Heidelberg Piano

Dear friends of piano music, I am a coward, I admit it unapologetically. For more than a year now, I've been hiding behind little colourfull  pictures and holiday photos. At least I was brave enough to show my hands in the context of finger exercises and a classic of student literature (Burgmüller's "Schwalbe"), which proves that I actually exist and am a piano teacher. And I had even - I hope you appreciate this - thoroughly cleaned the dust on the piano, which I don't do for everyone by a long shot. You also know my last application photo, officially taken by a photographer with the aim of applying for a job as a Latin teacher at schools. I remember that appointment very well, it was a few years ago - I told the photographer I was a Latin teacher and then had to laugh terribly because I thought it was really funny at that moment. I would never have thought of becoming a Latin teacher during my horrible school years - life really is full of surprises. And I love ...

  Dear friends of piano music, "you can read it", a friend said to me, "the reality is much worse". i don't know exactly what it is that i have been trying unsuccessfully for years to finish reading "1984" by George Orwell. It's a dystopia, the antithesis of utopia, the hopeful, positive blueprint for the future. For me, 1984 is the end of individual thought and action in a world that has also become ugly on the outside, caused by a totalitarian state. Perhaps it is a kind of family trauma that makes me put the book down again and again. Although I am already the third generation to have escaped from such a state, it is still burned into my thinking and feeling, the fear of losing this freedom. We have it - we can read everything, think everything, do almost everything. But what do we do with this achievement of intellectual enlightenment - "sapere aude", have the courage to use your intellect, think for yourself?   At the moment we a...

  Dear friends of piano music,  I am late again. Last week was Mother's Day, which was introduced in Germany in the 1920s by the Association of Florists. This is why not all mothers are so happy about this institution. Flowers from the husband are often enough an expression of a guilty conscience. So what are we to make of the often thoughtlessly bought flower arrangements placed on our doorstep to satisfy convention? Later, you can leave them at the nursing home, and then you hire the cemetery gardener. such children are, thank God, rare. And of course, there are also parents who you wouldn`t wish on a child. I have often met children at school who did not have it easy with their parents and who, contrary to expectations, nevertheless developed really well - resilience, as it is now called in psychology. What it means to be a mother - at least that's how I felt - you only fully understand when you are already a mother. Before that, you are simply busy with too many other ...

Dear friends of piano music, the other day would have been one of the darkest days of my life by a hair - my piano, my beloved piano, one of my best friends, so to speak, suddenly and unexpectedly broke down. Without any warning, the g of the middle octave no longer made a sound, and unfortunately that's how it would stay. I tried to make another recording, but it was really a tragedy., the sound impression was distantly reminiscent of a knitted jumper, knitted with much love and effort by one's favourite deceased grandmother, thus possessing a high sentimental value, which has fallen victim to the appetite of malicious moths. Now, of course, one could argue that it is typically German doom and gloom to moan about a single piano key that does not work, while all the other 87 are perfectly fine. And tragedy, well really, to get so theatrical - I remember a lecture by a Heidelberg lawyer and brilliant city guide who recalled a plane crash in the 1980s that killed half the Class...

Dear friends of piano music, Everything was better in the old days, so it often seems to us. Of course, there was no corona pandemic in the past.My grandma always said that nobody was sick before, not like today, when everyone has chronic colds, allergies, back pain, migraine, tinnitus, burn-out, midlife and quarter life crises , Dyslexia, ADHD, ...... When I said that her family had taken in her second cousin as the third child because her entire family had died of typhus, my grandma said: Yes, but that was during the war. If I then kept digging - Omi, your sister died at the age of 18 because she had scarlet fever and diphtheria, and you had it too and have had a heart defect since then - my brave grandmother said. Yes, but that only happened because the weather was so bad that we couldn't take the horse-drawn carriage to the doctor - it had snowed so much. And it happened so terribly quickly - only two days and she was dead. That was in the1930s in Brandenburg, 100 km north of B...