Instrumental by James Rhodes Page B

Verona to study with an Italian piano teacher called Edo, he mentioned the composer Anton Bruckner.
    â€˜Pile of shit,’ I said. ‘Overlong pieces, wrote nothing for the piano, boring and not worth wasting time on.’
    In truth, I’d never heard anything written by him.
    Edo literally slapped me. He sat me down, said to me, ‘You do not move now’, and put on a CD of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. All seventy minutes of it.
    I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. It changed me irrevocably.
    Bruckner was a deeply devout Christian (sample quote: ‘They want me to write differently Certainly I could, but I must not. God has chosen me from thousands and given me, of all people, this talent. It is to Him that I must give account. How then would I stand there before Almighty God, if I followed the others and not Him?’) who was short, overweight, lacking social gracesand hopelessly romantic to the point where he proposed several times to hot young women but was always turned down. He never married, developed severe OCD that resulted in a crippling obsession with numbers, constantly reworked his compositions because he was so self-critical, and drank too much.
    He also composed some of the greatest symphonies known to man. Giant, sixty-, seventy-minute and even longer orchestral universes that are the great mountains of musical history.
    The Seventh Symphony has four movements, and each one of these epic musical landscapes deserves its own chapter in this book. But it will always be the huge, desperate, second movement that knocks me to the floor like a Tyson left hook.
    WHEN I BECAME A FATHER the echoes of my past became screams. There was a cold, insidious certainty growing like a cancer in my entire being that terrible things were going to happen to the most precious thing in my life. It was the single most terrifying thing that I had ever experienced. Everywhere I looked, I could only see danger.
    I didn’t know it was possible to feel so many powerful emotions at the same time – pure, unadulterated, instantaneous, fat love coupled with a terror so blinding and penetrating I could barely breathe. And there I was, handed this unutterably perfect thing. Those blissfully ignorant nurses might as well have given the keys to an Aston Martin to a four-year-old in Times Square and said, ‘Go crazy.’
    I insisted on doing the middle-of-the-night feeds. I was up anyway. Anxious, over-thinking, running through all the myriad ways in whichhe could die at any moment. Knowing at a primal level that something terrible was going to happen to him and that it was only a question of when, not if. Because that is what happens to children.
    The plus side is that he and I bonded intensely. I mean, yeah, it’s unhealthy, but I lived and breathed him in, twenty-four hours a day. I could not get enough of him. To this day, the happiest, most profoundly peaceful moments of my life have been holding him, fast asleep, a satisfying weight in my arms, feeding him as he slept. I didn’t even know you could feed babies while they sleep. Knowing I was nourishing him, protecting him, that at this moment nothing could happen to him.
    In the furious, ultra-competitive ‘school stakes’ of middle-class London, we got him down for a bunch of primary schools, years ahead of schedule. And in every interview with the schools my questions didn’t even touch on the facilities, syllabus, food etc.
    We’d be sitting in the head teacher’s office complete with appalling, frankly lazy children’s paintings littering the walls, and she’d be telling us how:
    â€˜Our school is an excellent feeder school into the more successful secondary schools in London, with many of our students then going on to the most renowned schools and universities in the country. We have a full and imaginative curriculum, superb facilities, regular field trips, consistently excellent Ofsted reports and a