Leonid's Piano
The Sarvarian school's piano was not just another piece of musical instrument out there, but the main source of vibrant melodic education, that the family had acquired to keep the end of the year ceremonies uplifting.
FAMILY ALBUM
5/8/20242 min read
The photograph shows Leonid Sarvarian at the piano on the last day of the school year. The children are there, the ceremony is underway, his hands are on the keys. What the picture cannot show is that the man playing had never taken a formal lesson in his life.
The school was always short of money. Even so, the Sarvarians managed to bring a piano through the door. They wanted music in the building—something the children could sing with, something to mark the celebrations, another way to teach. There was only one problem: no one knew how to play it, and there was no money for a teacher.
Leonid decided he would learn.
He already loved classical music. He would listen with real attention, then sit at the piano and hunt for the notes he had just heard. Little by little the instrument began to answer him. In time he could play for the performances and the ceremonies himself.
He did not stop at the keys.
That love of music moved into the classroom. He brought Chopin, Bach, Vivaldi, and the others to children who had never been asked to listen that way. He taught them not only to hear a piece but to understand it—its shape, its character, why it was beautiful, why it mattered. He would start a recording and wait only a few seconds before asking who it was. The children became startlingly good at it.
A team from the Sarvarian School began appearing in televised interschool competitions, naming composers and identifying works from the opening bars. Family memory says they won so consistently that other schools could barely keep up, and eventually the Sarvarian team was asked to step aside.
Through all those years the piano stayed.
Leonid grew from the young man teaching himself into the principal of the school. Generations of children came and went. Governments changed. The school changed. The piano did not.
Then came the day the family had to leave the place that had taken so much of their lives. Of everything gathered there over the decades, they took only two things with them: the library and the piano.
The piano was carried up to the third-floor apartment where Leonid lived. It remained with him for another twenty years.
When the time came to leave Iran for good, possessions were sold and a lifetime was packed away. The piano waited until nearly everything else was gone. It was the last of his belongings he put up for sale before he left the country forever.
So the photograph is more than a principal playing for his students. It is the beginning of a long companionship—an instrument that followed Leonid from the classrooms of the Sarvarian School all the way to his last days in Iran.