The Loser Read Online Free Page A

show up my hated family, to set out in the direction they had abhorred from the first. It wasn’t art, or music, or the piano, but opposition to my family, I thought. I had hated playing the Ehrbar, my parents had forced it on me as they had on all the children in our family, the Ehrbar was their artistic center and with it they had slogged their way to the last pieces by Brahms and Reger. I had hated this family artistic center but loved the Steinway, which I had blackmailed my father into having delivered from Paris under the most frightful circumstances. I had to enroll in the Mozarteum to show them, I didn’t have the faintest idea about music and playing the piano had never exactly been one of my passions, but I used it as a means to an end against my parents and my entire family, I exploited it against them and I began to master it against them, better from day to day, with increasing virtuosity from year to year. I enrolled in the Mozarteum against them, I thought in the inn. Our Ehrbar stood in the so-called music room and was the artistic center where they showed off on Saturday afternoons. They avoided the Steinway, people stayed away, the Steinway put an end to the Ehrbar epoch. From the day I played the Steinway the artistic center in my parents’ house was kaput. The Steinway, I thought while standing in the inn and looking about, was aimed against my family. I enrolled in the Mozarteum to take my revenge on them, for no other reason, to punish them for their crimes against me. Now they had an artist for a son, an abominable species from their point of view. And I misused the Mozarteum against them, put all its means into play against them. Had I taken over their brickyards and played their old Ehrbar all my life they would have been satisfied, but I cut myself off from them by setting up the Steinway in the music room, which cost a fortune and did indeed have to be delivered from Paris to our house. At first I had insisted on the Steinway, then, as was only proper for the Steinway, on the Mozarteum. I brooked, as I must now say, no opposition. I had decided to become an artist overnight and demanded everything. I caught them unawares, I thought as I looked around in the inn. The Steinway was my barricade against them, against their world, against family and world cretinism. I was not a born piano virtuoso, as Glenn was, perhaps even Wertheimer, although I can’t claim that with absolute certainty, but I quite simply forced myself to become one, talked and played myself into it, I must say, with absolute ruthlessness in their regard. With the Steinway I could suddenly appear on stage against them. I made myself into an artist out of desperation, into the most obvious sort available, a piano virtuoso, if possible into a world-class piano virtuoso, the hated Ehrbar in our music room had given me the idea and I developed this idea as a weapon against them, exploiting it to the highest and absolutely highest degree of perfection against them. Glenn’s case was no different, nor was Wertheimer’s, who had studied art and therefore music only to insult his father, as I know, I thought in the inn. The fact that I’m studying the piano is a catastrophe for my father, Wertheimer said to me. Glenn said it even more radically: they hate me and my piano. I say Bach and they’re ready to throw up, said Glenn. He was already world famous and his parents still hadn’t changed their point of view. But whereas he stayed true to his principles and in the last and final analysis was able, if only two or three years before his death, to convince them of his genius, Wertheimer and I proved our parents right by failing to become virtuosos, failing indeed very quickly, in the most shameful manner , as I often was privileged to hear my father say. But my failure to become a piano virtuoso never bothered me, unlike Wertheimer, who suffered right to the end of his life for having given up, given himself over to the human sciences,