“Pianists must practice eight hours a day! What a life of hell!”, said my elder sister. “You could be a composer, so you’ll only have to write. You can make the others play, and you don’t have to learn your music!”.
I was nine and I had never given a thought to the fact that composers and interpreters were different people. Actually, I wanted to make my own music, but since I had to learn to play first, I started taking piano lessons, realizing only later that all the music I liked had already been written by Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, who had “stolen” my ideas!
I might as well be a pianist, a musician who plays others’ works, that after all belong to him, too.
And this has always been a mania for me, not only as a child, but in my entire life.
