The pianos were there, in the middle class dining-rooms, and it was important and desirable that children played the piano. Music, both "classical" (no better name has been created for it) and "academic" (an even worse denomination) was greatly appreciated. Playing the piano was then, to certain extent, a forced choice.

It is curious that, in some languages, the act of performing a musical instrument is designated by a verb that means "to play", whereas in Spanish the verb used for this means "to touch". [1] Maybe this is why as a child I realized that this was a serious business, that it was not a game, and why it took me so many years to understand that an earnest musician is one who can enjoy his instrument.

The piano is a musical instrument that arouses, in some people, that strange, ineffable sensation usually called "musical enjoyment". The reason why this happens mainly with a given instrument and not just any instrument, or with certain kind of music and not just any music, or why some people have an extraordinary talent for playing an instrument while others are not so gifted, will always be an enigma.

All we can know is that there is enjoyment there.

***

Those who choose the piano as their instrument, whether professionally or as amateurs, also need to choose a teacher. A teacher is someone who educates, who passes on a certain knowledge, who knows how to get the most out of his pupil and, last but not least: someone who inflicts suffering. Each person knows where the boundaries of their masochist tendencies stand and up to which point they will follow their teacher.

One may well paraphrase Lacan here: the musician must let go of his teacher, provided he has "made use of him". A condition that was entirely met in one situation I wish to describe.

A pupil was trying to play a prelude by Chopin during his piano lesson. The notes, the tempo, the sonority, the memory, the position of the hands, the pedals, the concentration, the emotion, the care required with the "rubatos", everything seemed to be under control. (Let us mention that "rubato", the effect obtained when a sound steals a fraction of time from another sound, is typical of Chopin’s genius and compositions, which have given us two-hundred years of sublime performances of his music as well as some clearly ridiculous ones. This is why interpreting Romantic music is actually far more difficult than it appears to be.)

Let us go back to the obedient pupil who fears ridicule. After he has executed the prelude, the teacher utters the unforgettable sentence: "make me yearn". The mystery is partly revealed: it is about eliciting a yearning for the sound. There, where sound is expected to appear, there has to be a split second of... silence.

It is then something very different from moving the listener, even though this may occur. It is about arousing desire, not by means of sound, but through its absence; about making the sound appear not when it is expected, but at another time that admits no measure. Why not quote Lacan once again: the a object elicits desire by "presentifying" itself in silence.

Playing the piano.
Is it possible for one to play the piano just for oneself and not for others? Probably not. What kind of a weird experience is it to summon friends and music lovers to listen to music played on an instrument whose technology dates back to the XIX century (an instrument that is already 80 years old in this XXI century, in which not being up-to-date with technology is considered a major sin); music written two centuries ago, stemming from a world, a society, a sensitivity, a spiritual disposition that have supposedly vanished?

How can desire span centuries and be kept alive within an experience that is only seemingly repetitive?

Roland Barthes says something about this in a very beautiful way, in The Obvious and the Obtuse; I just need to ask the reader to replace Schumann’s name by the word "music" in the following paragraph and to imagine it played on the piano.

"Loving Schumann (...) is in a way to assume a philosophy of Nostalgia, or to adopt a Nietzschean word, of Untimeliness, or again, to risk this time the most Schummanian word there is: of Night. Loving Schumann, doing so in a certain fashion against age ... can only be a responsible way of loving: it inevitably leads he who does so and says so to posit himself in his time according to the injunctions of his desire and not according to those of his sociality." [2]

So playing the piano (and not just playing Schumann or Chopin) also entails some nostalgic jouissance and acceptance of the subjective possibility that one may not be current, and that there is a love and a desire that are at ease at the night with its solitude, beyond social demands.

Let us conclude, then, pianissimo (now with double "s"), that music is something one had better not talk about too much, for it is best listened to. [3]