“Like an old gentleman,” says Katja Eichinger, looking at the grand piano in front of her, a black Bösendorfer from Vienna. “As if he would come here, lift his hat and say, Schubidu, there I am.” She plays a chord. “It’s for jazz,” she says, not a classical grand piano. Actually, jazz isn’t really her thing. But today she’s making an exception.
There are halls steeped in history in which Eichinger wants to play the piano today, the master mix studio in Munich-Unterföhring. It smells of wood, the lamps glow warmly, the song that brought down the Wall in Germany was recorded here – at least according to the artist’s self-image: “Looking for Freedom” by David Hasselhoff.
But not only “The Hoff” worked here, in 2021 Katja Eichinger recorded her first album in the studio. On this very grand piano, the old jazz gentleman. Shubidu.
Also violin? At some point it’s good
“But first we have to talk about the recorder,” says Eichinger. Because that’s how it started, in the Hessian province. The author and journalist grew up in a village near Kassel. Because her older sister played the flute, she wanted it too. Actually, the recorder ruins most people’s musical future. But Katja Eichinger fell in love with making music via the flute, she took piano lessons and also wanted to play the violin. It had to remain a dream at first because her mother had to drive her everywhere at the time, there was no other way in the village. School, piano, ballet and additional violin lessons? At some point it’s good.
In high school she had an American piano teacher who introduced her to the composer George Gershwin. The piece “Three Preludes” opened something in her. “Chopin got incredibly boring to me at some point, I was done with that,” she says.
Eichinger now begins to play. “He’s upset, you!” She gets annoyed. It doesn’t matter, she has to go through with it now. “Three Preludes” is one of the few pieces she can play by heart, otherwise she always needs sheet music. But the Gershwin, he’s burned into her, with him she feels so safe that sometimes she can do without grades, she says.
Eichinger pulls a music book out of her cloth bag. “But the man I admire most of all living musicians is Philip Glass.” The American composer wrote the film music for “The Hours”, his opera “Einstein on the Beach” is considered a pioneering work in avant-garde music theatre. “It’s best played by Víkingur Ólafsson. I can’t do it that well. But I try.”
Even if Eichinger doesn’t quite get close to the Icelandic star pianist: She plays Glass very well. For his “Etude No. 6” she now sits more upright than with Gershwin. She plays confidently in the furious passages, turns the pages quickly, she has done it a thousand times, and she can grasp the pages of the music book directly with her fingers. Then she stops and says on the last note, “I love, love Philip Glass.”
After Gershwin came the “Dead Kennedys”
Classical music was not always important to Katja Eichinger. After school she had enough of home. She moved to London, met her first boyfriend. He was a physicist – and punk. Gershwin didn’t matter, they were important now Stone Roses and the Dead Kennedys. During this time she only played the piano when there was a “thing out of tune” in some punk apartment.
In 2006 she moved back to Germany. A piano should be included in her new life in Munich-Schwabing. Eichinger spent a year looking for the right one, she wanted a baby Steinway. “Actually, I always thought that I played too badly for a piano like that. Then at a rather stuffy film event I was chatting with this colorless banker. He told me that he had a Steinway. When I asked him what he played, he only called beginner’s pieces, so shockingly simple.” And so she thought: if he has a piano like that, I can too.
Eichinger found a man in Karlsruhe who was restoring old Steinways and was looking for a grand piano for them. It took the Steinway expert almost a year to restore the instrument from 1939 and restore its perfect sound. And how does it have to sound? “Sharp, really clear, and at the same time volume and warmth, that you can play all the great masters on it,” says Eichinger. The piano weighs a ton, and two men had to balance it in Eichinger’s fourth-floor living room. “When he was standing here, it was as if someone had moved in with me.”
During the pandemic, she finally fulfilled her dream of the violin, which had failed at the time due to the traffic structure of the small town in Hesse. She practices every day, but now what to pretend? “Sorry, that doesn’t work. I’m too nervous for that.”
Play in front of others? Katja Eichinger has stage fright
In the studio, on the old gentleman, she is now playing Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 21, the “Waldstein”. Eichinger plays flawlessly, but then her fingers slip. “I’m excited,” she says. “The fact that I can play in front of you at all is a great therapeutic success.”
Because Katja Eichinger has stage fright. So debilitating that she couldn’t play in front of anyone for the rest of her life. “I had a party at my place when the Steinway was new. Everyone said I should play something. But I couldn’t.” Even as a child she was afraid to play in front of people. She was in good company: her piano teacher at the time ended his concert career because he could only play if he had taken beta blockers. But if you take too much beta blockers, you’ll get soggy. Eichinger didn’t want that, so it was clear early on that playing the piano would always remain just a hobby.
She now finds it easier to play in front of people, also thanks to an orchestra workshop. “The conductor was also a trauma therapist, a great combination.” A lot was about the joy of making music and overcoming fears. “Since then I’ve been playing more freely,” says Eichinger. That’s important because she was in the studio with two composers. They worked on the soundtrack for the television series “Asbestos”, which, based on their idea, was filmed by director Kida Ramadan. In January, the series will run in the ARD media library.
During the lockdown, Eichinger also came up with the idea for her first album: “Soma”. It is named after the pill in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In the novel, the drug ensures that people feel good. “I was so fed up with yoga and mindfulness,” she says. She downloaded all kinds of apps to stay with herself in isolation, but they achieved exactly the opposite. “Especially the background music on this mindfulness stuff got me down. That’s why the album is a satire on it.”
On “Soma” she reads recipe supplements, texts about oxycodone, Viagra and Ritalin over the piano pieces. “I can’t say exactly what that is either. It’s certainly relaxing but also disturbing, a dark English gallows humor.”
The piano in the studio has fallen silent, Katja Eichinger climbs into her retro Mercedes in front of the studio. The autumn sun is reflected on the black paint. She has to go home, she still has plans: to practice Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23, the “Appassionata”. No audience at all, just her and the baby Steinway.
No passion without accessories. Katja Eichinger always has these items to hand when making music:
The wing
A ton in weight and from 1939: Eichinger’s Baby Steinway.
(Photo: Niko Kappel)
“This is my baby Steinway. Because this piano is here in Munich, Munich is also the center of my life. You can’t just move quickly with it. It gives me down-to-earth contact.”
The Violin
A childhood dream come true: a violin.
(Photo: Niko Kappel)
“I’ve been playing the violin for a few years now. I bought these during lockdown, it was like adopting a child. I also take lessons. But because my nerves are so tight, I could never just play it in front of people. So I’d rather just show them off. I have really bad performance anxiety.”
The arc
The bow belongs with the violin, and Eichinger takes both with him on business trips.
(Photo: Niko Kappel)
“Just like the violin, I always have it with me. When I’m in Berlin because I have business to do there, I always have to take the bow and the violin with me. Like the piano, I see them as beings. Okay, that might make sense A bit too esoteric, let’s say it’s a hermaphrodite. Something between being and thing.”
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