No not another post about Bach, but a new book sent to me by Legend Press, duly signed by the author William Coles no less, so many thanks, and I found the timing of its arrival quite amusing, hot on the heels as it was on my thinking about my Me and Johann post.
The Well-tempered Clavier comprises 96 preludes and fugues that J S Bach wrote for the clavier, but now of course played on the piano. Seventeen year old Kim, a student at Eton, is a piano player in a desultory sort of way but this all changes one summer term when a new music teacher arrives. Her name 
is India and she is beautiful and Kim falls madly in love with her on the spot.
''I take in her clothes and the scent, a smell that I will forever associate with heaven on earth, lily of the valley, and those hazel eyes with black eyelashes and her moist scarlet lips and that mane of brown hair...''
At their first lesson India gives him her annotated copy of The Well Tempered Klavier and Kim vows to practice and practice to prove to her that her belief in his potential is fulfilled and to win her approval and perhaps earn her love.
To his total astonishment India reciprocates his feelings and an intense, wildly passionate affair develops. It is, of course, doomed. Not because they are discovered and disgraced, but because of Kim's bitter jealousy of India and the men she may have known before she met him. He is studying Othello in class that term and is totally unaware of the reality of this poisonous emotion until he feels it himself. The love that India feels for him is true love, but he cannot see it and kills off their relationship as surely as Othello killed Desdemona.
For the rest of his life he regrets his behavior and his loss:
'' I am not given to emotion. But even now, 25 years on, the sound of Bach's Well-tempered Clavier makes my hairs bristle at the nape of my neck. My stomach spasms, my heart jolts, and in an instant I am back there, back in a small music room with lime-green walls and a scuffed upright Steinway...... today I can only manage five bars before my fingers clunk onto the wrong notes....if I were note perfect it would make no difference. For even years back I could never finish the prelude with crying. It's the Prelude 17, in a-flat major''
The sound of a particular piece of music can be so evocative. Many years ago I was singing in a performance of The Dream of Gerontius and I will never forget arriving home to be told that a very close friend of mine had died. She had actually passed away while we were singing Praise to the Holiest in the Heights. It was some twenty years before I could even listen to this piece by Elgar without weeping and even now I find it difficult to maintain my composure. So that opening paragraph immediately caught my attention and held it throughout.
It is not a story of a teacher seducing a pupil for fun or for thrills, it is the story of a true love, probably fragile and probably doomed anyway without Kim's jealousy, but it captures beautifully those heady summer days when we were young and exams were finished and we would while away those lazy summer school afternoons and the future looked bright and all seemed possible.
I shall be keeping a close eye out in future for more from William Coles and have duly have noted that this is 'Based on a True Story'. His or someone else's? I am sure he is going to be asked that question many many times...
I really enjoyed this book and thanks to Legend Press again for bringing this to my notice and giving me the opportunity of reading this evocative story.
