so he usually contented himself with impressionistic fragments. But he was eager for the rest of us to be at home on the piano, and engaged a brilliant piano teacher, Francesco Ticciati, for us all. Ticciati drilled Marcus and David in Bach and Scarlatti with passionate, demanding intensity (Michael and I, younger, would play Diabelli duets), and at times I would hear him bang the piano with frustration, shouting, ‘No! No! No!’ when they failed to get things right. Then he would sit down sometimes and play himself, and suddenly I knew what mastery meant. He instilled in us an intense feeling for Bach especially, and all the hidden structure of a fugue. When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, ‘smoked salmon and Bach.’ (Now, sixty years later, my answer would be the same.)

I found the house somewhat stark, musicless, when I returned to London in 1943.

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