Sonata: A Memoir of Pain and the Piano by Andrea Avery (Pegasus Books, 2017)
—Cathy Ritchie
I was raised with rheumatoid arthritis (RA)—my father’s. He was diagnosed at age 30 in the early 1950s, several years before my birth. I grew up never seeing him without a severe limp or misshapen hands. Rightly or wrongly, my parents sheltered me from the worst of his disability, and thus I entered adulthood shamefully unaware of what RA does to joints, extremities, and dreams. He died at age 55 as I prepared to graduate from college.
Fast-forward to 2017. In my role as librarian, I came across an advance copy of a not-yet-published book called Sonata. When I saw the author was a pianist dealing with RA as an adolescent and adult, I was intrigued. I learned so much from Andrea Avery. For many reasons, she’s worth visiting at least once, and maybe more.
Avery’s blunt subtitle admirably encapsulates her story. She emphasizes the graphic, often harrowing details of her disease, details I was extremely sobered to hear—i.e., the “Pain” of it. But throughout the book, Avery’s passion for music in general and “the Piano” in particular is the driving force and motif behind nearly everything she takes on. And as the main title hints, one particular classical work, a “Sonata,” would become the soundtrack to her roller-coaster life.
Avery was born in 1977 and diagnosed with RA at age 12. By then, she was already an acknowledged near-prodigy at the piano. Her diagnosis inspired determination. She reflects: “For too long, I refused to believe that I could not be both [arthritic and a pianist]. For decades, with swelling and crumbling hands, I groped at the piano, kneading, fearing that if I lost it, I would lose the only thing I liked about myself. Well into foolish adulthood….I kept one bruised and brutalized hand on the keyboard.”
As years passed and her continuing lessons were interspersed with RA treatments, incapacitating reconstructive surgeries, and constant re-adaptations to her increasing disability, Avery found special solace via the music she nevertheless still managed to create: “When I was playing, my arthritis wasn’t the most notable thing about me. The music—even if it hurts me to make it—was.”
In particular, Schubert’s Sonata in B flat, D960, the composer’s final work, moved her emotionally and challenged her intellectually: “It was the first piece I ever wanted to really work on, not just sight-read and move on. I wanted to know it, to transcend the mechanics of this note, that note, and figure out what it was saying.” Avery interweaves insights about Schubert’s own brief life and its circumstances throughout her narrative. And she offers a theory: “[Schubert] did not have the meteoric rise that Mozart did. He began to grow into his talent but he died before he had the chance to do so. I did not die so young, but my playing did. Could I have heard this in the sonata? A lament for lost opportunity, lost music?”
Avery also found inspiration in the legacies of two fellow pianists. Austrian Paul Wittgenstein (1887-1961) endured right-arm amputation during World War I but went on to commission new music solely for the left hand, and devised special techniques allowing him to play presumably unreachable chords. And acclaimed American pianist Byron Janis, born in 1928, contracted severe arthritis in his hands and wrists at age 45. Despite that, he managed to continue concertizing, while becoming a volunteer mainstay of the Arthritis Foundation. Avery pays tribute to them both.
Avery’s passion for the piano never wavered, but she discovered in adulthood that she also enjoyed literature and writing. She eventually switched academic gears, earning an MFA in creative writing and a doctorate in education. She currently teaches English at Phoenix [AZ] Country Day School, and has published in a number of periodicals and anthologies. She also keynote-speaks periodically, and footage of her entertaining and thoughtful presentations is available on YouTube.
Avery summarizes: “Piano has given me something to reach for with my arthritic hands, some reason not to give up on my fingers….Without my muscle memory of playing piano, I doubt I would have pushed my hands to recover from their surgeries. I probably would have capitulated to the physical therapist’s only expectations of diseased hands like mine: hold a pen, button a shirt….Music has made my arthritic life better. And perhaps I am a better musician than I was or would have been—not despite my arthritis, but because of it….Arthritis has taught me what no music teacher could: how to improvise.”
Sonata is beautifully written, by turns laugh-inspiring and almost unbearably frank, ripping the veil off arthritis’s daily tortures. Thanks to Avery, I have new respect and admiration for my father and for anyone having to endure the ravages of this disease. But the book is also a loving tribute to the power of music-making to transcend and alleviate so much pain in a person’s life. Andrea Avery is living proof of how disease and aesthetic beauty can co-exist within a challenging life, with perseverance and enrichment their end rewards.
