Stephen Hough Revisits His Youth, in Playful Fragments

On the cover of the book “Enough: Scenes From Childhood,” out this week from Faber & Faber, a young Stephen Hough sits at the piano, wearing a velvet jacket stitched with sequins and fake pearls. He’s dressed as Liberace.

“Obviously, there’s a gay subtext to that costume,” Hough said in a recent video interview. “Even then, I loved the outrageousness of it, even though I was quite shy.” There’s a hint of subversion, something Hough maintains today with a twinkle permanently in his eye.

Hough, an English pianist and composer, has carried his lifelong love of creative writing into two previous books: “Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More,” and a novel, “The Final Retreat.” Where Hough described his novel as “Sibelian” in form, “Enough,” a collection of vignettes on childhood and Hough’s troubled adolescence, is, in his words, more Debussyan: “In the ‘Préludes,’ the way he writes the piece titles at the end of the preludes, not at the beginning, with dots — I love this idea of hinting at things, suggesting things.”

Playful suggestion abounds in Hough’s memoir, from the cover onward. (The first part of the title is a play on his regularly mispronounced surname, the second on Robert Schumann’s “Kinderszenen.”) “I do like shocking people, and I think that’s part of what keeps me onstage,” he said.

The critic Alexandra Coghlan said that there is a lightness of touch in both Hough’s playing and writing, “allowing him to explore some big topics on the page — his Catholic faith, his homosexuality, life as an artist — without becoming po-faced or preachy.” Among stories of “chucky” eggs (boiled hard, then mashed with seasoning) and his family’s tenuous Beatles connection, Hough recalls the time, at age 4, when he inserted his third finger up a neighborhood boy’s rectum. “Later, I would use it to trill long at the top of the keyboard in the Liszt First Concerto,” he writes, nonchalantly.

Despite a scrapbook style, “Enough” retains a loose chronology, beginning with his family’s first piano, a “pretty bad one” with yellowed keys and a rosewood frame, bought for £5 in an antique shop near his home, in an area between Liverpool and Manchester; and ending after the Hough won the Naumburg International Piano Competition in 1983, at 21.

In lieu of descriptions of pianos he’s loved — “It’s like meeting someone on holiday and having a romance: You know that you can’t see them again so best not to be too involved,” he said — Hough focuses on relationships with family and teachers, and an early musical life of hymns, nursery rhymes and “sweet, teeth-rotting tunes” from the world of light music.

Hough’s writing is deeply sensual, “because I had such a lack of it in my childhood,” he said. The post-World War II period that saw colorful developments in art and music — he turned to David Bowie and Marc Bolan in his teens — coincided, in Hough’s world at least, with “horrible food”: his grandmother’s “desiccated baking,” or overboiled sprouts that “looked like comatose slugs.” That peculiarly British trait of blandness, Hough said, “comes right through from the Victorian suspicion of pleasure.”

“Only in our literature have we allowed ourselves to enjoy words in a sensual way,” he added. “You think of the great poets right through the era, that’s the only place where we have let go of the tight corsets and collars.”

Before he had any idea of the concept, Hough knew that he was gay. Later, he learned what the word “homosexual” meant: “I thought, ‘How disgusting is that!’ And then two seconds later, I thought, ‘Hey, wait a minute, that’s me!’”

His adolescence was full with contradictions about sexuality, particularly as he converted to Catholicism. Later, his route to self-acceptance came through celibacy. A busy professional life after his Naumberg win helped distract him, though he was tormented by the constant possibility of guilt — mainly through unconscious thoughts, like sex dreams. “This was my scrupulous theological line on overdrive, really,” he said, ”but it was distressing, I have to say, many times in my life.”

Hough’s parents — loving of him, but not especially of each other — contained similar conflicting multitudes. His father, a member of the now-defunct Liberal Party, was anti-Europe but not aligned with the political right’s position on the issue, was prudish and chivalrous around women yet also a serial adulterer. “He was just outside of every box that you could imagine,” Hough said, “in the most interesting way.”

His mother was irrepressible. Despite saying that she was solely attracted to men before her death, “there were so many clues along the way,” Hough said. “Maybe she was part of a kind of sexual fluidity before it was known as that; maybe she enjoyed physical affection with women without feeling the need to say, ‘I’m a lesbian.’”

At 10, Hough enrolled at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester. What followed was a dark period for him (he suffered a nervous breakdown) and the school (some of his teachers would later go to prison for child abuse), before he moved to the Royal Northern College of Music, where “something sparked into life.”

Three life-changing moments came in a short period: the inaugural BBC Young Musician of the Year competition; his first Catholic Mass; and his discovery of Edward Elgar’s setting of the John Henry Newman poem “The Dream of Gerontius.”

“It turned me around in every way: musically, religiously, personally,” Hough said of the Elgar. “You can taste it really: that era of late Victorian camp, high-church life.”

Hough had been interested in composing, but was forced to stop studying it as he focused on piano while at the Royal Northern College of Music. (John Corigliano encouraged him to restart in the 1990s.) In contrast to his many piano teachers — including “Miss Felicity Riley,” an orange-lipped teacher from the next village, the avuncular Gordon Green and the fearsome Adele Marcus — Hough didn’t feel the need to return to composition lessons.

“I think it’s a little bit like writing words,” he said. “I don’t think Henry James had creative writing lessons, but he read and he knew the grammar, and so he set off on a journey with it.” That method — of writing music by absorbing musical grammar — informs his compositions, which “are always felicitous, viz., most recently his delicately allusive first string quartet,” the music critic Michael Church wrote in an email, referring to “Les Six Recontres” (2021), which evokes flavors of the French neo-Classical set Les Six.

“Enough” concludes in New York: Hough gained a scholarship to the Juilliard School, and fell in love with a city slowly coming to terms with what would become the AIDS crisis.

“As the 1980s moved on, it was like a cloud in the sky on a sunny day,” Hough said. “Gradually it began to be darker and darker, and this extraordinary life of clubbing, fun and parties became very different in flavor.”

But while the book ends with Hough’s life in turmoil, there’s one final suggestion: that better things are coming.