[Edna Bold played the piano]

[My friend] Jessie Mills […] lived with a widowed mother, an uncle, an aunt and a terrible Grandmother [who] kept a pawnbroker’s shop and a screaming parrot […] It struck me as odd that such a gentle child should belong to such a household, and odder still when she declared on day, “My uncle is practicing Beethoven, Mozart and Mendelssohn”. The pawnshop, the parrot and Messrs. B. M. and B. did not belong together. I had not heard of surrealism. 

“Could I have a piece by Beethoven, Mozart or Mendelssohn?” I asked my music teacher. “They are beyond you”, she said, and marked the scales, exercises and pieces like Blue Bells of Scotland and Robin’s Return that I was to continue practicing. I knew I was going home to practice NOTHING. 

It was impossible to spell out how I knew Beethoven, Mozart and Mendelssohn and their kind were more than mere mortals. They were the recording angels of the profound, the sublime, the mysterious. 

It was not until I went to the secondary school that I heard their music. We were taken to concerts, recitals and operas in the town. Visiting celebrities came after hours to the school music society. I became familiar with the music of Brahms, Bach, Handel, Rossini, Elgar, Debussy, Schumann, Schubert, Delius, etc., etc. I began to play from the simpler extracts of their music and if my technical ability did not match my understanding, at least I knew I was struggling to interpret ‘Something’.