The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

First published: Die Klavierspielerin, 1983 (English translation, 1988)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: 1970’s-1980’s

Locale: Vienna

Principal characters

• Erika Kohut, a piano teacher
• Erika’s mother, her controlling mother
• Walter Klemmer, a music student

The Story:

Erika Kohut is a pianist who lives with her mother and teaches at a music conservatory. Erika’s consciousness is filled with an angry, absurdist, flow of impressions, evoking strong memories and emotions. The thirty-eight-year-old Erika is still a very compliant daughter to her overbearing mother, a controlling bully who manages every aspect of her daughter’s life.

Erika’s mother had anticipated that her daughter’s talent would enable her to realize her own ambitions for greater wealth and social status. Because Erika’s father is absent, taken away long ago in an agitated state to a mental institution, Erika’s mother places all her hopes on her daughter, imagining her as a famous musician, envied and idolized by everyone. Despite all her mother’s scheming and dreaming, however, Erika has not become a brilliant pianist. Years ago, for her debut, she chose to play a piece so esoteric that she alienated the judges, leading her away from performing and into teaching instead.

While doing everything possible to encourage Erika’s musical accomplishments, Erika’s mother warns her against boyfriends, whom she thinks would destroy all of Erika’s achievements. To discourage her daughter’s interest in men, her mother forbids her from wearing makeup and buying pretty things for herself, and she even threatens to harm Erika if she has anything to do with a man. Erika defies her mother’s control and her thrifty domestic regime by splurging on frivolous dresses that she has no intention of wearing. This leads to one of their bitterest quarrels. Erika then smothers her mother with apologetic kisses, but a suggestion of aggression and animosity remains against the woman she considers her jailer and tormentor.

Despite their disagreements, however, Erika is in many ways her mother’s daughter—as she makes her way home through the crowded streets of Vienna, she comports herself as a haughty queen subject to plebeian inconveniences. She is also competitive and envious; in high school she had reported to the authorities a girl whose activities as a prostitute enabled her to buy the pretty clothes denied Erika.

At the same time, there are many signs of Erika’s own true dissent. Buying the frilly dresses is one sign, but her rebelliousness takes a twisted and dangerous form when she begins to secretly visit the peep shows in the red-light district of the city. While Erika’s visits to these shows and to sadomasochistic pornographic movies suggest that in one way she is assuming the power of the male voyeur, this underworld is nevertheless devoted to male sexuality and masculine preferences that encourage Erika to take them as guidelines for the construction of a submissive female sexual identity. Additionally, these sex shows and porn films provide nothing for Erika in the way of erotic pleasure—she so lacks an emotional or sensual life that at one point she cuts her genitalia to feel some sort of sensation.

Although in one part of her life she seeks some kind of libidinous life in the red-light district, Erika’s work persona is, like her home life, bereft of the erotic. One day, she finds that she is attracted to a young music student, Walter Klemmer. So obsessed is she that at one point she punishes a young woman flutist who is flirting with him by slipping a smashed glass into the woman’s pocket.

Erika’s first sexual experience with Klemmer is in a lavatory of the conservatory; the second is in the cleaning staff’s closet. Both episodes are joyless and unromantic—the second time, Erika is so repelled that she vomits into a pail afterward. Klemmer, on the other hand, is aggressive and forces her submission. She responds to her encounters with him by composing a list of demands. Erika has gained the upper hand by dictating to him how he may abuse her. At the same time, Erika, on one level, hopes he will take the initiative and abjure violence and reject her demands; she desperately hopes he will initiate a gentle and loving relationship.

Even as Erika seems to be entering into a submissive relationship with Klemmer, she also criticizes his musical abilities to the director of the school, preventing him from performing as a soloist in the upcoming recital. Enraged by her control over him as a teacher and repelled by her list of demands, Klemmer barges into her apartment, shuts her shaken and frightened mother away, and brutally rapes Erika. Having felt he has taught her a lesson, Klemmer regains his serenity.

Later, Erika procures a knife from her kitchen and puts on one of her old-fashioned pretty dresses. She then leaves to find Klemmer. When she confronts him, she does not exercise vengeance by attacking him as expected; instead, she requires him to bear witness as she stabs herself in the shoulder. Having finished with the brutal Klemmer on terms that suggest both sadistic power and masochistic submission, she returns home to the very mother who is responsible for the pathologies of her love life.

Bibliography

Barthofer, Alfred. “Vanishing in the Text: Elfriede Jelinek’s Art of Self-Effacement in The Piano Teacher and Children of the Dead.” In The Fiction of the I: Contemporary Austrian Writers and Autobiography, edited by Nicholas Meyerhofer. Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 1999. Suggests that Jelinek dismantles a mythical self constructed by the social ideology, causing her fictional “I” to vanish into the flow of linguistic dissidence.

Fiddler, Allyson. Rewriting Reality: An Introduction to Elfriede Jelinek. Oxford, England: Berg, 1994. An excellent introduction to Jelinek, suitable for undergraduates. Surveys her major work and provides close readings and the historical, feminist, and literary contexts of her fiction.

Johns, Jorun B., and Katherine Arens. Elfriede Jelinek: Framed by Language. Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 1994. Essays on Jelinek examine her modernist prose style, her postmodern reinvention of genre, and her feminist and antifascist themes.

Konzett, Matthias. The Rhetoric of National Dissent in Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek. New York: Camden House, 2000. Analyzes how Jelinek and two other Austrian writers created new literary strategies to expose and dismantle conventional ideas that impede the development of multicultural awareness and identity.

Maltzan, Carlotta von. “Voyeurism and Film in Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher.” In Literature, Film, and the Culture Industry in Contemporary Austria, edited by Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger and Franz-Peter Greisner. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Examines voyeurism as a source of self-estrangement in The Piano Teacher. Part of a larger study linking literature and film in Austria.

Meyer, Imke. “The Trouble with Elfriede Jelinek and Autobiography.” In The Fiction of the I: Contemporary Austrian Writers and Autobiography, edited by Nicholas Meyerhofer. Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 1999. Explores the limitations and pitfalls of choosing a biographical reading of Jelinek’s work, including The Piano Teacher.

Morgan, Ben. “Elfriede Jelinek.” In Landmarks in German Women’s Writing, edited by Hilary Brown. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Article on Jelinek is part of a larger study of twelve women writers from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century who have made major contributions to German-language literature.

Piccolruaz Konzett, Matthias, and Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, eds. Elfriede Jelinek: Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. Features essays on Jelinek’s contributions to world literature and about her influence on German and European literature. Also examines her relationship to sociopolitical issues, especially the legacy of fascism.