3 hours ago
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When I found a cassette tape of the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, aged seven, it’s how I imagine a kid would feel seeing Messi play football and thinking: I have to do that with my life. By then, I had already been sexually abused by a teacher for two years, and despite showing all the signs of trauma – night terrors, twitching, wetting the bed, constant stomach aches – I obediently kept his secret. To me, the world was a war zone of pain. I was a shy, awkward, lonely kid, but alone in my bedroom with that piece of music, I found a little bit of light that was just for me. Hearing it for the first time was almost a religious experience.
People think classical music is dry, but Bach was anything but. Half of his 20 children died in infancy: there was no way to get rid of that grief other than through his music. Bach composed the Chaconne when his wife died suddenly, and he didn’t get to say goodbye or even go to the funeral. Even if you don’t know any of that, listening to it, on some level you will know. When you think it’s the end, it just carries on, like having one more thing to say to a person after they die. There’s so much truth and so much emotion hidden inside those 16 minutes of music.
At seven, music offered me a way to deal with what I was feeling but didn’t yet have the words for. I became obsessed. Every night, I would sit in my room listening to recordings of Bach, then Horowitz and Ashkenazy, pretending to play along. It was pure escape, pure fantasy. I could hide inside the music, and it made everything bearable. The Chaconne specifically was like an ancient key that slid into my heart.
I had my first piano teacher at 14 and was offered a scholarship to the Guildhall at 18, but my parents wouldn’t let me go, preferring me to attend a “proper university” instead. So I stopped playing for 10 years, and worked in the City in a job I hated. I returned to piano in my late 20s with the same devotion I’d had as a child. Learning as an adult was more difficult, but I was more determined. Feeling as if you owe your life to something that you’ve lived and breathed and inhaled since you were seven carries you further than talent and ambition ever could.
At 31, in a psychiatric ward, I heard another piece of music that changed my life. I had been trying to kill myself. I didn’t want to die, I just couldn’t go on living. A friend smuggled in an iPod nano with Glenn Gould playing the Bach-Marcello Concerto in D minor on it. I’d never heard anything so beautiful in my entire life. I was heavily medicated, but it was as if I was seven years old again, hearing classical music for the first time.
That recording told me the same deep truth that the Chaconne had as a child, but now, as an adult, I was able to put it into words: if something this pure exists, then I don’t have to die. It gave me the impetus to get out, to keep living. I must have heard and performed that piece thousands of times, and every time it blows my mind. My first album came out a few years later, and I’ve just released my eighth. I’m playing on the same stages my heroes have played on – at the same venues, sometimes even in the same month and on the same Steinway.
But sexual abuse as a child is not something you can ever recover from or put behind you. It’s always there. My abuser was eventually arrested and charged with multiple counts of rape. He died before he faced trial. Everyone has their own version of trauma, but somehow we find a way to survive it. Music gave me the tools to feel less alone, to navigate a childhood filled with shame and secrets and power dynamics. In the Chaconne, I heard suffering transformed into something alive and beautiful. In Marcello, I heard hope at the exact moment I needed it. Both pieces taught me that there’s plenty of good in the world if we know where to look for it.
Finding that tape was a sliding-doors moment. It’s impossible to say how my life would have been different if I’d never heard the Chaconne, but it probably saved my life, and it has given me a career that I love. As a child, I thought: if something this incredible can exist, then it can’t all be bad. I believed that at seven, and I still believe it now.
The NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453 or visit their website for more resources and to report child abuse or DM for help. For adult survivors of child abuse, help is available at ascasupport.org
