Hide And Seek (Part 2). Amy Bird

in Max’s first concerto, written in B-flat Minor. If he’d chosen that key deliberately to court comparisons with Tchaikovsky it had certainly paid off: reviewers claimed he was as ‘bold’, ‘heroic’, ‘fierce’ and ‘eerie’ as the great Russian, ‘taking listeners to the same depths of melancholy and heights of passion’. None of that, in the year I teach. We play it safe in C Major. Although there is a danger, doing everything in the relative key to Max’s second concerto. A Minor. Just as haunting as his first. Perhaps even more so. For how it ended. Perhaps I’ve spent these teaching years intentionally skirting dangerously close to his memory – keeping him near but far enough away not to trouble me. But I don’t teach them about relative scales here. They can learn all that when they get to lycée. Until the Head of Music finds out, and quibbles it.

      Yes, genius had been Max’s every excuse. For his hours of silence, his refusal to co-operate in household chores, his dreadful failure to acknowledge Guillaume when the boy wanted to play. His excuse for everything. Not that he even needed an excuse when we first started going out. I just enjoyed watching his genius. It was like he was making love to the piano. It was the same face when he was striving to orgasm. The same lifting up and down of his hips at the piano as he reached the climax. Except later on he saved the intensity for the piano. Apart from when Guillaume was conceived. He gave a virtuosic performance then, when it mattered.

      So, yes. At least his excuse was valid: genius. The question is – was mine?