Mrs. Dolnick's Good Advice

Each time he goes to Mummy Plotnik's house in Stiletto City, The Great Plotnik gets to play his favorite piano in the world. Her 1936 Chickering spinet, which Plotnik's grandfather gave to her as a wedding present, has perfect tone, crisp trebles, solid basses, singing middles. Playing this piano always carries Plotnik to another world.

Last Saturday night, as everyone else was getting dressed to go out to dinner, Plotnik sat down at the piano to play. Robert Schumann's 'Traumerei' popped into his head. But while playing the middle section, he realized he had it wrong, that he'd juxtaposed the opening for the middle and the middle for...what? So he went looking for his Schumann 'Scenes from Childhood' piano book, which he located in the pile of music books next to the piano. The book looked like it hadn't been touched for decades.

Opening to 'Traumerei,' Plotnik read through the music to see what he was playing incorrectly, and while doing so also came upon all the notations his piano teacher, Mrs. Dolnick, had written on the music sometime in the 1950s, when The Great Plotnik was secretly memorizing the music while pretending to read it.

Transported back to his piano lessons as a young boy, which he feared and disliked, Plotnik remembered Mrs. Dolnick telling him that someday his memory would falter, but if he could read the music he would always be able to play it. Yes, yes, Mrs. Frieda Dolnick, with your white hair, your Austrian violinist husband, your little studio on Ventura Boulevard, your smell of rose water and your insistence that little Plottie would have to play last on the program -- you were right.

Not only that. Playing through all the Schumann pieces in 'Scenes From Childhood' made Plotnik realize that in his own songwriting and composing he has stolen from Schumann, from Mozart, from Beethoven, from Chopin, this phrase here, that phrase there, without ever being conscious of it. That's how it goes. Mrs. Dolnick knew this is the reason it is so important to study, to put yourself into the historical flow of the music, in some small way.

Then, if you're lucky, you get to sit down at your mom's piano, and bring it, and yourself, back to the beginning, to the land where the fairy tales come from.