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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Professor Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert), who gives piano lessons to advanced students at the Vienna Conservatory, stands at the window of her studio and hurls thunderbolts at the teen-age musicians. When a talented boy hits a clinker, she says, "A wrong note in Beethoven is better than a bad interpretation," which, she implies, is his real crime. Erika, who is both the heroine and the villain of Michael Haneke's audaciously brilliant "The Piano Teacher," has a masklike face and an air of indefinable hauteur. Again and again, she tells her students that they are spiritually inadequate, and though they may tremble and weep, they do not protest. It never occurs to anyone at the conservatory that Erika might be trying to destroy, not nurture, the young musicians. After all, harsh dismissal is an accepted style in Viennese music circles -- Mahler himself, perhaps the most nakedly emotional of all composers, was often coldly sarcastic in person. Great music lives at the intersection of mathematics and spiritual exaltation, and Erika, who plays well and has keen insights into her favorites, Schubert and Schumann, always clothes her nastiness in the appropriate colors.
High-minded and rigorous, she has sacrificed everything for her work. She lives in an apartment with her hysterically possessive mother (Annie Girardot); the two of them take turns bullying...
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