Laura Furman - The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

Great pianists manifest the musical impulse early, usually around age four; for Anna Kuhl the decisive moment came at two, when Frau Holzer, giving a lesson to Anna's older brother, discovered that the little girl had perfect pitch. On further examination the child revealed astonishing powers of memory and muscular control, as well as profound sensitivity to aural stimulus-she wept on hearing Chopin for the first time, burst into fierce, agonal sobs as if mourning some inchoate yet powerfully sensed memory. Frau Holzer undertook to form the child's talent; by age four Anna had composed her first song, “Good Morning,” and by age six had mastered the Versuch, The Well-Tempered Clavier and most of Chopin's Études. That year she performed at an exhibition of the city's young pianists, playing with such artistry that Grunfeld, the notoriously saccharine court pianist, was seen shaking his head and mumbling to himself as he left the hall.

“A prodigy,” Frau Holzer wrote in her recommendation to Herr Puchel. “Memorizes instantly; staggering technique and maturity of expression; receptive to hard work, instruction, challenge.” Regarding what Frau Holzer chose to call the child's “unique anatomy,” Puchel was matter-of-fact to the point of brusqueness, devising technical drills suited to Anna's conformation but otherwise focusing, for the present, on the traditional repertoire. Herr Puchel-stout, bushy-bearded, with a huge strawberry of a nose and endearingly tiny feet-had concluded after forty years of teaching that his students would never be truly happy unless coaxed and cudgeled to that peak of performance in which nervous breakdown is a constant risk. Students, by definition, could not reach Parnassus alone; they were too weak of will, too dreamy and easily distracted; they had to be cultivated into that taut, tension-filled state without which pure and lasting art is impossible. Thus it was that visitors to Herr Puchel's studio could hear “Falsch!” regularly screamed from the teaching room. “Falsch!” der Meister would shriek at the first missed note, “Start over!,” his screams punctuated in summer by the swack of the flyswatter with which he defended his territory against Vienna's plague of flies. In moments of extreme aesthetic crisis he would push aside his student and sit at the piano, hike up his legs and pound the keyboard with his dainty feet, legs churning like a beetle stuck on its back. “You sound like this!” he would howl at the offender, though his gruff tenderness could be equally effective. “Don’t be afraid to stick your neck out,” he is said to have told one student after a risky, rubato-laced polonaise. “You might find that it gets stroked instead of chopped off.”

A dangerous man, yet prodigious in his results, and apparently Anna responded to this sort of treatment. By all accounts she was a preternatu-rally serious little girl, self-assured, disposed to silence but precise in speech, with an aura of unapproachability that discouraged all but the very determined or very frivolous. A photographic portrait made at the time shows a girl as slender and graceful as a tulip stem, with long, ringlet-ted masses of black hair, deep-set dark eyes, high Slavic cheekbones and skin as pale as January snow. At this age she seems unconscious of her unique right hand, or perhaps trusting is a better word; she has allowed herself to be posed with her fingers draped to full effect across the back of a Roentgen chair.

“A perfect breeze of a girl,” is how the Salonblatt , Vienna's snob-society newspaper, described the young Anna. “A perfect breeze who turns into an exquisite storm when seated before the eighty-eight black and white keys.” Puchel believed that the loftiest musical heights could be reached only through the ordeal of performance; he wanted Anna to start playing in public immediately, and arranged through court connections her society debut at a soirée of the Princess Montenuovo. Salonblatt rhapsodized over the playing of this “mystical” child whose arpeggios “flashed and shimmered like champagne,” while the Baroness Flotow left an account in her diary of a charmingly poised little girl who devastated the company with Chopin's Nocturnes , ate cakes and drank Turkish coffee with the ladies, and complained about the quality of the piano.

She continued awing the impressionable aristocracy for several years, until Puchel judged that she was seasoned enough for her concert debut. In October 1895, the Berlin Philharmonic was scheduled to perform in Vienna; when Julius Epstein, the featured pianist, fell ill, Puchel arranged for Anna to take his place, and after the monumental program of Beethoven's C major Concerto, a set of Rameau variations, the Weber-Liszt Pollacca , and a Chopin group consisting of the “Berceuse,” the E-flat “Nocturne,” and the E-minor Waltz, the girl prodigy left Vienna gasping for air. Brahms toasted her in absentia that night, at a banquet intended to honor the suddenly forgotten Epstein; Mahler enthused over her sonorities and golden tone, while both traditional and Secessionist critics marveled at her luminously refined technique, her uncalculated emotion and spontaneity. Agents and concert managers came seething; after interviewing numerous candidates, Leo and Hermine settled on the well-known agent Sigi Korn-blau, who appears to have been the kind of dry, hustling administrator that every genius needs, although Anna reportedly told her cousins that visits with Herr Kornblau were “not much fun,” and “rather like going to the dentist.” Within weeks the young virtuoso and her entourage-her mother, her French governess, a servant girl named Bertha, and Herr Puchel, who carried along a dummy keyboard for practice on the train- had embarked on her first European tour, and for the next three years she alternated between prolonged seasons of close-packed concert dates, and equally demanding, if more solitary, periods of study and practice.

Many have speculated as to the brutalizing effect of such a life on someone who was, after all, a mere child. Regulating Anna's program would seem to have been within the power of her parents, but it appears that Leo and Hermine were no less susceptible than their fellow bourgeois to validation by the aristocracy. Through Anna they might cross, for brief moments at least, the glacis separating them from the remote nobility. Their daughter's labors brought them acceptance, and whatever the cost to Anna in personal terms, the strain seemed not to diminish-perhaps even enhanced?-the remarkable message of her playing. Like all virtuosos, she had exemplary technique: critics wrote of her fluent, almost chaste clarity, the pinpoint accuracy of her wide skips and galloping chords, the instinctive integrity of her rubato and her broad dynamic range, from shadowlike pianissimo to artillery-grade forte. But more than that there was the singularity of her sound, the “golden sound” that the critics never tired of describing, along with a tenderness of expression that ravished her listeners. This was not yet another robotic prodigy pumping out notes like a power sewing machine; there was, rather, a quality of innocence in her playing, an effusion of trust and vulnerability all the more remarkable for being conveyed through supreme artistry.

“The child,” wrote Othmar Wieck, a critic not known for charity, “is a veritable angel come down to earth.” And in Vienna, a city that more than cherished art, that craved it as an escape from the gloom and pessimism that had settled over the empire in the century's final years, it was perhaps only natural that people would project their fears and longings onto the young virtuoso. Haut bourgeois concertgoers openly wept at her performances, while for others she became an object of obsession, her name turning up with arcane frequency in suicide notes or the vertiginous ramblings of the mentally disturbed. But even those of sturdier, less enervated natures would lapse into deep melancholy after one of her concerts, as if they’d sensed within their grasp some piece of information crucial to existence, only to feel it slip away as the last note was played.