We will see some of Erika’s other clandestine excursions. In other scenes, the willed blankness of her stare, refusing cues and context, does the same.Įrika says she has been taking a walk after a full day of giving piano lessons her mother (Annie Girardot) accuses her of lying. Its skittering conveys an almost animal panic, and animal need. When feelings escalate, she lets her look dart around the room. Throughout the film, she will register emotion with minimalist precision.

She wears her hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, with no makeup, or none visible, on her freckled, almost translucent skin. She holds her rail-thin body ruler straight. like a whirlwind,” but Huppert controls her movements perfectly. Rather, with a shot of the inside of a door, which Erika opens as she returns home at the end of the day. In Haneke’s version, it starts with a door. The central drama of The Piano Teacher emerges when impassivity meets something else. She is training those who will outlive her to outdo her. The vanishing cultural significance of what they are doing only makes these rituals more desperate. They rush to the door as soon as the list of admits to a master class is posted. Students wait hours for their brief auditions when they fear they have played poorly, they sob. Frugality is one of several forms of discipline that rule their lives.īoth novel and film depict a world that is highly hierarchical. At least, the mother constantly harangues Erika about saving up for one. They constantly talk about buying a place of their own. They rarely mention her father, who died in a mental institution. She rents a small apartment with her mother, who takes care of the cooking, cleaning, etc., as she always has.

Her personal life, too, hangs in suspension. In Michael Haneke’s 2001 film adaptation, she is played by Isabelle Huppert (then in her late forties).Įrika nearly had a career as a concert pianist but never made it. In the 1983 novel by the Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, she is “approaching the end of her thirties.” “ Auch kein junger Baum mehr,” “no sapling anymore,” her mother cruelly reflects. The protagonist, Erika Kohut, gives lessons at a conservatory in Vienna. The Piano Teacher understands this-and understands, too, that all teaching involves some version of these pleasures and these pains. Therefore, if what you desire is to be dominated, you must develop good pedagogy. But it is the masochist who knows and writes the script and will judge its performance. Which one can learn to hurt me the way I need? The sadist may appear to be in charge. Every masochist is a teacher in search of the right student.

In the end piano