The piano player

This article deals with the novel by Elfriede Jelinek. For the film adaptation of the same name by Michael Haneke see Die Klavierspielerin (film) .

The piano player is a novel by the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek , which was published in 1983 by Rowohlt Verlag .

The novel tells the story of the suffering of the piano teacher Erika Kohut, who was trained to be a pianist by her domineering mother and who dies emotionally and sexually under this oppressive control. Erika's attempt to overcome her frigidity in a sadomasochistic relationship with her student Walter Klemmer fails and ends in Erika's rape .

The novel is one of Jelinek's most important works and can be assigned to contemporary literature on the subject of mother-daughter relationships. The autobiographical motif of the dressage of a girl to become a musician by an authoritative and domineering mother can also be found in other works by the author. B. in the novel The Locked Out and in the tragedy Clara S.

Elfriede Jelinek, 2004

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The main character of the novel is Erika Kohut, a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory . Erika is 36, but still lives with her mother in an apartment and has even shared the marriage bed with her since the "expulsion" and the subsequent death of the sick father. In this tight grip, Erika is almost completely under maternal control, which does not even allow her to buy clothes. For example, out of a blind rage, the mother tears up Erika's newly bought dress and makes other clothes of the daughter disappear.

The mother's goal right from the start is to make her daughter a celebrity, to control her completely and not let her out of sight, so that she never has to be alone. As a child, Erika was trained to be a piano player by her mother; a solo career fails and she therefore accepts a professorship at the conservatory. Erika has no privacy because the room she lives in cannot be locked and is therefore subject to constant control by her mother.

For the retired old lady, Erika's money is the hope that she will soon acquire a condominium in which she can live with her daughter again. The mother regards Erika as her property and hardly tolerates social contact, especially not with men. If the daughter comes home only 15 minutes late, the mother will not rest until she learns the reason for the late arrival. She takes advantage of her daughter's conscience to use Erika for herself. Every average behavior of others is labeled as primitive and bad, which means that Erika does not recognize her isolation. However, Erika still has wishes, for example when she sees new clothes on her classmates. But if she can't get it, she tries to destroy it. She steals compulsively, although she throws the stolen goods into the nearest garbage can out of fear.

In the oppressive embrace of the mother, the daughter dies mentally. Erika regularly holds small concerts, forcing students with their parents to be present, otherwise the students get bad grades. But also the music, which is supposed to increase the value of the daughter for the mother, becomes an oppressive burden for Erika, because the mother simply demands too much. Therefore, Erika takes refuge in autoaggression and voyeurism . Quote: “You carefully check the edge, it is razor-sharp. Then she pushes the blade deep into the back of the hand several times, but again not so deeply as to injure tendons. It doesn't hurt at all. The metal cuts into it like butter. "

Erika visits peep shows and watches strangers having sexual intercourse in Vienna's parks. But that doesn't give her any satisfaction either. One day after Erika lied to her mother that she still had to go to a concert in the evening, she drove to the Vienna Prater after dark and went for a walk in the Prater meadows. Your destination is the Jesuit meadow. She sneaks up on a couple and watches the sexual act. The Turkish guest worker notices Erika's presence, but cannot ask her. Because Erika comes home late after that, the mother, who was worried and actually wanted to sleep long ago, beats her up, and Erika hits back until they are both exhausted on the floor.

The piano teacher often spies on her students and surprises them, for example, when they look at the stills of soft porn at the Metro cinema in Johannesgasse. She only looks at such soft porn twice because she prefers harder presentations. She is the only woman on the way home from the conservatory to go to an erotic shop, lock herself in one of the peepshow booths, watch the naked women on the turntable, pick up a "paper handkerchief that is completely caked with sperm" from the floor and smell it. In addition, Erika always has a carefully wrapped razor blade with her. With it she cuts the back of the hand or in front of an old shaving mirror of her father's labia.

As one of Erika's piano students, the committed athlete and technology student Walter Klemmer decides to conquer the teacher, Erika is completely overwhelmed. Klemmer uses every opportunity to be around Erika's. He is also in the audience at a rehearsal in the gymnasium of an elementary school. The teacher does not know how to react to the student's behavior and so ignores him. However, she is impressed by the determination and perseverance of Klemm. During a concert, Erika goes out, wraps a water glass in her handkerchief in the changing room and crushes it. She makes sure that there are sharp-edged splinters that she puts in the pocket of a flutist who had previously flirted with Walter. The girl who owns the coat cuts her hand while putting on the coat and screams. While teacher and student run together, Erika apparently calmly goes up one floor and urinates in the school toilet.

Klemmer follows her and takes her out of the cabin. He forces a kiss on her, reaches under her skirt, and while sobbing with greed he penetrates her with his index finger. Suddenly Erika pushes him away and keeps him an arm's length away. She stays upright, opens the zipper on his pants, takes out his erect penis and masturbates him. As soon as he tries to say something or to approach her, she threatens to let him stand there. Immediately before he orgasm, Erika pulls her hand back from his genitals. Klemmer urges her to continue, but "she doesn't want to touch it anymore, at any cost" and also forbids him to masturbate or turn around if he wants to see her again.

In the next piano lesson with Klemmer, Erika behaves as if nothing had happened. She only criticizes the performance of her student on the piano. At the end of the lesson, she hands him a sealed letter. Walter suggests that they spend the weekend together. Erika shrinks from that. Klemmer follows her on the way home and catches up with her in the stairwell. When he follows her into the apartment, the mother is not happy about the uninvited guest. Erika claims that she still has to discuss something with her student and goes to her room with him. Because it cannot be locked, the two push the sideboard in front of the door. The mother thinks this young man is only after her savings. Out of anger and helplessness, she drinks various liqueurs to calm down.

Meanwhile, Erika asks Klemmer to read the letter. In this envelope are Erika's most secret wishes. She writes that Klemmer should beat, gag, yell at and rape her. "When I beg, then just pretend you want to do it, in reality please pull the cuffs even tighter, even tighter, and pull the strap at least 2-3 holes, the more, the more I prefer it, more tightly together, and also stuff my old nylons, which will be ready, into my mouth as tightly as I can and gag me so ingeniously that I can't make the slightest sound. ”Klemmer is not like that presented; he runs out of the apartment. Because Klemmer no longer shows up for piano lessons, Erika waits for him after his clarinet lesson and then drags him into one of the cleaning ladies' storerooms. She kneels on the floor in front of him and puts his penis in her mouth, but no erection occurs .

Frustrated by his sexual failure, Klemmer runs into the park to kill a flamingo . He doesn't find an animal, but scares a young couple in love, whom he threatens with a club. Then he masturbates on the street in front of the house where Erika lives with her mother. In the middle of the night he calls her and demands that she open it for him. As soon as she opens the door he storms into her apartment, slaps Erika, rams her fist in her stomach and kicks her when she doubles on the floor. The mother wants to call the police, but Klemmer pushes her back into the bedroom and locks her up. Before he rapes Erika, he drinks a glass of water in the kitchen.

The next day, Erika goes to the technical college armed with a knife, without knowing whether she wants to kill Klemmer or win him back. She spots him in the midst of a group of happy fellow students and watches him flirt with a girl. This directs Erika's aggression on herself. She stabs the knife in the shoulder instead of in the heart and goes home bleeding.

Criticism and interpretation

The piano player received various criticisms, but mostly received affected recognition in reviews. Above all, the exceptionally pictorial language of the novel was praised. There is also a broad consensus in science that the drastic representation of the processes chosen by Elfriede Jelinek primarily serves to ensure that it is realistic.

There is a tendency in research to read The Piano Player as “a demystification of the love between man and woman who discover the truth behind it, namely sadomasochism as an expression of the war between the sexes”.

Sigrid Löffler formulated her point of view as follows: “The tragedy of the piano player Erika Kohut is that she has everything she needs to be a brilliant artist - except for genius. Contempt for everything ordinary, haughty seclusion in the awareness of one's own inviolable treasure, extremely irritable musical sensitivity, highly cultivated quality standards for oneself and the environment, exclusive devotion to music, sublimation of sexuality in art, proud loneliness of the artist who only focuses on her work - all that is abundant. But it was not enough for the great pianistic artists who could justify such a habitus. (...) The position of the narrator changes constantly. Who is actually speaking can hardly be made out in the gliding transitions between narrator commentary and character speech , between reflection and role prose. It is the language itself that scoffs and sneers, grimaces and mocks, dissects, distorts, satirizes, messes up quotations and breaks even the most horrific communication with as tasteless jokes and metaphors as possible . "

Austrian literary criticism saw it more positively: “In no other work does“ our ”Nobel Prize winner chase over her linguistic keyboard with such virtuosity . Sure, it's not particularly harmonious when the Jelinek gives a concert for hatred, power and destruction, but despite the brutal precision with which she carves bourgeois mendacity, this unreadable sarcastic humor flashes again and again between the lines in this oppressive novel through which Elfriede Jelinek plays her finest literary instrument: self-irony . "

The actual problem of interpretation or the “peculiarly resistant trait” of the work can be seen in the fact that the novel “ does offer a psychoanalytic deciphering (but at the same time undermines this through forced anticipation”).

Marlies Janz named the problem directly:

"The text itself states that Erika is the maternal phallus (" appendage ") and at the same time the husband (" until death do them part "). The psychoanalytic interpretation of this mother-daughter relationship does not have to be done in the interpretation, but is made explicit by the text itself. The punch line of the narrative method of Die Klavierspielerin is that the text leaves nothing to be interpreted, but rather expresses the psychoanalysis of the characters and lets them become their figuration ”.

Nevertheless, it did not prevent some authors from attempting a psychoanalytic interpretation of the novel themselves. In the chosen language of the work, the “performative contradiction” is also noticeable, since it denounces the effects of violence against a woman in a language of violence.

Jelinek himself sees piano teachers as slaves of musical culture, as their profession does not allow any creativity. There isn't even life in them. In her book she had exaggerated this shortcoming.

Kohut

The protagonist Erika Kohut has a namesake in the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut , a Jewish emigrant from Vienna whose theory of narcissistic personality disorder was gaining influence at the time the literature was first published.

filming

2001 director Michael Haneke filmed the book under the title Die Klavierspielerin with Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut and Benoît Magimel as Walter Klemmer. The film is one of the most internationally successful Austrian film productions in recent years.

literature

expenditure

• Elfriede Jelinek: The piano player . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 1983 (first print)
• Elfriede Jelinek: The piano player . Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek 1986, ISBN 3-499-15812-4

Secondary literature

• Michael Fischer: Trivial myths in Elfriede Jelinek's novels "The Lovers" and "The Piano Player" Röhrig, St. Ingbert 1991 ISBN 3-924555-75-3
• Frank Rainer Max & Christine Ruhrberg (eds.): Reclams Romanlexikon . Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 2000 ISBN 3-15-010474-2
• Marlies Janz : The piano player In: Marlies Janz: Elfriede Jelinek . Stuttgart / Weimar 1995, pp. 71-86. (= Metzler Collection 286) ISBN 3-476-10286-6
• Caroline Eliacheff & Nathalie Heinich: Mothers and Daughters. A triangular relationship over literature and film motifs. Walter-Patmos, Düsseldorf 2004 ISBN 3530421758 . From the Franz. By Horst Brühmann. P. 38ff. (Chapter "Passionate Mothers and Their Adult Daughters")
• Elizabeth Wright: An Aesthetic of Disgust. Elfriede Jelinek's novel “The Piano Player”. in: Text + Critique , VIII / 1999: Elfriede Jelinek , S. 83–91
• Delf Schmidt : The Invisible Second , opening lecture on the theme day "The Art of Lecturing", at the Berlin International Literature Festival 2016. Printed in: VOLLTEXT , 4/2016

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.elfriede-jelinek-forschungszentrum.com/fileadmin/user_upload/proj_ejfz/PDF-Downloads/LitEJ-pdf.pdf
2. ↑ ^{a b} Michael Gratzke: Liebesschmerz and Textlust: Figures of love and masochism in literature . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, p. 236.
3. ↑ See Michael Fischer: Trivial myths in Elfriede Jelinek's novels "The Lovers" and "The Piano Player". Werner Röhrig, St. Ingbert 1991.
4. ↑ Christa Gürtler: The unveiling of the myths of nature and sexuality . In: Christa Gürtler (ed.): Against the beautiful appearance. Texts on Elfriede Jelinek. New Critique, Frankfurt am Main 1990, p. 312.
5. ↑ Sigrid Löffler: The mother as will and idea. Elfriede Jelinek's "piano player", trapped inside art, body and language. Berlin 2005.
6. ↑ http://www.leserschwert.at/buch.php?buch=480
7. ↑ Elizabeth Wright: An Aesthetic of Disgust. Elfried Jelinek's novel "The Piano Player" . In: text + criticism, issue 117, p. 51.
8. ^ Marlies Janz : Elfriede Jelinek . Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 1995, p. 72.
9. ↑ Hedwig Appelt: The physical literature. The Phantasm and Presence of Woman in Scripture. Quadriga, Weinheim / Berlin 189, pp. 113, 125.
10. ↑ Annegret Mahler-Bungers: On the trail of grief. To Elfriede Jelinek's "The Piano Player". In: Freiburg literature psychological discussions, Volume 7: Masochism in literature. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1988, pp. 80-95.
11. ↑ Beatrice Hanssen: Elfried Jelinek's Language of Violence . In: New German Critique 68, 1996, pp. 79–112, especially p. 80.
12. ↑ allocine.fr section "Elfriede Jelinek résume le propos du roman et du film" (French)
13. ↑ Elizabeth Wright: An Aesthetic of Disgust. , P. 90, note 4
14. ^ Rolf Löchel: Contemptible winner type . Elfriede Jelinek and Michael Haneke on the film adaptation of the "Klavierspielerin" on: literaturkritik.de , No. 5, May 2002.
15. ↑ Cristina Moles Kaupp: The piano player. Mechanisms of violence . In: Der Spiegel , October 11, 2001. (To the film version)
16. ↑ Collected links to the review of the film ( Memento of the original from October 24, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on the homepage of the Austrian Society for Literature.