'The Piano Teacher' is like a piece of chamber music; a dissonant, serial composition with cold, confused Erika on piano, Mother on violin (always fiddling away even, or especially when, uncalled for by the score) and, supplying the lower notes, Walter Klemmer on cello (a little arrogant regarding his abilities and too keen to wave his bow about).
The music is without melody or harmony, but it is a stunning piece of virtuoso writing. The sounds are jarring, violent, cacophonous. Much of the technique the musicians use is unorthodox: bowing beneath the bridge, hammering on the piano keys with fists. There isn't a moment of beauty in the entire work. Its most unusual feature is that it has a conductor, Elfriede Jelinek. More unusual again is that she is not just conducting the trio, she is conducting us the readers as well and she appears a little over-anxious that we should view everything exactly as she does. The musicians must keep to the score and we must keep to the written notes.
On the upbeat Ms Jelinek breaths in. She breathes in all of the air in the room. We are hers until she chooses, if ever she does, to breath out again.
Mother, the progenitor of all that occurs in the novel, is an appalling creature. Her determination to keep her daughter within her control at all times - to the extent that they share a bed - must result from a deep fear of which we are ignorant. She lived through World war 2, but we know nothing of her experiences, nor those of the man she married, a man who may, at that time, already have had the mental-health problems which would, later in his life, result in his being confined in a mental institution. Mother's overbearing need to control her one child must be the result of deep trauma in her own life. Her fear of being left alone is beyond any normal uneasiness at such a prospect. This woman is psychotic. It is with her husband that she should be finding company. The two of them are on different floors of that big building on the hill.
Erika, born from the one dribble of seed that man implanted in his wife. 35 years on she has been so shielded from regular society that she has no idea who or what she is. Mama saw early on that she might just have the talent to be a concert pianist. Practice, practice. Competition. Practice, practice. Competition. But more than technique is needed to be a concert pianist. To play Schubert, Schumann, Chopin you must know something of the extravagant range of emotions that were familiar to the composers. Erika has heard of such emotions but has no first-hand experience of any of them. Her reach for feelings can only be located through extreme actions. Cutting herself brings forth one particular feeling - pain - so that seems worth doing, occasionally. She feels a kind of lust but has no means to express or expunge it. Peep shows and pornography become a fascination, a means of being in the vicinity of this activity of which she knows little. But combined with her already distorted and grotesque idea of human relations (what was home life like when both her father and mother were present?) this leads to ideas forming in her head about how emotional connections might be achieved which have no place in any relationship.
Walter Klemmer, by being interested in Erika, provides a point of fixation for her; a means by which she can attempt to process physical connections which will break through into those emotions she has never felt, first-hand. But what does she know? He is a student in the music academy where she now teaches, so she has some modicum of authority - the element of her character to which he is responsive - but she has no agency within the realm of her own emotional range. All of her receptors are malfunctioning. The gramophone of her mind is running down; the soprano is becoming a bass and nothing is making any sense. He, in is his way, is as adrift as Erika.
Erika strides through the smelly room, a bizarre spindle-shanked bird in the zoo of secret needs.
Breath out again please Frau Jelinek. I have followed your every word, fascinated, repulsed, upset, confused. I understand too that we are all quiescent in the face of state brutality and too meek before a state system that keeps us in our place. But please put your baton down. I can't take any more.