2 - No More Piano Lessons

Summary

At home only one person was pleased about my disaster: my father. Now he could feel confident that music was not my destiny. He made use of my distress to reinforce his determination that I should have no more piano lessons and that my general education should come first. My shock at the examination result, together with his attitude, almost succeeded in making me give up music altogether. Still only twelve years old, I turned back almost frenetically to my old hobby of making model aeroplanes, not touching the piano for many a month, feeling that it was no longer a friend, almost as if it were a living creature that had let me down.

In the following four years, my life was devoid of music. This misery was compounded by my father's constant financial troubles, which caused me to change schools twice.

In the years 1925 and 1926, my father was unable to find work in his profession as an engineer. His violins had won him great prestige; even the world-famous violinist, Bronisław Huberman, visited our home and arranged some ‘blind’ trials, in which my father's instruments won higher praise than any others, even higher than the old Italian instruments, including a Stradivarius. But the violins reaped admiration only – no financial rewards to save us from disaster. Rich people interested in investment bought old instruments, especially those which bore the names of great Italian makers, while professional musicians who dreamt of buying one of my father's instruments could not afford them.

Worse still, my father, through his gullibility and kindness, was plunged by a confidence trickster into the most appalling debts. He was suddenly befriended by a Polish army officer, who professed a flattering interest in his violins, asking searching and interesting questions, so that my father greatly enjoyed his visits. I often saw this Colonel Weintraub, standing in front of the large, glass-fronted shelves in which my father kept his instruments. He was a small, fat man with an expansive stomach that hung over the belt of his uniform. He was mostly bald, and what hair remained was shaved to the skin.