In most ways, my life is unimaginably different from Agnes’s. I’m a mom. I have a job as a professor of music, and that salary goes into a bank account with my name on it. I drive, I stream music, I vote. But once in a while I imagine I’m having an experience similar to Agnes’s. Mostly that’s at the piano, but the past few weeks I’ve had some moments where I’ve felt that just maybe I’m feeling something like what she felt.
Agnes was sick, starting when she was in her late teens. She died of heart trouble, and she also had some throat problems that kept her from singing; there’s a program that lists her as the alto soloist in Beethoven’s ninth symphony, and she wrote all those songs and all that choral music, so that was probably hard for her. And her health problems kept her from touring, which is one of the reasons we haven’t heard of her.
I’ve mostly always been pretty healthy, I’m happy to say, but the last month has been a little different, and I wonder if I’ve been feeling any of what Agnes felt. I had a scare about a month ago. Spoiler alert, a mammogram and ultrasound found nothing wrong; as I happily texted my sister, it looks like fighting cancer will NOT be my next big project. But while I was in the couple of weeks waiting for the imaging appointments, I was definitely looking at my mortality and feeling like my time might be running out, and like my remaining time might be me feeling terrible. I’ve had a couple of mortality brushes before, and here’s what was new this time: I had a very clear feeling that I have to live not just for my kid but also for my project. I have to get Agnes out into the world, to get other people excited about this incredible music. And of course Agnes obviously felt that she had to get her music out into the world, and knew her time would be shortened, and knew she might be feeling rotten the whole time. She probably did feel rotten the whole time. But she wrote so much music, and left such careful copies. She doesn’t strike me as a complainer or a drama queen—it seems like she just got on with it and did her work.
That’s really inspiring. I love the idea of just getting on with doing your work, because you know it’s really important, no matter how you feel. But I’m afraid I don’t quite live up to that. Right after the negative screening, I managed to catch a nasty cold, and it hasn’t quite gone away. I’ve soldiered through some of the time, teaching my students and practicing some and doing a big performance—more on that in a minute—but over the weekend I gave into the cold and just collapsed on the couch in my jammies, with fiction and cough drops and a tissue box. Just as I’m not the pianist Agnes was, I suspect I’m not the patient she was, either.
Fortunately, performance adrenaline does work really well to make me feel better for at least a couple of hours, and I got to play Agnes for a big audience, maybe her biggest audience yet. My dear friend Sonya is a medical doctor, and we do a talk together called “Practice Medicine Like A Concert Pianist,” with deliberate practice tips for doctors. All the musical examples in the talk are from Agnes etudes, and at the end I play an etude they’ve been hearing me practice. We were a plenary talk at the Academic Internal Medicine Week conference last week, and we estimated that at least 600 people were in the audience. It was interesting and fun to play Agnes’s music without her story—there are examples of challenging spots, and I talk about how I practice them—and then to play the F# major etude at the end. So it wasn’t an introduction of “here’s a neglected woman composer, and you should care about her because she’s an inspiring example”—it was all about how to practice music, and then as an example of music it was “here’s this piece.” People loved it. I think the most up-voted question in the conference app was “can she please play more?” And it was really fun to bring Agnes to an audience who wasn’t expecting to hear a woman composer, and have her music be enjoyed and appreciated, as music for its own sake. Ultimately that’s the whole point: the music deserves to be heard.
And it will be! In a little over a month I’ll be playing the 12 Agnes etudes and the amazing sonata in Brno, Agnes’s hometown in the Czech Republic. I bought my ticket and booked my hotel. It’s really happening. And I’m going to be able to visit the castle where Agnes briefly worked as court musician, and I’m going to be able to go back to her archives. I can’t wait. But I also need to practice a lot, and I’m afraid I’m not as good as Agnes at working really hard when I have to keep blowing my nose.