„Ц“ for Zwickau in Russian. What a strange letter I thought as I read the chapter on Robert Schumann in our encyclopedia of music which had a brown cover.

I didn’t know then that the first money I saved in Germany would be for a journey to Zwickau.

Long hours in overnight trains, arrival at long last, overcast skies, the St. Mary’s Cathedral, losing my purse, a couple touched by my desperation giving me money, the bouquet of roses, the Schumann Memorial, two visits to the same museum within a few hours.

Emotions nineteen to the dozen.

Nine years later this small East German town was to become a turning point in my life.

The record cover has faded. A long time ago it was black with a large photo in the centre of the young French pianist in a sky-blue suit with long hair.Pascal Devoyon.

And the recording … translucent like some of Claude Monet’s paintings, with the precision of Salvador Dali, the dreaminess of Paul Klee and the fragility of Berthe Morisot …

That was a live recording of the Tschaikowsky Competition in 1978. In those days, for the people living in the biggest tin can in the world - the Soviet Union - a Frenchman was like a being from outer space.

Thanks to the fall of the Berlin Wall, this man was to become my teacher 25 years after my mother bought this record.

Once in my room in Yerevan I open a drawer in my bookshelves and see a pair of gloves which have been lying there between old schoolbooks and notebooks since my childhood.

The wool is pale green and embroidered on the back with little flowers. The fingertips have been cut off.

As it was always very cold in the winter at the beginning of the nineties I practiced the piano wearing these gloves.

I close my eyes and envisage this scene.

Is that world still there, somewhere?

My music history teacher was a slim woman with blonde hair. Her lessons dragged on devoid of passion.

Once she put on a record, gave us paper, and without revealing what piece it was, told us to „paint the music“. After the old Russian record player crackled like an open fire for a few seconds, the music started.

I don’t exactly know any more what I painted, but some time in the middle of the second half of the piece the sun came up over the frozen horizon.

Years later as I played just this prelude by Debussy, the sun shone again!

We had a walnut piano. A Rönisch. I was about seven years old at that time.

When I think of this picture I always see my mother playing the piano. Mostly in the evenings, by candlelight. Not because that was nostalgic, but because there was no electricity.

Chopin études, Debussy preludes, Bach ….

In my child’s mind, music from a lost world. A world which promised freedom.