Elfriede Jelineks The Piano Teacher

In 2004 Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for her
musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary
linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of societys clichs and their subjugating power
(Nobel, 2004). In her most celebrated novel, The Piano Teacher, Jelinek (1983/1999)
desediments the societal clich that Western art music is ennobling, portraying it instead
as violent and hostile to nature and sexuality.
The piano teacher of the title is Erika Kohut, a woman in her late thirties, who
teaches at the Vienna Conservatory of Music. She lives with, and sleeps in the same bed
as, her mother, who is old enough to be her grandmother (p. 3). Erikas father exited
soon after she entered (p. 3), and she is now trying to escape her mother (p. 3),
recognized as Mother by the State and by the Family (p. 3). Jelinek uses the pronoun
SHE to describe the adolescent Erika, the capitalization signifying the extent to which
she is the exception to the norm that surrounds her so repulsively (p. 15), an
exceptionality that is explained to her very meticulously (p. 15) by her mother. Her
exceptionality is a result of her being Mothers only child (p. 15), and a genius (p.
25). After an important but disastrous public performance, however, a career opportunity
that knocks but once (p. 27), Erika has to forego her ambition to be a concert pianist,
instead becoming a piano teacher, for what else can she do but become a teacher? (p.
27). The majority of Erikas spare time is then spent with her mother, watching television
that prefabricates, packages, and home-delivers lovely images, lovely actions (p. 5). As
an escape from her mothers oppressive influence, however, Erika visits Viennas red
light district where she becomes nothing (p. 51). She watches women strip from a

booth in which she fits exactly (p. 51), despite the fact that nothing fits into Erika (p.
51). Erika feels solid wood in the place where the carpenter made a hole in any genuine
female Nature seems to have left no apertures in her (p. 51).
Walter Klemmer, an engineering student and one of Erikas most talented piano
students, would love to be friends with Erika (p. 65) and over time Erika opens up to
him, telling him that her father lost his mind and died in the Steinhof Asylum (p. 71).
But Klemmers clear sexual interest brings back memories of previous sexual
relationships and these memories arent good (p. 74). Despite her shrieking, pounding
and scratching during the sexual act, she has felt nothing, she has always felt nothing
(p. 74). Klemmers hobby is white water rafting, which he sees as a way to develop a
sense of your body, through your body (p. 78). He tells his professor that she wouldnt
believe how much a person can enjoy his own body ask your body what it wants and
itll tell you (p. 78). But Erika enjoys cutting her own body (p. 86), which she has
been doing since she was a child. Klemmer tells Erika that, a human being attains his
supreme value only when he lets go of reality and enters the realm of the senses (p.
119). His favorite composers, Beethoven and Schubert, with whom I feel personally
involved (p. 119), despise reality and regard both art and the senses as our sole reality
(p. 119). Erika, in contrast, believes feelings and passion are a substitute for spirituality,
and consequently she prefers undramatic music, such as Schumann.
Klemmer wonders if perhaps Erika Kohut is far too withered to understand him
(p. 123), but he nevertheless still wants to take on his teacher to conquer her (p.
124), which he eventually does, in one of the conservatory bathrooms, where she
cooperates like a good girl (p. 178) and pulls out his dick (p. 178). But just as he is

getting to enjoy the situation as well as the feeling in his body (p. 180), despite the fact
that she deliberately hurts him (p. 180) by inserting her fingernails under his foreskin
(p. 180) and digging her teeth into the crown of his dick (p. 180), she stops before he
reaches orgasm. He begs her not to stop for Gods sake (p. 181), but she insists that
she doesnt want to touch it any more (p. 181). Instead she tells him she will provide
him with a list of all the things he can do to her (p. 180) in the future.
When Erika and Klemmer next meet they are both seething with love and a
comprehensible desire for more love (p. 189). Erika produces a letter that she gives to
Klemmer, just as she has pictured it at home a thousand times (p. 190). They go to
Erikas house, barricade themselves in Erikas room (which has no lock on it), and ignore
Mrs. Kohuts repeated attempts to interrupt them. Klemmer gazes at Erika in love and
veneration as if someone were gazing at him gazing at Erika in love and veneration (p.
213). He is keen to get the show on the road (p. 214) but Erika insists he read the letter,
and after reading it he can no longer see her [Erika] as a human being (p. 215).
In the letter Erika expresses a desire to be punished, to be tied up solidly,
intensely, artfully, cruelly, tormentingly, cunningly (p. 215), to be physically abused
she wants him to smash his fists in her stomach to be dimmed out under him, snuffed
out (pp. 215-216) and to be called insulting names, such as stupid slave (p. 218).
She wants him to ignore any request coming from her (p. 217), to pay no attention to
my pleading, thats very important (p. 217). Klemmer finds it hard to believe that a
woman who plays Chopin so marvelously (p. 226) wants to stick her tongue in his
behind when he mounts her (p. 226). She pleads for rape (p. 226), asks to be treated
brutally but thoroughly (p. 226), and wants to choke on Klemmers stone-hard dick

when she is so thoroughly tied up that she cant move at all (p. 226). But he recognizes
that, paradoxically, written illegibly between the lines (p. 226) is please dont hurt
me (p. 226). Klemmer reacts to the letter with confusion. He wants to get out of this
apartment, which has become a trap (p. 216), finds it all so funny (p. 216), says,
Maybe, Absolutely not (p. 228) and then, Well have to wait and see (p. 230).
Eventually he leaves without saying goodbye and slams the apartment door behind him
(p. 231). But after a breather and some deliberation, he is reluctantly impressed by the
limits she pushes against in an attempt to expand them (p. 235).
The next time they meet Erika Kohut drags the student into the cleaning staffs
cabinet (p. 240) where Klemmer shoves the womans mouth upon his genital like an
old glove (p. 242). But he is afraid of the piano teachers inner worlds (p. 241), and
because he must [get an erection], he cant (p. 241). Erika in turn mentally disengages,
her attention drawn to the scene outside the window, where natural forces rule with
overwhelming power (p. 245). Klemmer presses his all into her face (p. 245),
stuffing himself into the womans mouth (p. 245), but still cant give his best today
(p. 245). Erika, struggling for air, throws up into an old metal pail (p. 245) and is
berated by Klemmer for getting him all mixed up (p. 246). He tells her that she stinks
to high heaven (p. 246) and prepares to leave, despite the fact Erika would like to
watch him squeeze her throat shut (p. 247). They part ways after Klemmer
recommends that she leave town (p. 247) on account of how nauseating her bodily
vapors are (p. 248).
The next day Klemmer comes to the Kohuts home late at night and viciously
attacks Erika and her mother. After masturbating outside the building he phones Erika

and demands she let him in. She opens the building door and trustingly puts herself in
the mans hands (p. 262). But despite the fact Erika would not remind the man of his
bodys failure for all the tea in China (p. 262), he pushes and slaps her. Mrs. Kohut
wakes up and is outraged by Klemmers behavior. If anyone is going to slap Erika, itll
be Mother, she thinks to herself. Klemmer continues to degrade Erika, treating her like
a piece of athletic gear (p. 264). Mrs. Kohut indignantly points out that he is damaging
someone elses property, namely hers! (p. 264). Klemmer locks Mrs. Kohut in the
bedroom, then smashes his right fist, not too hard and not too soft, into Erikas belly (p.
266). He kicks her in the ribs as she lies on the floor (p. 269), believing that she
brought this on by trying to control him and his desires (p. 269). Erika begs him to stop,
reminding him of what she used to be for him (p. 269), but he hits her harder, enters
her and ejaculates. He then advises her not to tell anyone (p. 273), apologizes, says he
just couldnt help it (p. 273), and after a long goodbye, leaves. The novel ends
ambiguously, with Erika walking through Vienna dressed in an irresolute semiminiskirt (p. 277) and ill-fitting top carrying a knife. Youth laughs at Erika because of
her exterior. Erika laughs at youth because of its interior, which has no real substance (p.
277). Outside the universitys Engineering department she sees Klemmer with his arm
around a female student. She watches as the students interrupt themselves with their
own laughter (p. 280). With no burst of rage, fury, or passion, Erika Kohut stabs a
place on her shoulder, which instantly shoots out blood (p. 280). She then heads home
(p. 280), knowing the direction she has to take (p. 280).
The Piano Teacher is clearly violent. But it is violent in a number of different
ways. First, it depicts acts of physical violence that are described in graphic, often

gruesome, detail. Erika yanks (p. 8) at her mothers hair, she furiously kicks a hard
bone (p. 17) of a stranger in the streetcar, one of her students has a slashed, bloody
hand (p. 170) after Erika puts broken glass in her coat pocket, and a hole opens (p.
180) in Klemmers penis after Erika deliberately hurts him. Klemmer, in turn, smashes
his right fist into Erikas belly (p. 266) and licks and beats her alternately (p. 273).
Even minor characters are physically violent. While walking in the red light district Erika
sees the head of a four-year-old thrown back by a mothers slap of hurricane strength
(p. 46). When the child then emits horrible sounds the impatient mother promptly
knocks it out of plumb again (p. 46).
Second, these graphic depictions of physical violence take place within the
context of a more prevalent and diffuse emotional violence. As a child, Erika is not
allowed to associate with ordinary people (p. 26). She is not to be bothered by love or
pleasure (p. 33). She shouldnt get involved in athletic competitions (p. 25). Her hands
are supposed to practice, not scoot under the blanket like ants and scurry over to the jam
jar (p. 52). These imperatives, that amount to a prohibition on nature and sexuality, do
not originate in Mrs. Kohut, but are rather endemic to the process of enculturation itself,
for culture requires, for its continuation, coercion. Some students rebel against their
piano teacher. But their parents force them to practice art, and so Professor Kohut can
likewise use force (p. 12). Western musical culture, Jelinek suggests, requires emotional
violence, which in turn licenses physical violence.
Third, the narrator of these scenes of physical and emotional violence is also
violent, insulting its characters and ascribing the least charitable impulses, desires, and
motivations to them. Erika is described as a shapeless cadaver (p. 65), a flabby bag of

tissue (p. 65), a pathologically twisted joke of a creature (p. 65) and a rapturous
idiot (p. 65). When a student asks her what her goal is, she answers, Humanity, which
the narrator interprets as a ploy to gain power and social standing she is summing up
Beethovens Heiligenstadt Testament for her pupils and squeezing in next to the hero of
music, on his pedestal (p. 13). A musicologist who studies Mozart is also assumed to be
parasitical. She bites a hole in the flesh of one of the great geniuses and pushes her way
inside (p. 20). And Erikas mother and grandmother, who stand guard, rifle in hand, to
protect Erika against the male hunter lurking outside (p. 33) do so because they have
dried, sealed vaginas the two old women have turned into siliceous stone (p. 33). In
sum, the narrator ascribes no positive motivations to, and demonstrates no compassion
for, any of the novels characters.
Fourth, the narration is also violent in its form, incorporating the thoughts,
feelings, words and actions of its characters within an undifferentiated text that prevents
them from speaking in their own words and from their own perspective. Take the
following passage, for instance:
Erika keeps her whimpering down because of the neighbors. Mother perks
up her ears. She is forced to realize that her daughter is being degraded
into something like a piece of athletic gear. Mother indignantly points out
that he [Klemmer] is damaging someone elses property, namely hers!
Mother concludes: Get out of here at once. And as fast as you can. (p. 264)
In this paragraph the last two sentences are Mrs. Kohuts words. But they are not offset
typographically, using conventions indicating direct speech (i.e., quotation marks).

Rather, her speech is recited by the narrator, who exerts complete control over the text at
all times, thereby preventing alternative, and potentially dissenting, perspectives from
challenging its authority.
And finally the overarching narrative itself is violent, consisting of a series of
physically and emotionally violent encounters that are never resolved. At the conclusion
of the novel, bleeding from her shoulder and holding a knife, Erika knows the direction
she has to take. She heads home, gradually quickening her step (p. 280). The ambiguity
of this last sentence adds to its menace. Is the direction she has chosen simply
geographical or moral? Has she decided to go home or to attack her mother? Or herself?
Or both? At the end of the novel, no tension has been dissipated, no conclusions reached,
no problems resolved. Nothing has fundamentally changed.
The novel is thus violent through and through. It depicts acts of physical violence
Klemmer hits Erika, Erika stabs herself, Erika injures a student. It depicts acts of
emotional violence Mrs. Kohut taunts Erika, Erika scorns her students, and Klemmer
verbally abuses Erika. Its narrator is violent, insulting characters and ascribing the least
charitable motivations to them. It is violent in its form, an anonymous, omniscient
narrator preventing characters from speaking for themselves, their thoughts, feelings,
actions and words constrained by a faceless, nameless authority. And finally, it is violent
in its overarching narrative, which concludes with the suggestion of more violence to
come (most likely suicide or matricide). Yet this violence, by virtue of being selfconsciously literary, draws attention to itself. While cultural narratives of Western art
music are diffuse, pervasive, without clear origin and unavailable to critical scrutiny, the
violence in Jelineks prose is explicit. Her counter-narrative, focused on the hypocrisy,

back-stabbing, power grabs, and coercion implicit in Western art music culture,
desediments dominant cultural narratives about Western art music. In challenging the
idea that exceptional geniuses create timeless masterpieces that in turn make people more
human, The Piano Teacher opens up a space for more personal, idiosyncratic narratives
of Western art music culture to emerge.