The winter I bought the piano, I was having a very bad time.
I was behind on writing my third novel, sleeping four hours a night and committing an ignoble litany of romantic mistakes. My silent hope and expectation was that a sensible third party would intervene. “You’re making a hames of this altogether, Dolan,” they’d say, and direct me down some holier path. Unfairly, no one did. Well, everyone did, but they weren’t successful. The opinion of my friend circle was unanimous: take melatonin, switch to decaf, stop texting people you know are bad for you, write your book. My response was: how about I don’t do any of that and instead just buy a piano?
I’d studied piano for 10 years throughout my childhood and adolescence in Dublin. By the end I was pretty good, and I’d remembered it well enough to write about a pianist in my second novel.
But since leaving Ireland after my undergraduate degree, I’d never had much of a fixed abode. I flitted between cities and countries, never staying put for longer than a year. All this moving around meant I couldn’t own anything larger than a carry-on suitcase. My yoga mat was thin enough to fold rather than roll; I had 10 hangers and refused to buy more so I’d be forced to give away an item of clothing for each new one I acquired. I was not a candidate for piano ownership. There was no way to practise, so I didn’t.
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At the start of this nomadic phase, I still played whenever I visited my parents. Their ivory-keyed upright piano is an object of family lore, my grandfather in Longford – a carpenter – having rescued it from a neighbour’s fire and restored it himself. I’d been the only household member who still played, so after I left, the instrument and I decayed in tandem. Each time I opened the lid, the keys were stiffer and I was slower in connecting them to the notes on the page.
Eventually I stopped conducting these check-ins. The gulf between past and present ability was too daunting. Let me and the piano part in peace, I decided. Our roads will diverge. So it goes.
Then, in the summer of 2022, I moved from London to Berlin. There was nothing specific about Berlin that I thought would alleviate my various woes – some circumstantial, some existential. I had decamped to Deutschland. I’d gathered enough data to surmise that simply moving country wouldn’t change me, but I’m the all-time uachtarán of doing the same thing and expecting different results.
Moving, indeed, did not prove a lasting fix. My first few months in Berlin were suspiciously stable, anchored by learning the language. I was too confounded by case declensions to go around making trouble for myself. But after a year I’d become reasonably proficient in German (and Italian, too, another long story involving a reading group and a baroness). This was good in terms of helping me navigate local bureaucracy and not die, but bad re: sense of daily purpose. As soon as the German project had lost its urgency, my self-destructive habits crept back in: neglecting my body, lacking boundaries, romanticising my own suffering while avidly seeking more of same.
The nadir of such depressive cycles had usually been the point that I moved country. But I was so thoroughly sick of relocating – the bubble wrap, the lost deposits – that I thought I’d try something else first.
Fate played its part. In early 2023, I had coffee with a Turkish friend in my neighbourhood and she invited me to accompany her on a few errands. One of these involved popping into a music shop that was about to close. All the pianos were on sale. I sat at a glossy black Steinway and played some arpeggios. Since it was a new instrument, I wasn’t comparing myself to my teenaged proficiency like I’d done with the fire-salvaged piano in my parents’ home. I could view the matter in isolation: I liked to touch the keys and hear the sounds.
That evening I found the online shop and ordered a Yamaha P-145B, the cheapest electrical piano with weighted keys. It could be disassembled and moved if needed, which soothed my commitment-phobia.
Three days later, it arrived.
Assembling the thing was already an endeavour, and an endeavour was just what I’d sorely missed. But I wouldn’t have realised as much from a million years of wallowing in self-pity. It was only once I’d sliced open the big cardboard box that it struck me: I am a compulsively driven person and am miserable when I don’t have an aim. It’s an unfortunate fact about me that I only ever see this in hindsight. Ah yes, I got depressed because I’d achieved one ambition and didn’t have another immediately lined up. I forget this until I’ve already embarked upon some new venture and suddenly feel like myself again. Writing used to serve as one such release valve before it became my job. Now the stakes are too high; I need sprightly goals, ones I don’t use to pay my rent.
Some of the proverbial spring in my step, then, had returned from putting the instrument together. Next came the longer gauntlet: relearning how to play.
With the piano had come a booklet of beginner pieces. I could barely read a single note. For the first few weeks, I played scales and arpeggios – these at least returned quickly – and struggled with pieces that I could have smoothly sight-read at seven years of age.
Berlin didn’t fix me, but it’s where I’ve learned patience – or at least how to have more of it than I used to. When adversity next pays me its customary visit, I’ll stay where I am and meet its eye
Before my Berlin era, this initial humiliation would have defeated me. It’s one thing to learn an entirely new skill; it’s another to toil in the hope of eventually getting as good as you’d been before your brain had fully developed. But learning German and Italian had been – of all the words I never thought I’d earnestly use – character-building. I’d sounded like a dunce when embarking on both these languages, and I’d kept at it because I knew from having learned other languages in school that you can’t skip over duncehood, but must trudge through it. Confidence, they say (they’re always saying things, and they’re often right), comes after taking action, not before. German and Italian were two recent examples of my sucking persistently enough to get good. Let’s suck at piano for a while, I decided. On the other side of sucking lies greatness.
So I sucked for several months, and each month I sucked a little less. I treated myself like a child I was teaching to read. If I stumbled over a passage, if I needed to slow down or start again, I thought: we’ll figure this out, there’s no rush. My entrenched self-hatred still sporadically cropped up, this lifelong spam message that no firewall can wholly exclude. The key is to not take it seriously. You’re stupid and worthless, the age-old voice says. Instead of dignifying it with an engaged response, I tend to just sarcastically accuse it of tendering me old rope. Yes, how accurate, I think, but have you not got anything new? You’ve been beating this drum since I was five years old!
After I’d worked through the pamphlet that came with the piano, my mother sent me my old exam books. She’d kept them, she told me on the phone, because her own had been thrown out when her childhood home was sold and it had felt like someone had cut off her hands.
When the books arrived, I saw I’d signed my name on the inside of every cover. My first ‘Naoise Dolan’ appeared in shaky pencil. Later, I’d mastered cursive and the use of a fountain pen, then came neon biro and embellishments of flowers and hearts. The names made me cry. Or not just the names, but the contrast between the childish handwriting and the deathly serious pressure I remembered having felt as I read through each piece I’d played. I’d been terrified of disappointing anyone, of ever making a mistake. Before I could properly hold a pen, I was excoriating myself for not being perfect.
I played through these books, made my mistakes, tried to be gentler with myself this time around. Then I bought a few of Henle’s At the Piano series, compilations of Chopin and Mozart and Bach. My sight-reading was coming back; I could do it at the level I’d reached when I stopped, though I couldn’t perform any studied piece nearly as well. The unseen section had been my Achilles’ heel throughout my piano exams. I’d worked so hard on the prepared pieces that my sight-reading seemed demoralisingly shabby by contrast, which discouraged me from practising it, which in turn only increased the competence gap. Now I decided to convert my weakness into a strength. I sight-read for 30 minutes each day.
It’s been seven months now. At this point I can open up most sheet music and play it for pleasure from scratch; I just glided through a volume of Chopin’s waltzes. There’s still boredom and frustration, but each time I push through it, there’s more evidence the next time that it’s best to just keep playing.
My Berlin problems abated, most of them, over these seven months. The third novel got written, edited, edited again. The bad romances faded or imploded.
There will be future problems, I don’t doubt, because I’m a high-strung individual with a craving for plot. But in my daily contentions with sheet music, I’ve practised sitting still and plodding through. Berlin didn’t fix me, but it’s where I’ve learned patience – or at least how to have more of it than I used to. When adversity next pays me its customary visit, I’ll stay where I am and meet its eye.
Naoise Dolan is the author of Exciting Times and The Happy Couple
