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Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy: book review





Maestro (1989) is Goldsworthy’s first book, set from 1967 to 1977, embodying the theme of migration and identity for two main characters, one young and the other old.

A young man, Paul Crabbe, at the age of fifteen, is uprooted from Adelaide in the south of Australia to Darwin in the north, by his parents. An older man – now 80, Herr Eduard Keller, was uprooted from Austria as a refugee, and eventually landed in Darwin where he worked from his “home” as a piano teacher. Keller’s home is a weatherboard room above the front bar of The Swan hotel. The smell of beer and cigarette smoke seeps into the room with two pianos: a grand Bosendorfer for the maestro and an upright Wertheim for the student. Paul Crabbe is his student, for one lesson a week.

One day Paul enters the room waiting for his piano lesson. While the maestro is absent he looks at the photograph propped on his teacher’s piano: his son Eric and his wife Mathilde. Not much else is known about the mysterious piano teacher.

At the end of their first year in Darwin, Paul and his family drive five days south to Adelaide to stay with Paul’s grandmother for the summer holidays. He begins a library search to determine who Herr Keller really is. Keller died in 1944, the records reveal.

Back in Darwin, just as he is about to knock on the door for his piano lesson, for the first time Paul hears the maestro play the piano – Wagner’s Tristan. It was brilliant: “nearer to lovemaking than to music.” And in Darwin, Paul learns about that too, in the shape of Megan and Rosie.

Years later, in 1975, in between piano competitions, Paul heads for Vienna, chasing a cellist who claimed to have played with Keller before the war. And it is in Vienna, Herr Keller’s birth place, that Paul discovers the truth about his piano teacher.

Brief, succinct, unembellished, Goldsworthy paints a picture of innocence, that of a sixteen year old boy searching for the truth, yet also of fitting in, settling into a new country, a new city, a new place – a place where a person can leave the past behind.



MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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