It’s interesting how often pianos are at the centre of unsavoury relationships. In the film The Piano (1993) Holly Hunter gets her piano back one key at a time by letting Harvey Keitel do “things he likes” while she plays. They fall in love and eventually play more than scales together, and she ends up sacrificing a finger as a result. I hated the film. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t have dragged the piano just a few feet further up the beach.

In The Piano Teacher (2001) Erika is a piano professor in her forties at a Viennese music conservatory who lives in an apartment with her domineering mother. Her father is a resident in a lunatic asylum. With such a stable family background it’s no wonder she starts to obsess about her 17-year-old piano student. The film also touches on voyeurism and sadomasochism. Anything to make playing scales more interesting.

In The Seventh Veil (1945) Francesca Cunningham is a suicidal pianist and mental patient who earlier in her life came under the guardianship of James Mason in the role of a crippled musician and teacher who prevented her from being with her true love.

I can see a pattern – piano teachers are domineering and jealous of their students and for the most part want to sleep with them. No wonder classical music is seen by outsiders as some strange, mad world of ruler-wielding psychos…

To read Guy Noble’s full Soapbox column, check out the March issue of Limelight, available on Feb 16.