Scaling the musical Matterhorn

This book is an account by the music-loving editor of the Guardian of how he set himself the task of learning to play one of the most daunting virtuoso pieces in the piano repertoire, and to do so within the space of what turned out to be perhaps the most hectic year in the newspaper’s history.

Alan Rusbridger didn’t actually meet his self-imposed deadline. He had been overwhelmed by developments at his newspaper — the Wikileaks and phone-hacking exposures (both huge Guardian scoops), the Arab revolutions, the English urban riots, the near-collapse of the European financial system, not to mention the huge financial problems created for the paper by the digital revolution — and so could not put in the hours of practice he needed. ‘A job that was routinely 12 to 14 hours a day, Monday to Friday, regularly expanded beyond that and ate deeply into the sixth and seventh days,’ he writes. So it took him another six months of snatched practice periods to master Chopin’s fiendishly difficult Ballade No. 1 in G minor or, in his words, to find that he could ‘in the professional view of at least three proper pianists play it — sort of’.

Nice though it would be to have a CD of Rusbridger’s public performance of the piece at a rented hall in London on 13 December 2011 (the book should have included one), we have no reason to doubt his words. And listening again to my recording of Arthur Rubinstein’s performance of the Ballade, I am lost in wonder and admiration at the progress Rusbridger must have made since we used clumsily to play piano duets together when we were both foreign correspondents in Washington in the late 1980s. The question arises why? What has driven him on? And what has made him want to master a work that strikes fear into even the most accomplished professional pianist? These are questions to which he himself seeks the answers.