The Piano Student

(Paperback)

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"Explosively passionate, this story of forbidden love and unmet potential is ... for anyone whos ever felt the ineffable power of music."
Aja Gabel, author of The Ensemble

The Piano Student is a novel about regret, secrecy, and music, involving an affair between one of the 20th centurys most celebrated pianists, Vladimir Horowitz, and his young male student, Nico Kaufmann, in the late 1930s. As Europe hurtles toward political catastrophe and Horowitz ascends to the pinnacle of artistic achievement, the great pianist hides his illicit passion from his wife Wanda, daughter of the renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini. The affair is narrated by Kaufmann in the 1980s to another music devotee, who comes to him enchanted by Schumannscomposition Trumerei and awakens memories of the thwarted relationship. Based on unpublished letters by Horowitz to Kaufmann that author Lea Singer discovered in Switzerland, the novel portrays the anguish that the acclaimed musician felt about his never publicly acknowledged homosexuality and the attendant duplicity of his personal life. It's a riveting and sensitive tale of musical perfection, love, and longing denied, with multiple historical layers and insights into artistic creativity.

Reviews

"This intriguing, quirky novel, based on unpublished letters of Horowitz to a Swiss student, explores his hidden European years between living in Russia and the United States, and his hidden homosexual life outside his marriage with Wanda Toscanini." --Stephen Hough, concert pianist and author of Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More and The Final Retreat: A Novel "One of the greatest pianists of the last century, an illicit love affair with a young man, and a story using the genuine correspondence that passed between them--it makes for an utterly compelling read." --Jeremy Nicholas, author of The Great Composers and Chopin: His Life and Music "A tender psychological depiction of an impossible love--and between the lines a good deal of veneration for the pianist Horowitz and for the persuasive power of music." --Suddeutsche Zeitung "Lea Singer's novel combines narrative imagination and accurate research ... recounting vividly as well as exemplarily the multi-faceted history of a forbidden love between men and thereby captivating the reader." --Weltwoche "A book that tells with empathic devotion of music and death ... the story of a search for freedom in the most adverse circumstances ... The book poses the biggest question of all about relationships, What is true and what is a lie" --Neue Zurcher Zeitung

Author Bio

Lea Singer is a German cultural historian and a novelist who uses a pseudonym for her fictional works. Under her legal name of Eva Gesine Baur, she has authored biographies of Frederic Chopin and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. She has also written novels inspired by the lives of pianist Paul Wittgenstein and painter Caspar David Friedrich. Elisabeth Lauffer is the recipient of the 2014 Gutekunst Translation Prize. After graduating from Wesleyan University she lived in Berlin where she worked as a commercial translator and then obtained a master's in education from Harvard.