Review

When you open the back cover of this book of poems, you find a CD tucked into a plastic sleeve. It contains a collection of live recordings spanning 30 years by one of Canada’s premier pianists and teachers, William Aide. The sound quality is variable, but the performances all dazzle – from his incisive Chopin and colourful Schumann to two luminous Debussy pieces. But it’s the poems that are the main attraction here. Aide is that rare musician who uses words as expressively as music. His irrepressible search for grace has universal appeal. For music lovers there’s the way he invokes composers like Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, and – surprisingly – Massenet, whose Elegy inspired Aide to become a pianist.

Here is how he begins To an Old Executor:

“Skip the need to dig the sod
Buy a flowering linden tree
And sentimental as can be
Commit to Schubert, not to God.”

Some of Aide’s most affecting poems are tributes to people who changed his life, like his first piano teacher Miss Myrtle McGrath, who taught him the Elegy, his later teacher the Chilean master Alberto Guerrero, who taught so many of Canada’s finest pianists (see John Beckwith’s excellent biography), his fellow student Glenn Gould, and his own student Peter Vonek, whose death from AIDS left him bereft.

Aide has long been recognized as a significant voice in Canadian music. With four fine books (one a gutsy memoir) under his belt, he is unquestionably a voice that matters in Canadian literature as well.