Music as expression and resistance

Music as expression and resistance is embodied most clearly in Elfrieda Von Riesen’s piano playing. In a community that restricts both the instrument and girls’ education, music gives Elfrieda a forceful form of self-expression: when church elders come to challenge her plans, she answers from the next room with Rachmaninoff. The performance does not settle the conflict through argument; it makes her artistic ambition impossible to treat as a private or harmless wish.

A piano under restriction

The piano enters the family home under conditions of concealment. In East Village, pianos are technically forbidden because they are associated with saloons and unrestrained pleasure. Elfrieda’s parents bring one into the house after a doctor recommends a creative outlet for her energy, hoping to prevent her from becoming wild—a feared possibility in a community organized around compliance. When elders visit, the instrument is hastily covered with sheets and gunny sacks.

The household’s relationship to the piano changes over time. Elfrieda works with a teacher from the conservatory in Winnipeg, who drives to the house twice a week, and studies her chosen piece for two years. Her parents, initially keeping the instrument hidden, come to love her playing and sometimes ask her to perform familiar songs. That affection does not remove the restrictions around her: after the elders discover the piano, they discuss possible punishment for Jake Von Riesen and permit it to remain only on the condition that her parents ensure she uses it as an instrument for the Lord. Music is welcomed, in other words, so long as its purpose is defined by the authority that has tried to contain it.

The performance before the elders

The conflict sharpens when a bishop and a group of elders arrive at the family home to challenge Elfrieda’s intention to study music at university. She is fifteen. The elders regard higher education with particular suspicion when it is sought by a girl, and their visit places Jake under pressure to accept their judgment. Lottie Von Riesen stays in the kitchen rather than offer the visitors the hospitality they expect, while Yolandi Von Riesen waits with her father in the living room.

As the elders speak, the opening chords of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in G Minor, Op. 23 come from the spare bedroom beside the front door. Elfrieda has been working on the piece for two years, and her family knows its shifting qualities and emotional range. The music grows louder, then softer, then louder again. The men stop talking. Their conversation, conducted through the authority of the visit, is interrupted by a performance that commands the room without entering it.

The scene makes music a form of resistance grounded in Elfrieda’s actual circumstances. The pressure is not abstract: the elders have come to oppose her university plans, and the piano itself has been kept out of sight to comply with local rules. Rather than debate whether she may leave, Elfrieda plays with a conviction that renders her ambition audible. Lottie begins to hum and sway in the kitchen; the family members who hear the piece experience it not as background entertainment but as a change in the balance of the encounter.

Artistic agency and departure

Yolandi understands the performance as the moment Elfrieda takes control of her life. It is also, in retrospect, her debut as an adult woman and as a pianist destined for a much wider career. That significance is not presented as a formal decision announced by Elfrieda: she may not even have known the elders were in the living room. Yolandi leaves open the possibility that the timing was coincidence. The scene’s force therefore rests both on what the music does in the room and on the uncertainty surrounding Elfrieda’s intention.

When the piece ends, Elfrieda closes the piano, comes into the kitchen, drinks the remaining apple juice, and says she has finally mastered it. The elders file out, and the front door closes behind them. Jake does not join the others in the kitchen; he has gone to his study. Yolandi connects the moment to his loss of the elders’ approval and of authority within his household, as well as to the recognition that his daughter is free to leave. The performance has not erased the consequences of defiance, but it has made the cost of keeping Elfrieda in place plain to her family.

The piano scene belongs to a larger departure. By seventeen, Elfrieda has finished high school early, earned honours, received scholarships to study piano, and won a Governor General of Canada prize for her marks. She leaves for Norway to perform and study with a teacher Yolandi remembers by his nickname, the Wizard of Oslo. The achievement that the elders feared—a girl acquiring ideas and a life beyond the community—becomes inseparable from the musical discipline practiced at home.

Music in memory

Yolandi later recounts the performance to Radek, emphasizing that the pressure on Jake seemed to make Elfrieda’s playing more intense. She identifies the piece as the G Minor Opus 23, preserving the specificity of the music within a family memory that might otherwise become a generalized story of rebellion. In her telling, Elfrieda drives the visitors away through brilliance and anger. The music is remembered not simply as proof of talent, but as an action taken under constraint.

The contrast between the piano’s permitted purpose and its actual effect gives the episode its lasting tension. The elders can tolerate the instrument only when it is subordinated to religious use; Elfrieda’s playing instead carries a complicated interior life into a room governed by communal judgment. It expresses her ambition without translating it into the elders’ terms. Music is at once the work through which she develops a future and the means by which she makes the limits imposed on that future audible.