The musical career of American pianist Nina Simone has three important events.
The first one happens when a white woman who employs Simone’s mother as a maid recognizes that the young black girl is a prodigy. The woman attends a service at the mother’s church one Sunday, hears the girl play, and is so impressed that she decides to fund piano lessons.
The piano teacher turns out to be Muriel Mazzanovich. And it’s here that something special happens (it’s described in the book Princess Noire). The prodigy begins her lessons at the Mazzanovich house. She is told to play with her shoulders, not her wrists, and to spread her fingers in a specific way. She is introduced to Bach. She is treated like what she is—a prodigy—and not like a regular rural black girl.
The imprint of this experience on her personality would prove to be permanent. Mazzanovich has a proper British accent, and looks and sounds like high culture; she treats the young girl as one of her own, a member of the elite of European culture. From Princess Noire: “After her first lesson, [the prodigy] walked home already dreaming of the lessons to come… now she inhabited a larger world.”
