It happens to all pianists at some point: that terrifying moment when you’re on stage and can’t remember what comes next. My former teacher, Jean-Paul Sévilla, was once playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations when, at the end of Variation 7, he couldn’t remember how Variation 8 began. By the time he got off stage to find his score it came to him, but his evening was ruined. Then there was Vlado Perlemuter who, upon leaving home to go to the concert hall, was asked by his wife if he had forgotten anything. A friend in attendance jokingly said: “The beginning of the concerto!” When, a few hours later, Vlado walked on stage in Paris to perform Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto (which famously begins with a quiet piano solo), he couldn’t find the notes. My own turn came when I was 50 years old, playing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (all four and a half hours of it) from memory in Stuttgart. It was part of a world tour in which I played that mammoth work 56 times in 26 countries. That night, however, I went wrong in the big A minor fugue from Book 1 and couldn’t find my way out. I had to go and get the score. You feel so ashamed – but we’re only human, and sometimes it happens.
On the whole, I’ve been blessed with an excellent memory – I suppose some would even say prodigious as I’ve performed the complete solo keyboard works of Bach (the exception being The Art of Fugue), the 32 sonatas of Beethoven, and who knows how many millions of other notes from memory over the years. I always thought it would have been a good idea to measure my brain before I memorised all that Bach and then again after to see how it had developed and changed. Too late now. At the age of 64, it’s definitely shrinking, and memorising has become a very conscious, frustrating and time-consuming activity. But I stick at it because memory is a muscle that needs to be constantly used to stay in any sort of shape.
