The Last Concerto. Sara Alexander

      May of 1975 was in full bloom. The grasslands surrounding Ozieri were splattered yellow with blossom. In the crags between the granite along the roadside leading up to Signora Elias, rock roses grappled with gravity, their fuchsia-purple blossoms widening to the sun. Giant wild fennel swayed on the gentle breeze, scenting the air with anise. Tiny orchids appeared in the cracks between the boulders; Alba gazed at their petal faces, minuscule mournful masks. By Signora Elias’s gate, tufts of wild poppies greeted Alba, and each day she visited, another unfurled its bloodsplat petals.

      Shafts of morning light cut through Signora Elias’s large room and across the open piano lid, striking a golden gleam across its polished top. Alba could feel its heat trace her outline and light up her fingers. She looked down at the keys. Her fingers sprang into action.

      Signora Elias interrupted at once. ‘You took a breath, yes, but it was high in your chest, snatched. You cannot expect to be able to keep up with this Bach fugue in this way. Bach is stamina, precision, absolute clarity. He is the source.’

      Alba tilted her head back, blowing a puff of air out from her lower lip, which lifted a few strands of hair that had fallen onto her forehead.

      ‘And there’s no use in succumbing to frustration either. We can’t create or practise from that place. Sorrow? Yes. Feel the pain of those notes escaping from under you. Then simply work out what you must do to fix it.’

      Alba wanted to say sorry, but the words stuck in her throat, a knot of silence.

      ‘Don’t apologize,’ Signora Elias continued, as always, intuiting what Alba longed to say but couldn’t, ‘this is the work, Alba. This is the constant reminder that you are merely human. What Bach is laying out for us is the entire cosmos, layers of mathematics, interweaving with glorious symmetry. Then he twists it in on itself, revelling in the asymmetry of those rules. It’s a kaleidoscope of patterns. We know this. So we honour this.’

      Alba was accustomed to Signora Elias’s tempo increasing as she charged through her corrections, sometimes striding beside the piano, then drawing to a curt pause when the pinnacle of her thought was reached, a mountaineer charging towards the peak. She stood still now, in the spotlight of the sun’s glow. ‘Will you return to the beginning?’

      ‘Slower.’

      ‘And?’

      Alba swallowed. ‘Then I’ll play these first few measures, repeating at speed, playing with alternate rhythms.’

      Signora Elias raised her eyebrows, waiting for the end of the thought.

      ‘Until my fingers play me,’ Alba whispered.

      ‘Until there is no space between those patterns and you,’ Signora Elias added. ‘I don’t want to see Alba Fresu play with her fingers. I want to see the music ripple out of you. That’s when we know that you truly know the piece. When we have stripped it to its core, asked what it is, why it is, what it needs to tell us, and then step inside.’

      Alba looked at Signora Elias and allowed herself to smile in spite of a sinking in her stomach. When would these exercises become instinctive?

      ‘It’s about learning to control every minute movement of your body to produce the precise tone the piece requires,’ Signora Elias began, ‘and then, in performance, being able to shift that focus on control alone, and simply allow your technique to be in place, so your musicality can soar. We want to hear the music, not the practice. Music is about control and the loss of it at the same time; a beautiful contradiction. At this moment, from your flushed cheeks I see you are still grappling with the sensations of losing control in the first instance.’

      The past seven years Signora Elias had sat beside her each and every morning leading her down these waterways of her music. Now, at eighteen, as Alba approached her final year at school, their lesson together was a cool balm before class. After it, Signora Elias would permit her to practise unguided.

      ‘I want to apologize,’ Alba replied, her voice dry.

      ‘I know. Hold onto this thought – my corrections are leading you towards your music, Alba, they are never criticism alone, however it might feel.’

      Signora Elias invited the silence for a moment, as if it were an unexpected yet welcome guest. Alba lost herself in it. Her breath dropped down into her abdomen, warm, deep. She felt her lower back unlock, each vertebra separating a little, rising up out of the top of her head. Her fingers lifted back onto the keys. As she exhaled, they became heavy, assured, curious. The first few measures tumbled out effortless, precise. Alba stopped, then began again, each time her breath deepening a little more, each time her feet finding the reassurance of the wooden parquet rise up to meet them. As the cascade of notes became equal, controlled, her hands began to relax, speeding up without tension. Her fingers sank into the ivories, weighted but free. The glorious symmetry of the sounds and patterns washed over her, shining light. She was no longer in Ozieri. She was far beyond the plains, above her turquoise coast. She was deep in the forests of Gennargentu, beneath a gushing waterfall, icy cold electrifying her body. She was everywhere but here. And the feeling lit her up from her feet and lifted up out of her head. She was inside her body and far beyond it at the same time.

      The final run descended and landed, in perfect alignment, both hands announcing the last chord. The vibrations lifted out of the piano thinning to a faint blue glow somewhere in the air above the strings.

      And then it was over.

      She returned to a stark awareness of the room, once more a piano student surrounded by the landscape paintings on the wall around her, the promise of the spring morning outside sketching hope. She looked over at Signora Elias. Her eyes appeared wet, or perhaps it was the morning light, which caught a spiral dance of dust motes in the space between them.

      ‘You and I both know our lessons will reach their end after the summer. Your father has made it quite clear that you will be working at the officina. That will leave little or no time for you to be coming here.’

      Alba nodded. The thought of the minutes ticking away towards a time when the piano wouldn’t be part of her daily life made Alba feel like she was suffocating.

      ‘It’s time at this crucial point in your training that you are allowed to perform. At the very least once. Every performance I gave taught me something I needed to learn, and stayed with me forever. I want to give you that.’

      Alba felt her chest crease into a tight knot.

      ‘Don’t look so terrified, Alba. Perhaps in preparation you might play for my friend first? She is staying with me at the moment and her favourite thing is to listen to piano music. Would that be all right? After next lesson would be the perfect time.’

      Alba nodded, though the idea sent a sliver of terror scorching through her.

      Signora Elias looked into her. ‘When you practise in the way you have today, Alba, anything is truly possible. When you can acknowledge that fire and channel it with humility and passion, this instrument, and you, will sing.’

      The next morning Signora Elias instructed Alba to use their lesson time to warm up and run through her repertoire. ‘Take all the time this morning to repeat whatever you need. What have I told you?’

      ‘A piece soars only when it’s shared.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Because it’s then that we find out what we really feel about it, how much careful time we’ve given it. Whether our practise has been well directed.’

      ‘Which, of course, it has. You have the most wonderful teacher, I hear.’

      They laughed at that.

      ‘We’ll be down in a little while so you aren’t observed during practice. I have a gentleman coming to work on my car shortly, but he shouldn’t make too much noise; I’ll look out for him so he doesn’t ring the bell.’

      ‘Grazie, Signora Maestra.’

      Signora Elias closed the door behind