TRACK THREE

       Schubert, Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat, Second Movement

      Ashkenazy, Zukerman, Harrell Trio

       A few months before his death in 1828 at the age of thirty-one, Schubert completed a fifty-minute-long trio for piano, violin and cello. He had led a short, miserable, broken life with music providing the sole counterpoint to his wretchedness. Schubert was constantly broke, relying on friends for food, lodging and cash. He was invariably unhappy in love, not helped by being short, ugly and over-sensitive to slights both real and imagined. And yet, despite being a walking, talking car crash, he was aggressively prolific – he wrote more than twenty thousand bars of music in his eighteenth year alone, composed nine symphonies (Beethoven had only written one by the age of thirty-one), over six hundred songs, twenty-one piano sonatas and endless chamber music.

       The vast majority of his output wasn’t performed until after his death, but this trio was. Chamber music was much easier to perform in private homes than orchestral music, and some homes in Vienna would host regular Schubertiades – informal evenings of his music, together with poetry readings and dancing. In 1828 the trio was given a first performance at one of these evenings (put on to celebrate a friend’s engagement). The slow movement encapsulates perfectly a life too short-lived – funereal and dark, tinged with hope and an insight into the infinite potential of genius.

       Written by one of the only composers since Mozart who could conceive and compose an entire work in his head before scribbling it down on paper, this is the soundtrack of a man so depressed he started out his student days training to be a lawyer.

       It is a devastating reminder of just how much we have missed out on by his dying prematurely at the age of thirty-one.

       Stupid syphilis.

      WHAT’S MORE INTERESTING (TO ME) than how I learned to swallow and take it in the ass, is the impact that rape has on a person. It is like a stain that is ever present. There are a thousand reminders of it each day. Every time I take a shit. Watch TV. See a child. Cry. Glimpse a newspaper. Hear the news. Watch a movie. Get touched. Have sex. Wank. Drink something unexpectedly hot or take too big a gulp. Cough or choke.

      Hypervigilance is one of the weirder symptoms of PTSD. Every time I hear a loud noise, sneeze, bang, shriek, cry, car horn, anything sudden like a touch on the shoulder, a phone notification, I jump out of my skin. It’s involuntary, uncontrollable, unintentionally humorous and dementing at once. And it’s especially shit with classical music where sudden changes in volume occur all the time (if you see a slightly scruffy guy on the Tube with headphones on jumping out of his seat every few minutes, come and say hello).

      There are also the tics. The little and not so little twitches that have been with me since the abuse started. Eyes twitch, vocal chords spasm, grunts and squeaks pop out uninvited and must be repeated until they are just right. And, continuing along the OCD/Tourette’s spectrum, things need to be touched a certain way, rhythms tapped out impeccably on tables or walls or legs, light switches flicked the correct number of times, and on and on.

      When I’m playing on stage is where it gets dangerous; if a part of my left hand touches the keys of the piano then I have to replicate the exact same touch with my right hand. I have to. And quickly, too. Which is not something I want to be thinking about and orchestrating when trying to remember the 30,000 notes of a Beethoven sonata. I will also need to sniff one of my hands at certain times while playing (a big ask). And I try (and fail) to pass all of it off as ‘being artistic’ so people don’t notice. I will try and wait until I’m playing a loud bit before squeaking so the audience doesn’t hear me. Will try, on the fly, to change the fingering I’ve spent hundreds of hours memorising to allow me to turn my hand inwards and scrape the edge of the keys to satisfy that unique itch. And God forbid I should see a hair on the key. Then I’ll have to find time to brush it off, mid-performance, so everything is clean. It’s a lot to think about, feels totally out of my control, and there is no satisfactory explanation that will cut it with the critics when it impacts on my playing.

      The mental tics are much more insidious. Thoughts literally cannot be stopped or truly dreadful things will happen. So when I’m in a state, thinking about something bad, maybe about my girlfriend being all flirty with some other guy, or perhaps what it would feel like to hurt myself (a different variation on the same theme), it must be followed through until I am satisfied. So when well-meaning shrinks tell me to distract and stop the thought, I just laugh and think, ‘Ain’t going to happen, and actually you should thank me for it because if I do that you will end up paying the price and have some terrible accident, you’ll lose your career and husband, end up broke and disabled and need your own shrink who you won’t be able to afford so you’ll die alone and in obscurity, miserable and afraid. You’re welcome.’

      Then there are the really shaming things. Like getting an erection every time I cry. Somehow the body remembers everything and links tears with sexual arousal. I would cry as he blew me. But physiology is physiology and my dick did its job and got hard. And so now when I cry it thinks, ‘Oh I remember this! Up we go.’

      Sex is an excellent topic also. The ground-swallowing, monumental shame of the orgasm. The images that fly across closed eyelids as you fuck, that force you to shake your head to try and make them disappear. The constant reminders of being touched there, there and there and what it meant at the time and so what it must mean now. The unremitting awfulness of believing at a core level that your girlfriend, wife, fiancee is somehow stained, broken, disgusting and evil because she had sex as a teenager. Despite knowing how ridiculous, how stupid, how illogical that sounds. I had sex young. It was bad. I am bad. You had sex young so you are bad. And so we cannot be together, I cannot respect you. You are so fucking disgusting. Marry